How black Americans are losing out in the legal marijuana industry
With recreational and/or medicinal marijuana use legal in a growing number of states, some places (most obviously Colorado) are experiencing a weed boom. But per an investigation from BuzzFeed News, it's a bonus that has mostly been unavailable to black Americans thanks to the lingering legacy of the drug war. Here's the crux of the issue:
Ironically, experience in this new industry may be a legal disadvantage.
BuzzFeed could not obtain any hard numbers on the racial composition of legal marijuana dispensary owners, but the data collected from some 150 interviews for the piece suggest black dispensary ownership is in the neighborhood of just 1 percent. By contrast, black business ownership across all industries is far higher — about 7 percent and growing at triple the national rate — according to data from 2011 and 2012.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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