As cannabis industry grows, so should opportunities for communities of color | News

Editor’s note: This commentary is provided by the Medical Marijuana Education and Research Initiative (MMERI) of Florida A&M University.

Here’s an interesting fact: The national legal cannabis industry is bigger than the National Football League. Many billions of dollars bigger.

Take 2020, a pandemic year, for example. The NFL saw its annual revenues decline by $4 billion, to $12 billion, while medical and recreational marijuana sales grew by 60%, to $18.4 billion.

Of course, the NFL came back strong in 2021, with $18 billion in revenue, but it was still no match for the U.S. cannabis industry, which scored $26 billion in sales. But where the two are more in alignment is when it comes to the lack of diversity among ownership despite the support each business receives from minority consumers of their products.

Tahir Johnson isn’t taking on the quixotic challenge of changing the NFL’s lack of diversity in team ownership. When speaking about the business of cannabis, he uses the NFL to provide “proper context” on his efforts to keep the still-very-young industry from continuing a trend toward building an entrenched NFLlike monochromatic corporate makeup.

Johnson is the director of social equity and inclusion for the U.S. Cannabis Council, a broad coalition of cannabis businesses, organizations and people working to legalize the drug at the federal level.

The council was founded in 2021. He holds the same position with the Marijuana Policy Project, a group that has been around for 26 years and is a major player in backing state ballot initiatives to legalize medical and recreational marijuana.

He also hosts a podcast called “The Cannabis Diversity Project.”

“Social equity in the community means that money that is being made from cannabis goes back to those communities,” he says. “They get to share in the wealth.”

Howard graduate

A 2005 graduate of Howard University in Washington, D.C., Johnson is leveraging his background in wealth management to help influence policies and laws regulating cannabis markets across the country.

He wants to see a greater representation of Black ownership in the cannabis space, which has fallen to 2% from 4%, and more minority involvement in the cannabis job market.

“As with anything, if you can’t change the policies and the laws to help create opportunities for us, it’s not going to get done,” he says.

“Access to capital is one of the hugest problems and biggest things that impact us being able to get into this industry. It could cost you, if you want to open a dispensary, a million dollars. People from our communities don’t have that. And, furthermore, cannabis being federally illegal means that there’s no access to banking.”

“Because there’s no access to banking, that means that the only way that you can get access to capital is if you have personal wealth, access to private equity or venture capital. And we know from even outside of cannabis, just looking at traditional industries, that our people typically have less access to that, and they have less personal wealth,” he further explained.

The drive for social equity and inclusion in the cannabis industry is gaining momentum, with some states taking very progressive actions to encourage a diverse mix of interests in marijuana-related businesses.

After years of trying, Johnson recently applied and received a dispensary license in his hometown of Trenton, N.J., using personal savings and his 401k to cover related expenses like attorneys’ fees.

‘Career of the future’

Florida’s vertically integrated business model tightly restricts access to its medical marijuana market, with licensees required to manage everything from growing the cannabis plant to selling products at the treatment centers they own.

There are currently no Black-owned medical cannabis cultivation businesses in Florida, where the license application fee ranges from $61,000 – $146,000 — the highest in the country (at the writing of this article).

Like three other cannabis social equity advocates who have been featured in this column — Roz McCarthy and Erik Range of Minorities 4 Medical Marijuana and actor Malik Yoba — Johnson encourages people of color to enter the marijuana space through side doors.

“People often think about the plant-touching opportunities, like at the dispensary, cultivation, or manufacturing facility. But, really, one of the greatest opportunities that I see for our people to get involved in the industry is through ancillary services,” he says. “There are over 400,000 jobs right now in the cannabis industry and they expect that to quickly be over half a million. Cannabis is the career of the future.”

Visit https://bit.ly/3wyizR1 to watch MMERI’s Conversations on Cannabis Virtual Forum on YouTube featuring Tahir Johnson. [Link: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=c42ewaAVc8E]