Abstract
When the growth, distribution, and point of sales for cannabis were explicitly illegal enterprises, black and brown bodies bore the brunt of the state’s coercive force via the enforcement of laws that had little to do with the objective properties of cannabis, and more to do with instrumentally moving targeted groups into formal spheres of oversight and control. Today, where the supply chain and consumption of cannabis is both an attractive and highly profitable enterprise, race, class, and power remain salient. The roster of those who profit from the legal cannabis industry is overwhelmingly unrepresentative of the rosters of those who were victimized by the earlier regulatory regimes. This irony has not gone unnoticed, with journalists, bloggers, business owners, and scholars pointing out how a plant that served as a pretext for disproportionate carceral control of communities of color is—quite literally overnight via the result of a ballot initiative or legislative reform—now responsible for advancing the capital interests of majority-white agents and enterprises. To provide additional social context to this empirical trend, this chapter highlights some of the proposed and actual steps currently underway to advance economic equity among communities of color in the cannabis industry, framing the expansion and success of minority-owned cannabis businesses as a social justice imperative.