An omnibus bill to stand up Maryland’s legal cannabis market gives medical cannabis license holders first dibs on selling recreational cannabis and seeks to foster social equity — something lawmakers say no other state has managed to do.
The legislation, filed Friday, comes three months after Maryland voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum to legalize cannabis for adults 21 and older and is expected to generate earnest debate about what the billion-dollar industry should look like. The planned launch of the new market comes on the heels of a botched rollout of the state’s medical cannabis industry that initially shut out Black applicants.
“My argument has been from the beginning that it’s not worth doing if there’s no equity in the marketplace,” C.T. Wilson (D-Charles), the House bill sponsor and chairman of the House Economic Matters Committee, told his fellow members of the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland. The caucus is watching closely to ensure the market benefits Black people, who have been disproportionately affected by the War on Drugs, a decades-old U.S. government campaign to reduce illegal drug use that led to the mass incarceration of Black people.
Since 2012, when Colorado and Washington passed ballot measures to legalize marijuana, 19 other states and the District have taken similar steps. But none, according to lawmakers, has appropriately addressed the impact of the War on Drugs on minority communities. Others, like Virginia, have left buyers and sellers operating in a gray area with no legal market in place.
Maryland’s deadline for establishing legal sales is July 1. More than 400 licenses for growing, processing and dispensing could be issued.
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“It’s a complex topic. There’s a lot of different pieces. No state has gotten it right,” said Senate President Bill Ferguson (D-Baltimore City) of creating a system for legal sales with a social equity component. “I think [Maryland] has a possibility of being a national model.”
Lawmakers will be racing against a clock as they try to implement a plan before legalization takes effect. They said they do not want to be in a position similar to New York, where the illicit market exploded with so-called pop-up weed bodegas selling cannabis products.
Ensuring minorities have a stake in the legal sale of recreational cannabis was a central part of last year’s debate and became the reason standing up the legal market was delayed.
The bill allows people with medical cannabis licenses who were up and running by last October to enter the recreational market, with a one-time conversion fee based on their 2022 sales. For example, growers would have to pay $100,000 if their gross revenue was under $1 million and $2.5 million if their gross revenue was more than $20 million.
The bill creates an Office of Social Equity, a Community Reinvestment and Repair Fund and a grant program to support partnerships between those who hold operational licenses with those who have “social equity licenses.”
The bill also sets up an avenue for someone who has lived in an area that was impacted by the War on Drugs for five of the last 10 years, attended a public school in the geographic area for five years or meets another criterion created by the state commission and based on the state’s disparity study to obtain a license. The “social equity” applicants would be part of the first round of applications to be considered.
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Both presiding officers seemed pleased on Friday with the product.
“We knew Maryland needed to modernize its cannabis policies, and we knew we had to get it right,” House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones (D-Baltimore County) said in a statement. “Part of getting [it] right meant making the new industry equitable while meeting that July 1 deadline.”
Part of the goal of creating a legal recreational market, Wilson said, is to end an illegal stream of commerce that has led to the criminalization, arrest and death of too many Black men. According to the ACLU of Maryland, between 2018 and 2019 Black people in Maryland were over three times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than White people.
Wilson also said Black lawmakers cannot only be focused on the criminal justice aspect of cannabis.
“Big businesses want us to focus on people getting out of jail, which we should, and focus on citations versus tickets, which is fine, but they want that to be the distraction so we let that money slide off the table and if we’re lucky, we get crumbs,” Wilson told the caucus during its meeting on Thursday. “I don’t want the crumbs and honestly, I don’t want the cake. I want the bakery so my kids can own the block.”
Del. Gabriel Acevero (D-Montgomery) said he agrees with carving out a lane for minorities to obtain licenses, but he also wants to make sure that people who were jailed or served time for selling cannabis are not prohibited from participating in legal sales.
“I don’t want us to conflate diversity with equity and when we’re talking about equity we’re also talking about people who participated in this underground economy and are either currently incarcerated or formerly incarcerated and are either looking at or aren’t able to participate in this industry,” he said.
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Meanwhile, lawmakers are also considering legislation that would ban police searches solely based on cannabis odor.
The Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee on Thursday heard testimony on the bill, sponsored by Sen. Jill Carter (D-Baltimore City), who said courts have given mixed decisions on searching vehicles based on the smell of cannabis. She said it is the responsibility of the legislature, as a matter of policy, to give guidance to the courts.
“If the purpose of legalization was legalization for everyone then we have to take into account our painful, troubling history of racial disparity in the way laws are enforced,” Carter told the committee. “If we allow odor alone it’s still going to continue to be the same thing that we’ve had — which is more often than not people of color being pulled over, being searched, having the car searched for no reason other than odor — and then we haven’t accomplished the goal of legalization.”
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