One key goal, when the legal cannabis era arrived in Massachusetts, was to encourage participation by people who paid a high price during the years marijuana was seen as the evil weed.
The Social Equity Program run by the Cannabis Control Commission has helped scores of people enter the industry by offering free advice and training, expedited license reviews and waived fees.
Alissa Nowak is one of those people. Her story, told the other day on MassLive, puts a face on the consequences of marijuana’s long prohibition. Her experience reveals how arrests for even relatively minor transgressions, during the long “war on drugs,” made it hard for people to resume normal lives.
Nowak was arrested on marijuana distribution charges in Springfield about five years ago. She was charged after she sold weed to an undercover cop attending a secretive market. At the time, Nowak worked at a Dunkin’ Donuts while studying for a master of business administration degree. It was the best job she could land; she was on probation after being charged with felony possession of a prescription drug in college.
The marijuana distribution case in Springfield was continued without a finding. It qualified Nowak to take part in the state’s equity program. Today, she holds a license to deliver cannabis through her Norton company, Lucky Green Ladies. “The Social Equity Program changed everything for me,” she told reporter Will Katcher of MassLive.
To be sure, this sort of restorative justice applies only to victimless crimes. Illicit drugs that kill people remain an essential target of law enforcement, as we saw with last week’s arrest of two Longmeadow men. The Drug Enforcement Agency says a raid at the men’s address found 225 grams of pressed fentanyl bricks, a synthetic opioid linked to fatal overdoses.
It took a referendum question in 2016 to get the ball rolling on adult use cannabis in Massachusetts. The Legislature stepped in to shape rules.
The one that helped Nowak was driven by conscience.
As new cannabis firms prepared to get rich, was it fair that people still suffered consequences for jumping the gun on legalization? White entrepreneurs, for the most part, were cashing in on a business that in prior decades had sent disproportionate numbers of Black people to jail.
Nowak’s early success in business makes a clear case. Equity needed to be on the table.
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