If you’re from Oakland, California, and have been jailed because of a marijuana-related felony over the past 10 years, you may be on the short list of the small group of people allowed to apply for and receive a pot permit to sell legal marijuana. This is the result of the Equity Permit Program, which the Oakland city council green-lit late at night last week.
Council voted unanimously to pass the historic “Equity Permit Program,” which bucks national trends in legal pot policy. Normally, convicted drug felons are barred from entering the legal cannabis trade. Instead, Oakland will reward them.
The recently incarcerated, as well as residents of a half-dozen police beats in East Oakland, will be uniquely eligible for medical cannabis industry permits under the new Program. The plan will help reward neighborhoods and people hardest hit by the drug war, council members said.
Councilmember Desley Brooks pushed for this permit program by adding it as a last-minute amendment to a series of laws the council passed last week created to regulate the multimillion-dollar marijuana industry. Oakland is the first California city to regulate the cannabis industry and Councilmember Brooks’s addition of the Equity Permit Program, which would give out every other new permit to someone who had received an onerous marijuana felony conviction in the last 10 years, is ruffling some feathers.
The City Council will also consider whether to give priority to would-be dispensary owners who live in crime-plagued neighborhoods. The idea behind the employment rules, Minor said, is to offset the disparate impact of the war on drugs on poor communities and people of color.
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“That is just absolutely ridiculous,” said Bishop Ron Allen of the International Faith Based Coalition in Rancho Cordova (Sacramento County), a drug-prevention group.
“We do not need the city of Oakland to make drug dealers out of our youth and young adults,” he said. “These individuals working in these industries are legalized drug dealers.”
Bishop Ron Allen hasn’t been paying attention to how well the war on drugs has been going so far, I guess.
Critics say handing out every other new permit to a tiny group of people will create a licensing bottleneck that will cripple Oakland's vast expansion in licensed medical pot nurseries, farms, kitchens, stores, and testing labs. The Program was opposed by the majority of the city’s own Cannabis Regulatory Commission, who worked on the expansion for 18 months. Councilmember Desley Brooks added the permit program as a last-minute amendment, which passed unanimously at 1 a.m. one week ago.
Councilwoman Brooks said Tuesday night that criticism of the Equity Permit Program amounted to “people wanting to protect their self-interest."
It will be very interesting to see how this works out. This could be a very amazing turn of events in the new legalized marijuana economy that is beginning to take hold around the United States. One of the bigger questions for proponents of decriminalizing marijuana has been who will get that money? Who will control that business? Oakland’s City Council looks like it is trying to make things right.