White Dispensary Owners Have Locked Us Out Of The Industry

The Arizona #cannabis ballot measure fails to create any meaningful participation for black people, brown people, and indigenous people in the legal cannabis industry. This is by design. This ballot measure fundamentally, locks everyone out of the legal cannabis industry who did not risk breaking federal law and open a medical marijuana dispensary. In no uncertain words: anyone who owns, operates, or works at medical marijuana dispensary is a criminal in the eyes of the federal law. There is no difference between them and these people👇🏿under the laws of this nation (click here to see our first piece on this subject).

Read about the sting conducted by the MCSO here in Scottsdale AZ by clicking here.

How Are The Directors Of These Non-Profit Medical Marijuana Dispensaries Living So Lavish?

They are able to live lavish by not helping the communities they were charged with protecting, uplifting, and benefiting. Instead, these white dispensary owners have used their non-profit status not to make the community better, but to enrich themselves and buy mansions to hoard the spoils of their plunder. The largest dispensary operation in Arizona and in the country with its $850 million purchase of Verano, has only contributed $500,000.00 to charitable causes that is less than 0.005% of that purchase. Harvest has already contributed $300,000.00 so far to create an environment to own a monopoly in the legal cannabis market. All they care about is creating generational wealth for their families, while black, brown, and indigenous people rot in prison for doing the same thing, albeit, on a much smaller scale.

They Will Not Stop Until They Are The Only Ones Who Can Sell Weed.

We see it in Colorado, where brown people have been locked out of the legal cannabis market, they get arrested if they engage in the same activities as white people. We have seen the statistics that black people still continue to get arrested at outrageous rates for weed, yet these deceitful dispensary owners refuse to institute any language or earmark any funds, in their ballot measure, to protect black people from harassment from police.

We see that these rich white men only care about their own bottom line. They refuse to allow for more licenses so that the free-market can determine who has the best product. They do not want to compete, they just want a monopoly so they can amass all of the resources that legal cannabis provides for themselves.

They Lie When They Say The Voter Protection Section Of The Ballot Measure Provides For Minority Licenses:

These dishonest dispensary owners purposely lie to the citizens of Arizona by putting a clause in the voter protection section of their ballot measures that they know violates the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution. This red-herring that these white dispensary owners dangle is that the AZ legislature can amend this section of the law to add, up-to, 14–5 licensees for non-white people. However, any 1st year law student knows this violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution. Specifically, it has been tried before in Ohio, with their legalization effort reserving 15% of licenses for minorities. The courts struck this down.

They include this bonk in their ballot measure, because their spoke-person can always pivot and say we put that in the measure to allow the state legislature to make this decision. When all they had to do, is write it in the ballot measure, and replace minorities with people who had been convicted of marijuana possession crimes.

This ballot measure is a cash grab for these craven dispensary owners. They want to be shameless and out in the open about their greed, that is why the ballot measure allows them to convert their non-profit structure to S and C style corporations that they can then transform into publicly traded companies.

But, they can’t figure out how to write in their ballot measure a way to allow all Arizonans to participate in the legal cannabis industry they seek to create.

With a ballot measure that locks everyone out of the legal weed industry there is no incentive to support it. This sting, in Scottsdale, only nabbed two white people out of the 14 even though white people make up 70% of AZ’s population. The majority of people caught are black and brown people. These people will not be looking at serious trafficking felonies. Yet, if they worked for a dispensary this would be called business as usual.

More and more people will migrate towards the black market, because they offer a better product and they see how much money these selfish dispensary owners are making doing the exact same damn thing: selling drugs. Yet, that is going to put more black and brown bodies at risk. That will introduce more chaos into families and neighborhoods. It will strain our schools even more, because parents will be incarcerated for doing the same damn thing these rich white dispensary owners are doing.

This Is Why We #Decline2Sign.

When one the major backers of this ballot measure, Harvest Inc, uses a black-woman as a straw(wo)man, to front that she is the owner of a business so that Harvest, could get yet another license, we must #Decline2Sign. They want to use us, take our style, steal our swag, but when it comes to sharing the bag….no way.

That is why we say #Decline2Sign