Gov's Promise To Include Minorities In Weed Industry Up In Smoke

CHICAGO — Gov. J.B. Pritzker continues to insist the state's completely white-owned legal marijuana industry created with the legislative muscle of indicted former House Speaker Michael Madigan — the first time any state has done it without a ballot referendum — the "most equitable in the nation."

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Yet, here we are in an election year, three years after cannabis was legalized, a move that Pritzker promised would create "new millionaires in the Black community, in the Latino community, all across this state," there still is not a single licensed and operating weed store or grow operation in Illinois with majority Black or Latino ownership.

Pritzker's latest comments about our state's alleged social equity dominance in the legal weed business came Tuesday, when his administration announced changes to the dispensary application process that has been a roadblock for minorities.

Under the "proposed rules," dispensary applicants would be able to apply online for a $250 fee and bypass the pile of paperwork that was used for a flawed system that ranked a company's eligibility for license.

“I appreciate all the feedback we have received from stakeholders since the start of the cannabis program, whose work informed this proposal and is continuing to make Illinois’ growing cannabis industry the most equitable in the nation,” Pritzker said in a statement.

By feedback, the governor might mean the protests, lawsuits and harsh criticism from West Side politicians, African-American state Rep. LaShawn Ford the loudest among them, who was first to tag Pritzker's "equity" focused weed policies as an "epic failure."

Or maybe it was the unveiled promise of former state senator turned legal-weed entrepreneur, Rickey Hendon, that there would be re-election consequences if the governor didn't start taking action to clear the way for Black ownership in the marijuana business.

"If Pritzker gets this right, it could help his re-election chances tremendously. If it goes bad, 40 percent [approval ratings] will look like the high-water mark. I'm just keeping it real," Hendon told me last March.

"Our people are pissed right now. We're living in the time COVID, no-knock warrants, George Floyd. Younger Black people aren't taking it."

On Wednesday, a jovial Hendon said the change in the proposed application process, which is similar to Michigan and California, is definitely good news at the right time for politicians courting Black voters.

"I've to got to give credit to [former Illinois pot czar] Toi [Hutchinson] for these changes that we had been talking for about two years," he said. "Of course, there is an election coming, and it's good timing for J.B., and it's good the legislators who vote for it."

Ford likened the change in the dispensary application process to a "mea culpa" from Pritzker that his administration bungled the rollout of legal weed.

"It's clearly an admission that the process failed. I just don't know how we move forward for [applicants] who are suffering right now. The damage is done," Ford said. "Hopefully, there will be some process to make it right and diversify this industry in the future."

Illinois voters have heard promises of social equity sometime in the future from Gov. Pritzker before.

In 2018, Pritzker campaigned on a promise to “intentionally include Black and brown entrepreneurs” in the legal weed industry as a way to address “historically systemic racism.”

Four years later, the governor hasn't delivered. His administration has become a well-known purveyor of "fakequity," otherwise known as fake equity.

Fakequity occurs when politicians such as Pritzker fail to keep promises to address obvious social disadvantages minority communities face due to generations of institutional racism.

Despite Pritzker's 2018 campaign promise of equity, marijuana legalization in Illinois has solely benefited rich white men who could afford to buy into the cash-only weed industry who have cornered the market on selling dope sacks that an inequitable number of Black people went to jail for selling on street corners.

But there was no delaying bureaucrats, lobbyists, a sitting Cook County Commissioner and insiders with connections to Madigan and Pritzker from finding creative ways to get a cut of more than a billion dollars in revenue that the legal cannabis business has generated in Illinois.

Meanwhile, Hendon says minority-owned cannabis companies have suffered financially for years due to the state's still broken system for issuing licenses to so-called social equity applicants.

"Many of my friends bought buildings, leased property and are in far worse situations than I am. … People have had buildings for years, and they're losing a lot of money. People have borrowed money. Family and friends have fallen out over the money because of the wait," he said. "It's very frustrating."

Now, Pritzker says his "new proposal" will fix the system for dolling out legal weed licenses that didn't make good on his last campaign's pledge to intentionally include Black and Brown entrepreneurs in the pot industry four years ago.

That's what Pritzker's brand of fakequity looks like.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docuseries on CNN and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary "16 Shots.

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