“That leaves a lot of room for other people to come in on the backside, people who are already in the industry, people who are not of color.”
By Rebecca Rivas, Missouri Independent
When it comes to racial equity, state Rep. Ashley Bland Manlove of Kansas City and St. Louis City NAACP President Adolphus Pruitt typically land on the same side.
But on Amendment 3—the constitutional amendment that legalized recreational marijuana in November—they couldn’t be further apart.
On Monday morning, they both appeared on KCUR 89.3’s Up To Date to talk about the lack of racial equity among marijuana-business license holders in Missouri. Both agree that Black communities have long felt the brunt of marijuana criminalization, so Black business owners should be able to benefit from Missouri’s soon-to-be billion-dollar industry.
But where they clashed was whether or not the state’s new “microbusiness licenses” program, a provision in Amendment 3, can bridge that gap.
These are small-business licenses “designed to allow marginalized or under-represented individuals to participate in the legal marijuana market,” according to the state website.
Even with the microbusiness program, Bland-Manlove believes the new law cements in place an already distrusted, inequitable business licensing system established when medical marijuana was approved in 2018. Yet
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