When California legalized cannabis for adult use in 2016, many supporters acknowledged that the War on Drugs had disproportionately impacted communities of color around the state. It was, in fact, one of the selling points of Proposition 64, which went into effect more than a year later.
On the belief that the ballot initiative didn’t go far enough, though, social equity programs started springing up across the state in recent years to give special privileges to Black, Brown and low-income people who had been arrested and thrown in jail for nonviolent cannabis-related offenses and thereby barred from taking part in the new industry.
One survey, conducted in 2017 by Marijuana Business Daily, found that about 80 percent of the founders and owners of cannabis businesses at the time were White.
Neither the city nor the county of San Diego has a social equity program on the books and officials for both say they’re working to create one. By their own admission, they’re late to the game.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, considering that other municipalities in California have tried and failed to correct the injustices they previously identified. In some places, social equity programs have been portrayed as harmful to the same people they were supposed to help.
Prop. 64 allowed local governments to maintain control when legalization went into effect. To date, adult cannabis sales are legal in the city of San Diego and others, like Vista and La Mesa, but sales, distribution, manufacturing and cultivation continue to be banned in the unincorporated areas of the county.
That is slated to change in October, when the county’s Board of Supervisors is expected to bring online a countywide cannabis ordinance that got the greenlight this past January in a 4-1 vote. The details of what that will look like in practice are still being hammered out, but there is an expectation that there will be a social equity provision in the ordinance.
Officials have invited the San Diego County Cannabis Stakeholder Group to help in the process of developing a countywide cannabis social equity program. The facilitator of that group, appellate court attorney Andrea St. Julian, said the ordinance needs to make repairing the damage brought by the War on Drugs the front and center issue in a discussion that traditionally starts with land use regulations.
“When you start to formulate cannabis ordinances and regulations, you really have to start with social equity concerns,” St. Julian said. “And then, you have to consider also the concerns of the cannabis businesses, concerns of cannabis users and of course, the concerns and needs of the community as a whole. So redirecting government officials, and how they think about how to craft cannabis, a cannabis ordinance is really important.”
Andrea St. Julian, co-chair of San Diegans for Justice, appears at a press conference addressing the city’s proposed ordinance establishing the Commission on Police Practices in June. / Photo by Adriana Heldiz
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