Missourians will get a chance on November 8 to legalize recreational marijuana. They may well seize it: Nearly two-thirds of registered voters told pollsters in May that they supported the general concept. Other states have made the move—19 at last count—and have so far avoided societal collapse (even if Illinois loves tempting fate). Here in the Show-Me State, we already have a tightly regulated cannabis industry for medicinal purposes; upon passage of the ballot initiative, known as Amendment 3, that industry would stay roughly the same size in the first year but start selling for fun purposes too.
So at the street level, it would look something like this: Those dispensaries you’ve spotted around town would be able to supply bud, gummies, and vape pens to anyone who’s 21 and older; you could just walk in and show ID. Some additional “micro” dispensaries would pop up over the first few years, though probably fewer than 18 across the whole St. Louis area and certainly not one on every corner. Folks may be able to puff away in public, but only if the local government abides—and that government may not even welcome dispensaries at all. (A local ban can be enacted if at least 60 percent of voters want one.) And yes, the state would initially see an annual net tax-revenue boost of at least $35.3 million by official estimates, but that’s not even 2 percent of what we’ll spend next year just laying highways, for example. Thus, a wholesale revolution this would not be.
On the other hand, the petition is 38 pages long and has other provisions that would set Missouri apart in some ways—specifically in how it proposes to expunge criminal records and deepen cannabis-industry diversity. With those measures, the ballot initiative’s official campaign, Legal Missouri 2022, and the alliance of industry players and social-advocacy leaders who compromised on the language, all say they want more than just a new economic sector. They also aim to address an uncomfortable past. To accomplish that, they say, they’ve absorbed lessons from other states and fashioned a proposal that builds on the medical marijuana initiative that passed in 2018 with 66 percent of the vote.
“There were a lot of Black folks locked out [of medical marijuana licensing] simply because of economic disadvantage,” says Adolphus Pruitt, president of the NAACP’s St. Louis City chapter and a member of the drafting team. Amendment 3, he says, “gives a foothold in the marketplace to those in the communities impacted most by the war on drugs,” and its expungement provision “is something we negotiated and fought hard for.”
Yet Amendment 3 has detractors, too, of all political stripes. Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican and former sheriff, calls it “a disaster.” An op-ed piece in the historically Black St. Louis American newspaper blasts it as a “sinister” proposal that would achieve “no equity.” Mike Wolff, who is a former chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court and a longtime pro-legalization Democrat, laments the petition’s failure to direct the state to issue licenses to all entrepreneurs who meet minimum standards; he fears it will allow an “oligopoly” of companies to control the industry. The core of the disagreement between these two camps, you might notice, is not whether to end prohibition. It’s how.
Photo by Nicholas Phillips
Nick's buds
Prohibition is, after all, a mere blip in humanity’s symbiosis with cannabis, a co-evolution that began millenia ago when the fingers of Homo sapiens first pinched those hardy leaves growing near the Himalayas. In cannabis, our ancestors found nutritious seeds and a fiber for making rope and paper. They also discovered the only plant on Earth known to produce tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which our nervous system happens to be well-suited to process. THC soothes nausea and chronic pain, stimulates the appetite, and, at reasonable doses, can turn you into a glowy, giggly joy furnace. It also weakens short-term memory and draws attention to sensory detail. “There is another word,” writes the plants-and-culture journalist Michael Pollan, “for this extremist noticing—this sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness, by the already-been-theres and seen-thats of the adult mind—and that word, of course, is wonder.”
If you’re 87 years old and up, you were born at a time when smoking weed just to feel this way was still legal in Missouri and at the federal level—but very few people did so. That’s a key fact about prohibition: It did not arise in the 1930s from a science-based public-health outcry. Rather, according to multiple histories of the drug (here, here, and here), it was largely a propaganda coup by an ambitious and openly bigoted federal anti-drug official, Harry Anslinger, who warned that smoking pot led to a “delirious rage” (a.k.a “reefer madness”) and miscegenation. The very term “marijuana” was popularized by Anslinger, who sought to stigmatize it by linking it to Mexican immigrants at the southern border, although the drug already had niche fandom elsewhere: among jazz musicians. They passed it along to the Beats, who passed it along to hippies and college students—and that’s when it exploded and became a household word.
But even this rise in cannabis use wasn’t the sole reason that President Richard Nixon kicked off the war on drugs in the 1970s. As Nixon’s White House counsel would later admit to Harper’s, it was conceived in part to weaken two groups the administration perceived as enemies: the antiwar left and Black Americans. The tough-on-crime laws of the ’80s and ’90s were, in fact, inspired by rising crime rates. They resulted in more than 700,000 marijuana arrests nationwide in 2000, and they enjoyed the support of Black and white legislators alike. Their effects, however, cut deeper into communities of color, and that discrepancy persists today. According to recent studies by the Urban Institute and the ACLU, Black and white young adults use marijuana at similar rates, but from 2010 through 2018, the rate of marijuana arrests in Missouri was 2.6 times higher for African Americans.
The irony is that while prohibition may have had a racist origin, the movement to end prohibition comes at a moment when science is suggesting legit reasons to be prudent with the plant—especially at the potent THC levels common today. It slows reaction time, and peer-reviewed scientific studies show the drug can create health risks or harm young brains and bodies, whether fetuses or teenagers. In an apparent nod to these findings, Amendment 3 would keep DUI laws intact, permit sales to adults only, and ban marketing to children.
Some advocate a go-slow approach as more research trickles in. Kevin Sabet, CEO of the national nonprofit Smart Approaches to Marijuana, has pointed out in writings and speeches that many physicians’ groups, such as the American Medical Association, oppose adult use. He argues that, contrary to popular belief, the drug can be addictive; studies cited by the National Institute on Drug Abuse suggest that 9 percent of users will grow dependent on it. Sabet fears a “Big Marijuana” industry will profit from that dependence.
But any policy will carry costs and benefits. Given legalization’s momentum among the states and its support by 62 percent of Missouri voters in that springtime poll, it appears more and more Americans now see cannabis as akin to alcohol—and would prefer the tradeoffs inherent in legalization. (Major law enforcement groups haven’t pushed back, either: At press time, the city and county police officers’ unions were staying silent, as were the associations of state troopers and prosecuting attorneys. A spokesperson for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said that “marijuana just isn’t DEA’s focus in St. Louis.”) So for the majority, the debate will probably be less about whether Amendment 3 is safe and more about whether it’s fair. And to understand that debate, you need to know that some people have viewed the medical marijuana system—the foundation on which recreational would be built—as anything but.
Dr. Randall Williams sits alert inside a hearing room of the state capitol, hunched at the witness microphone. His audience on this evening, March 4, 2020, will be hostile. For weeks, an oversight committee in the Missouri House of Representatives has been probing the medical marijuana program’s rollout by the Department of Health and Senior Services, and now the members want to hear from Williams, the department head. With a striped bow tie and spectacles hanging from a cord around his neck, he starts his narrative by describing how much work his team did to prepare for that ballot initiative’s passage: none at all.
“And that,” says Williams, in the drawl of his native North Carolina, “was by de-sahn. We did not feel like it was a good use of the taxpayers’ money to start working on a program that might not even pass.” But pass it did—and sent his agency scrambling to meet a series of deadlines, at first without any budget or staff.
From the get-go, Williams explains, the “north star” of decision-making was patients. To enable patients to access their newly legal medicine, the department needed to issue licenses to entrepreneurs hoping to supply it. Yet this posed a challenge: While voters had demanded minimum numbers of marijuana facilities—for example, at least 60 growers statewide and at least 24 dispensaries per U.S. congressional district—they’d also demanded “seed-to-sale” tracking, a strict monitoring system designed to prevent surplus supply from slipping into the black market. So the DHSS needed an industry big enough to comply with the minimums but small enough to keep an eye on. It commissioned a market study by economists at the University of Missouri–Columbia, who found that the minimum facilities would likely churn out more than enough supply to meet demand. This study, in large part, led the DHSS to cap the licenses at the minimums. Awarding extra licenses later, the thinking went, would be easier than issuing too many and trying to claw some back.
“One of my favorite sayings to patients,” Williams says, his thumb and index finger open like pincers, “was [that] I can always make your incision bigger, as a surgeon. I can’t make it smaller.”
License caps carried their own risk, though. Williams had chatted with his counterparts in the 32 other medical-marijuana states and heard the same warning again and again: The biggest threat to patient access will be lawsuits from entrepreneurs shut out of the industry. Under Missouri’s new law, all license-denial appeals would be diverted away from the circuit courts and into the state’s Administrative Hearing Commission (AHC). Still, to avoid even the possibility of bias, Williams insisted that the scoring of license applications be blind and contracted out to a third party. Once the 2,163 applications flowed in, controversy ignited anyway.
In December 2019, the DHSS began announcing who would get the initial and highly coveted 338 licenses. Yet some applicants had pursued more than one license and, upon losing out, clanged alarm bells: Identical answers to identical questions across multiple applications did not always receive identical scores. Subjectivity, everyone knew, was inherent to the process; inconsistency, however, was not supposed to be.
Weeks later, state reps and senators streamed into Jefferson City for the 2020 legislative session. The House’s Special Committee on Government Oversight held hearings on the rollout. The committee members—spurred, no doubt, by constituents frustrated about the scoring—spent hour after hour grilling DHSS officials. The officials explained that the scoring problem wasn’t, in fact, a problem. Yes, the same answer typed into a dispensary application, for instance, could’ve earned fewer points on a manufacturer application because those were two distinct license categories, and therefore, scored by two distinct individuals. The important thing was consistency within license categories, and the DHSS felt confident that the third-party scorer, Wise Health Solutions, had pulled that off. (The company’s owners have always insisted as much, and a recent stat seems to vindicate them: 857 unsuccessful applicants ended up filing appeals, but as of mid-July 2022, the AHC had processed about half and granted only 5, suggesting that Wise Health’s scoring was highly consistent.) But the committee scrutinized every detail, searching for skulduggery and conflicts of interest.
Now Williams is in the hot seat before the committee. The hearing is running long—well past 10 p.m. It takes a turn through the looking glass: Democrats blast government-imposed limits on the economy while Williams, a Republican, defends them. “What we’re really trying to do,” the doctor-director says, “is match demand to production.” To which Rep. Crystal Quade of Springfield, the Democratic minority leader, replies: “I believe that we should let the free market determine that.”
Then Amy Moore, the medical marijuana program’s deputy director, who’d been sitting next to Williams, leans toward the mic. “You’re onto something interesting,” she says, “this idea of raising the licensing limits to something else. I think you all”—she gestures to the committee—“have always had the opportunity to create a free market for this, and you still do.” Several members look up from their phones. Moore’s point: Whereas the voters enshrined this program into law via ballot initiative (and only voters can change the law), the legislature can, if it so chooses, create its own parallel program and allow for unlimited licenses. Yet the voters expressed a desire for seed-to-sale tracking, which Moore calls a “massively complex and very expensive” monitoring system. “If we had 2,200 facilities to regulate, with any hope—any hope at all—of preventing diversion [to the black market],” Moore says, the program’s costs “would skyrocket,” possibly even beyond program revenues. Her implication: Legislators can open up the market, but surveilling it would cost a fortune—and they may need to find funds to help cover that cost.
This hearing would prove to be the last on this topic. The committee never released a report on its findings. Suspicion has lingered in the minds of some legislators, though. In May 2021, the Missouri Independent, an online news outlet, found several examples of the state appearing to have issued more than five dispensary licenses to a single entity under common ownership or control—a no-no under the medical marijuana law. The department said those arrangements were kosher, yet it refused to release ownership records on the grounds that the law didn’t allow for it. Rep. Peter Merideth, a Democrat representing South City and one of the rollout’s fiercest critics on the committee, tried to push through a measure to open the records, but it reportedly fell prey to a veto threat from the governor, who has taken campaign contributions from the industry. (Parson has denied interfering in the marijuana program.)
Merideth, by the way, no longer sits on the committee; the House’s top Republicans, he claims, removed him. “Why did they stop investigating, and why did they remove me?” he says. “All very good questions. Seems like there may’ve been some pressure on that process to stop going forward. I can’t tell you where that pressure was or what it looked like, but it got its way.”
Another interpretation is that the committee stopped investigating because, in the end, it found plenty of smoke but rather little fire.
“I think that, by and large, the scoring was in the range of acceptable,” says Eric Walter, a partner at Armstrong Teasdale. (Walter is also outside counsel for the Missouri Medical Cannabis Trade Association, a.k.a. MoCannTrade, and says he’s advising “multiple” clients who are appealing license denials.) “I think mistakes were made [by Wise Health], but when you look at the groups that won, those groups did well on a lot of applications across all different categories.”
In other words, it may be the case that certain cannabis entrepreneurs won licenses not because they manipulated a corrupt process, but rather, because they had the money and skill to win them. And that, to some observers, is a problem unto itself.
Photo by Nicholas Phillips
Proper grow room
A grow room at Proper Cannabis' cultivation facility in Rock Hill.
John Pennington, a co-owner of Proper Cannabis—the best-selling brand in Missouri, according to one industry tracker—reaches into a tub and lifts a bud to my nostrils. “This is a new one,” he says. The new strain’s name is Phantasy. Its profile on Proper’s website states: “Chunky, trich-heavy buds with floral and berry notes, plus undertones of gas.” (“Trich” is short for trichomes, the tiny hairs that produce the cannabinoids.) Phantasy’s THC content is 24 percent—roughly eight times stronger than the stuff smoked at Woodstock. Such is the marvel of cultivating scientifically and legally, and here at Proper’s headquarters in Rock Hill, it’s no casual exercise: We’re standing inside “the vault,” which holds about $2 million of product at the moment, secure behind a keycard-access door and watched by several of Proper’s 117 security cameras. Photos aren’t allowed in here. “Even if you penetrated the building,” Pennington says of a would-be burglar, “you still couldn’t get in here.”
Pennington likes to describe Proper as a scrappy startup. Certainly its office area, which we visited earlier, exudes a youthful warehouse chic: exposed ductwork, workout gym, keg of Kaldi’s cold brew, and a central café-kitchen (with sliced watermelon out for snackers). But Pennington, 40, is as close to an industry insider as you can get these days. He has “been around the [cannabis] plant” since he was 16, he says. Conversations with his mom and sister, who worked in mental health, sparked his interest in its therapeutic potential. (Only feminine plants flower, so one of Proper’s grow rooms is named “Helen,” after Pennington’s mother.) In 2006, he got practical training by going into commercial real estate, where he had to learn how to raise private capital—a critical skill in medical marijuana, as no federally insured bank can legally lend to that industry. After Amendment 2 passed, in 2018, Pennington and his co-owners raised $23 million to launch Proper. Most of their nine applications were denied, but they did win four licenses, enough to become “vertically integrated”—that is, permitted to grow, process, transport, and sell at retail dispensaries, all without a middleman. Pennington helped set up MoCannTrade and now sits on its board. Despite his status, he insists that it’s a tough line of work.
“The outsider perspective is that this is a super wealthy, profitable business, and everybody’s making a shit-ton of money,” says Pennington, “and that’s a fallacy.” He’ll be lucky to turn a profit this year, he says, and the primary culprit is section 280E of the U.S. tax code, another consequence of federal prohibition. Under 280E, marijuana companies pay taxes on their gross revenue, unlike most businesses, which pay tax on their gross revenue minus expenses. Some marijuana companies can even end up owing more to Uncle Sam than they earned in profits—and go belly-up.
Proper has thus far avoided that fate. On the contrary, the business is growing. With about 150 employees on the payroll, Proper already occupies more than two-thirds of a 90,000-square-foot industrial building off Manchester Road. As we’re walking away from the vault, Pennington tells me he plans to take over the last third of the building very soon. “And all this,” he says with a grin, “has nothing to do with what we’ll have to do in the case we go recreational.”
Like many of his peers, Pennington prefers that Missouri’s move to recreational be limited, at least at first. In the 2022 legislative session, Rep. Ron Hicks of St. Charles filed a bill to do it through statute—and without license caps. That bill never made it to the House floor for a vote, and Hicks suggests that he knows why: “No one else but Steve Tilley and his lobbying group—that’s what killed my bill.” Tilley, a former speaker of the House, is the founder of Strategic Capitol Consulting; he and his firm lobby on behalf of, and have ties to, established players in medical marijuana. Tilley’s industry-related activities, in fact, fell under scrutiny by federal investigators in 2020, according to The Kansas City Star. Tilley declined an interview request, but when it came to Hicks’ bill, the industry didn’t exactly hide its opposition. Many leaders, including Pennington, testified against it publicly.
Pennington favors Amendment 3 instead—and the $397,500 his company has kicked in to Legal Missouri reflects that. He himself took part in the drafting discussions, which started in August 2020. Legal Missouri was regrouping at that time. Its organizers had submitted an initial version of the petition and had begun gathering signatures for it, but the pandemic thwarted them, so they decided to wait until the next election cycle and, in the meantime, fine-tune their proposal. John Payne, the campaign manager, says he organized the new drafting team into two committees: one for industry players and one for advocacy groups, the latter which included local chapters of the NAACP and NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws). No provision could ascend to the final draft unless both committees agreed on it. “Sometimes things were contentious,” recalls Payne. Take the tax rate: Set it too low, and you’re missing a chance to fund public priorities, but set it too high, and you’re pushing consumers toward illicit dealers. In the end, the drafters chose 6 percent. The resulting revenue, after covering initial costs, will be split three ways: drug addiction treatment, veterans’ health, and the public defender system.
Nobody—not even the industry—got everything they wanted, says one of the drafters, Dan Viets, a Columbia attorney who specializes in legal defense against marijuana charges and serves as NORML’s state coordinator. Some states outright ban home cultivation, Viets points out, but Amendment 3 would allow individuals to grow 18 plants at home—possibly the most generous amount in the country—and give away up to 3 ounces of dried flower (only to adults, of course). “That’s something that the industry has no interest in promoting,” Viets says. “People who are in it for the money, why would they want people to be able to cultivate for themselves? Now, you do have to register to cultivate, which I know rubs some people the wrong way. But you do have to compromise.”
Nowhere in Amendment 3 will you find license caps. You’ll see only a minimum number of “comprehensive” (or medical-plus-recreational) licenses. That minimum is pegged at the existing number of medical licenses, and because those can almost immediately convert to comprehensive, it’s widely assumed all will do so—and that DHSS will not issue any on top of that, at least while the market stabilizes. Payne says he’s not opposed to the state issuing more but only to the extent it can verify compliance with seed-to-sale tracking. Otherwise, he says, “It’s like a boa constrictor trying to eat a horse.”
Eapen Thampy considers all this “a scam.” Founder of the lobbying firm Great State Strategies, Thampy has worked for years on cannabis issues in Jefferson City and helped craft Hicks’ bill. He believes that those who meet certain standards should be able to put out their shingle, just like liquor stores and restaurants do. The minimums in Amendment 3, he argues, are a clever way to allow a cautious state agency to keep a lid on the market at its current size—which thereby enlarges the industry’s consumer base while walling it off from competition. The industry has provided the lion’s share of Legal Missouri’s campaign fund, Thampy points out, so why expect anything else? “The whole point of [Legal Missouri’s] initiative,” he says, “is to put the people who paid them money into a position of market dominance and exclusionary access.”
But the NAACP’s Adolphus Pruitt, another Amendment 3 drafter, says that while a system of unlimited licenses “wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world,” it just didn’t seem realistic. “Missouri is a Republican state and fairly conservative,” Pruitt observes, “so a lot of things would’ve been great to have in there. Getting it passed? I don’t know.” What crystallized Pruitt’s support, he says, are the social justice provisions. Those require a bit of unpacking, but even insiders such as Pennington see them as necessary. “You have a lot of people who have been f—ked by the same thing we’re doing legally,” says Pennington, in his offices at Proper. “You can’t overlook the history, the victims, the war on drugs. These are not easy topics. There were times the discussions got tense. But this was the process that led to the drafting of Legal Missouri.”
Melanie Marie Randels recalls her run-in with prohibition this way: It was past midnight. She was young—maybe 21—and behind the wheel. A police officer in Charlack pulled her over and walked up to her window. He smelled pot smoke, Randels recalls, and she mouthed off to him. The officer searched the car, plucked a dimebag from the glovebox, and handcuffed her. Yet she avoided a drug charge on her record, she says, because she hired an attorney, who negotiated the charges down to a lesser offense.
“If you got money, you could make it disappear,” she says, seated inside her office at the Canna Education Collective. It’s a storefront space in Dellwood where she and other entrepreneurs hold workshops, sell paraphernalia, and find ways to earn legal profits on the edges of legal cannabis. (See sidebar below.)
Randels runs this place, but she knows things could’ve turned out differently, because others arrested for pot possession have not been so lucky—and Amendment 3’s proposal for expunging (or clearing up) their records is one reason she helped gather signatures. Expungement matters because a drug offense or arrest can have “collateral consequences”—that is, long after the fact, it can hamper one’s efforts to secure housing or employment if the required paperwork asks about criminal history.
“There’s a tremendous amount of prejudice in our society toward people with criminal records,” says Mallory Rusch, executive director of Empower Missouri, an antipoverty nonprofit. “[Such] people are seen as inherently less trustworthy and less deserving of respect.” Rusch says Amendment 3’s expungement proposal may or may not be the way that her group would’ve worded it, but that overall, “We do believe that this will be an overwhelmingly positive thing.”
It wouldn’t be a blanket and immediate pardon. For certain marijuana offenses, a person in custody could petition the court for release and expungement, and a person on probation could get both automatically. This would involve “a very small percentage of the population,” says Karen Pojmann, spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections—an estimated 528 fewer people under supervision and 44 fewer prisoners, she says.
But by far the biggest group affected would be the hundreds of thousands of Missourians going about their lives with records of arrest or conviction for simple possession. By 2024, those records would be automatically expunged and their existence could be denied even if the individuals haven’t received notice. “I think that was pretty creative and important,” says Ellen Suni, a dean emerita at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law who directs its Expungement Clinic. In contrast to the many other states that require a petition, she says, Missouri would be more aggressive under the proposed law and “treating these sort of like ‘never shoulda happened.’”
It wouldn’t be easy: Missouri doesn’t have a central repository of criminal records, Suni observes, and the petition’s language (like many legal texts) is not completely clear. “The courts are going to have a lot to deal with on this,” she says. But it wouldn’t be an unfunded mandate, at least: The petition calls for tax revenue to pay for expungement first.
Randels invites me for a stroll around the Collective. In the back room sit six pots of plants breathing under grow lamps. This is her greenhouse: She’s a licensed medical-marijuana “caregiver.” That means she has state permission to sell her growing services to as many as three card-holding patients; Amendment 3 would increase that maximum to six patients. “The access to the industry is far beyond dispensaries already,” she says. “People out here still hustling, risking their lives. They don’t know you can [legally] sell half a pound as part of your services. I’m ready to tell them. We have some power we don’t tap into.”
Amendment 3 calls for even more entry points: It would require the state to issue at least 144 “microbusinesses” that would be majority owned by social-equity applicants. A debate has emerged, though, over how valuable these licenses would be.
There would be two kinds: dispensaries, which sell in retail spaces, and wholesalers, which grow and process. Other states have tried such an approach, but Amendment 3 proposes a feature that may be a first in the nation: These small enterprises would transact only with each other—that is, the dispensaries must source from wholesalers, and wholesalers must sell to the dispensaries.
“That sounds unique—I haven’t come across that yet,” says Ed Keating, co-founder of Cannabiz Media, a global cannabis-license tracker. “I guess it sets up a two-tier system—almost two different economies.” But would it be a protective bubble or a cage? Keating says it sounds “burdensome” because it narrows microbusinesses’ choices, but on the other hand, it would force them to strengthen one another. Payne says the motivation was, in part, to guarantee shelf space for the wholesalers. Without it, the dispensaries might prefer to source from bigger providers, who enjoy greater economies of scale.
Either way, eligibility would be limited. To avoid constitutional challenges, Amendment 3 proposes a race-neutral criteria that includes people with a net worth of less than $250,000; people with certain prior cannabis convictions (and their children and spouses); people who graduated from unaccredited school districts; people who reside in areas with specified levels of poverty, unemployment, or incarceration rates; and service-disabled veterans. Applicants who meet minimum standards would then be thrown into a lottery.
Those standards won’t include, however, commercial site control or capital requirements. That kind of openness is something that Kaliko Castille, interim executive director of the Minority Cannabis Business Association (MCBA) in Washington, D.C., considers “a big deal.” Castille also likes Amendment 3’s provision for an equity officer who would go into communities damaged by prohibition, teach about the application process, and provide targeted technical assistance.
But Castille laments Amendment 3’s lack of upfront grants to microbusinesses, given how hard it is even for connected folks to secure financing. Leaving that to the free market, he warns, creates the risk that applicants will enter into “underhanded” agreements with multi-state operators who offer startup capital in exchange for most of the profits. This was a problem in Illinois, according to Reese Xavier, CEO of HT23 Growers in Chicago Heights. “People do a lot of things because they don’t think there are other options, and it becomes really predatory,” he says. “I can’t tell you how many offers I’ve turned down that on the surface sounded good.” He agrees with Castille that the states should invest more in microbusinesses on the front end. “If your goal is social equity,” he continues, “and I have to turn over 70 percent of my business just to get operational, is my business really social equity?”
Payne counters that in almost any industry, “the sweat-equity person can get screwed by the money guy,” but a good attorney can ensure the contract is mutually beneficial. “I don’t think there’s anything we could write into this to prevent people with more resources from winning out over those with fewer,” he says. (According to a January report by the MCBA, “six states provide funding to social equity applicants or licensees by way of grants, micro-loans, and no- or low-interest loans.”)
What about entrepreneurs who fit the criteria and already have startup capital? Brennan England, director of the Missouri chapter of Minorities for Medical Marijuana, faults Amendment 3 for not setting aside for them the lucrative comprehensive licenses. “There are plenty of well-to-do, strategic, driven Black and Brown people who still face adversity because of their race,” he says. A program to connect them only to microbusinesses, he argues, is “a slap in the face.”
Yet the NAACP’s Pruitt urges people to have some faith in Black residents’ ability to profit from a microbusiness. “This initiative isn’t perfect,” he says, “but I know this: Some craft growers are salivating over this.”
It has certainly seized Randels’ attention. She’s endorsed it, but she and the Collective plan to hold a town hall before November 8 so that people can at least get solid facts before casting ballots for or against it. “It’s up to us to make sure those measures in there are good for our community,” she says. “If we don’t come together and get a real idea of what we’re facing and make an educated decision, we’ll lose again.”
viennetta / iStock / Getty Images Plus
A Legal Alternative
In a sense, recreational cannabis is already legal. One variety of Cannabis sativa is industrial hemp, which became lawful to grow over the past decade. Hemp is defined by its low level of “delta-9” THC, the chemical in marijuana that gets you high. But it also contains cannabidiol, or CBD, which can be converted to “delta-8” THC—a compound that has its own intoxicating effects, and a particular advantage: It can be legally sold in Missouri. Ask Andrew “Pancho” Rucker. A self-described serial entrepreneur who has authored children’s books, Rucker is also a member of the Canna Education Collective and the founder of BumbleBars. His company originated this way: In 2020, he says, his grandmother fell and fractured both her femurs. He wanted to find a painkiller for her that wasn’t an opioid. Aware of delta-8’s potential, Rucker infused a chocolate bar with the hemp derivative and gave it to his grandma. She liked its effects so much that Rucker spun it into a business. He launched his company out of his home, and these days, he says, BumbleBars are for sale in about 50 stores across a handful of states. He has so far avoided the medical marijuana program, he says, because of the “red tape,” but will study Amendment 3’s microbusiness proposal and “wait for the dust to clear.” Meanwhile, reports from BumbleBar customers are trickling in. One gave a testimonial for his website: “I ain’t never had an edible do me like that, Bro!”
