The Cannabis Debate: Three spells in jail, but now Linda earns $9,000 a month – dealing legally

A California scheme is trying to right past wrongs in the justice system by fast-tracking low-income former drug criminals into running legitimate cannabis companies. David Cohen investigates
Life-changing: Chaney Turner of The People’s Dispensary, ex-illegal seller Linda Grant, Della Moran of Humboldt’s Finest, and The Hood Incubator’s Lanese Martin
Westley Hargrave

When Linda Grant was growing up in the projects and all of 12 years old, she realised there were two ways in life to get by — either you did well at school or you went into the family business.

“Everyone in my family — my brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts — sold weed and I started beginning of junior high,” she said. “I sold one-dollar joints to students in the toilets all day, then I would go home and get hell high. I was raised in the ghetto and had been using weed since age 10, so it felt normal to me.”

Grant was expelled from school at 14 but by her mid-teens had built up a lucrative business.

At 18, she was arrested and sent to jail for possession. It was the first of three sentences she would serve of up to a month behind bars. Then at 25, she had the first of her six children and scaled back her weed business, scared of being sent away from her kids.

For the next two decades, Grant lived as a single mother, barely surviving on $400 (£315) a month from social welfare and food stamps, augmented by a bit of weed selling on the side.

She never thought her life would change much, but last year it did, dramatically. Grant, 50, became the owner of three businesses worth several million dollars. Today she draws an income beyond her dreams of $9,000 a month.

It turns out Grant had one thing on her side — geography. She lives not just in California, where cannabis was legalised for recreational use in 2016 and is now a $2.5 billion industry, but also in Oakland, located across the bay from San Francisco, and the first city in the US to start an “equity programme”.

“Equity” means “fairness” and the programme seeks to right a historical wrong — black Americans, the data shows, are 3.7 times more likely to have been arrested for cannabis possession since 2001 than white Americans, despite using the drug at roughly the same rate. And whereas the wealthy could afford lawyers who got them off or bailed, the poor went to prison, often at a devastating cost to family life.

Our UK poll published this week revealed that only 49 per cent of British respondents believe the argument that “criminalising people who use cannabis is wrong and ruins life chances” is a compelling one for legalisation.

But in Oakland, the criminal justice argument — namely righting the wrongs of the war on drugs begun by President Richard Nixon in the Seventies — has been one of the key planks of cannabis policy.

Oakland has used its equity programme to create a cannabis licence issue system with two ways to get to the front of the queue.

First priority is given to “equity applicants”, such as Grant, who have income below 80 per cent of the city’s median and a previous criminal record for low-level cannabis offences. The second way to be fast-tracked is to be a “general applicant” who offers to be an “equity incubator” — partnering with an equity applicant and providing them with support and free rental business space for three years.

For every two cannabis licences issued in Oakland, one has to be to an equity applicant, and so far nearly 800 equity licences have been issued by Oakland City Council.

Three other cities — Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento — have since created their own equity programmes, accompanied by expungements (annulments) of more than 60,000 marijuana convictions dating back to 1975.

Few equity applicants have been more savvy than Grant, who has partnered with three equity incubators and taken advantage of the fact that, unlike Colorado, California allows cannabis to be sold online. She has set up two marijuana retail delivery businesses, Top Shelf Express and Lit Delivery Service, as well as a distribution centre linking growers to retailers, called Oaktown Distribution.

Vultures dangled $50,000 cash for me to give them my licence and walk away. But I resisted. Thankfully. Each of my licences are now worth well over a million dollars

Linda Grant

“It was a moment to hold your nerve,” she said. “Soon as equity kicked in, the white yuppies from Colorado swooped in to buy our licences for what seemed to people like me a huge amount of money. We called them the vultures. They dangled $50,000 [£39,000] cash for me to give them my licence and walk away. But I resisted. Thankfully. Each of my licences are now worth well over a million dollars.”

Grant has The Hood Incubator to thank. Co-founded by Lanese Martin, it is a non-profit business accelerator that empowers equity applicants by giving them access to networks of advisers and investors.

Martin, 33, said: “We have helped more than 25 people, including Linda, partner with the right people and avoid the vultures.” She also introduced Grant to other black industry role models such as Chaney Turner, 39, co-founder of The People’s Dispensary in Oakland, and Della Moran, 32, brand ambassador for cannabis cultivators Humboldt’s Finest.

Another beneficiary of the equity scheme is Alfonso Blunt Junior, 39, known as Tucky, who sold pot illegally for 18 years. He regards the one time he was arrested as “the luckiest day of my life” because it qualified him for the Oakland equity programme.

Alfonso “Tucky” Blunt Junior, a former dealer turned cannabis entrepreneur
David Cohen

“In my hood, you were a total exception if you didn’t go to prison,” he said.

“Over 40 of my friends and family went to prison for marijuana and hundreds of people on my turf got locked up.”

Six months ago, the father of five partnered with Brittany Moore, a fellow African-American from Georgia, and started Blunts and Moore, a 4,000-square-foot Oakland retail dispensary that is now “projecting sales of $400,000 [£315,000] a month”, he said.

But with less than 4 per cent of cannabis licences in California owned by African-Americans, critics say equity still has a long way to go to right the criminal justice wrongs of the past.

They point out that most former weed dealers need training and lots of support to successfully transition to the legal economy, and that very few were getting the support they needed.

Dale Sky Jones, head of Oaksterdam University, teaches how to run a cannabis business
Westley Hargrave

Dale Sky Jones, head of Oaksterdam University, an adult education college in Oakland famous for specialising in “cannabusiness” courses, is helping to plug this gap. Some cannabis retailers, too, are helping equity licence holders get a foothold.

Debby Goldsberry, 52, owner of Magnolia Wellness in Oakland, offers 15-week courses to equity applicants.

Jones, 43, said: “Our school has had students from 40 countries, including the UK, since the mid-Nineties, but more recently 50 of our alumni are equity applicants who came to get the confidence and skills to set up their own cannabis business.

“It’s one thing to be given an opportunity, quite another to be able to take advantage of it and we help equip them to swim with the sharks.”

One of Jones’s alumni is Tucky, who enrolled in a course that taught him the regulatory side and how to talk to potential investors. “Since we launched six months ago, I have been offered $3 million [£2.4 million] to sign over everything, but that’s not for me,” said Tucky.

My goal is to turn Blunts and Moore into a worldwide franchise traded on Nasdaq. I want to use cannabis to change the narrative for black people

Alfonso Blunt Junior

“My goal is to turn Blunts and Moore into a worldwide franchise traded on Nasdaq. I want to use cannabis to change the narrative for black people. I have three people on my staff who went to jail for weed and I want to help people like them become legitimate store owners.”

He added: “If other US cities and states adopt programmes like Oakland, it can start a wave. In Massachusetts they have already developed the most advanced equity program of all US states that is just starting to kick off.

"Ex-weed dealers helped to go mainstream. Good for them, good for society. Even in the UK it can happen … just you wait and see.”

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