- [Voiceover] Show me again just how much weed you had.
- I had a gram, man, like it's like a little bitty bud man.
It barley fit, it's small.
- [Voiceover] In states like Colorado
that have recently legalized some form of cannabis
there has been an economic boom.
But according to BuzzFeed news reporter
Amanda Chicago Lewis, the way these states
are legalizing weed is possibly,
well, racist.
(bright music)
So, I met up with her in Denver to learn more.
- I cover drugs and drug policy,
more specifically cannabis and the cannabis industry.
- [Voiceover] So Amanda spent the last six months
reporting on how racial disparities in the war on drugs
have carried over to the way the government has structured
the legal cannabis industries.
- The key thing that my story covers
is getting involved in the industry.
In many states, the first barrier
is that if you have a drug felony,
you're not able to participate in the industry legally.
In every county in America during the war on drugs,
black people have been between two and ten times more likely
to get arrested and serve long sentences
for drug crimes than white people,
even though they're using and selling drugs
at the same rates.
- [Voiceover] Okay, to reiterate,
in these states were cannabis is now legalized,
if you have a drug felony, you cannot work in the industry
in a capacity where you might touch the plant,
like growing, or selling, or trimming.
But if you're a person of color,
you're way more likely to have a drug felony,
even though you're not more likely
to have used drugs or to have sold drugs.
Enter Unique Henderson,
a dude who has been left out.
- I thought it was cool when it was legalized.
I mean, there's a lot of people making money out here.
There's a lot of people coming from out of town
making money.
I wanted to try to open up a dispensary
like, way before anybody.
A lot of people came out here to open dispensaries,
and then, basically, come to find out that
I couldn't do
I paid for all that stuff for nothing
because I couldn't even do
be a part of it because of my felony.
- [Voiceover] The felony for what, exactly?
- Me and a couple of friends, we basically
wanted a place to go hang out.
- [Voiceover] How old were you guys?
- 16. I would say 16.
Soon as I started rolling a blunt,
the police pulled behind us and
I tried to get the weed back to its owner (laughs),
but he didn't want to take it,
so I actually tried to put it up underneath my seat.
Me and the Mexican guy got arrested and
two white guys, they got let go.
It was pretty crazy, but.
- It sort of seems like the kind of thing that
for politicians and for law enforcement lobbyists
and the law enforcement lobby,
we're going to keep everyone safe
by keeping drug dealers out of the industry,
but that's impossible.
Cannabis is a crop.
It requires expertise.
You need to know how to grow it.
You need to know how to store it.
You need to know how to cure it.
You need to know how to package it.
- [Voiceover] We head across town
to meet somebody who is thriving in the new environment.
- [Amanda] So you think a lot of people
who have weed businesses in Colorado
used to operate on the black market?
- I guarantee it.
If you don't know anything about this
and you think it's just gonna be a gold mine,
you're sadly mistaken and you're gonna learn real quick
that you might loose a lot of money real fast.
- [Voiceover] That's Jason Ray,
the master cultivator at Sundance Gardens,
a legal grow facility that produces
more than 20 strains of cannabis.
- My dad actually started this here in Colorado without me.
He was all, you're doing that in north Cal,
well guess what, I'm doing it here in Denver,
and I'm like, what?
Spent more than anyone else was,
but we got our money back twice as fast
because it was done right.
- Did you ever feel like you were being observed
by like law enforcement, or were you ever concerned
about like legal consequences?
- People got busted all the time.
- [Voiceover] Jason, while growing on the black market
did have run-ins with the law,
but his turned out a little differently.
- A cop pulled me over and I had it all stashed,
but not that good, and so and found my ounce,
and impounded my bike, took me back
to her little jail in Park City Utah, and
- What wound up happening?
- Never anything more than a misdemeanor,
thank god, because I wouldn't be able to do this
here today, if I'd gotten charged with a felony.
- So, think about this, Jason was caught
with an ounce of weed.
He spent like a night in jail.
He probably got a good lawyer, and then
he eventually got that figured out and it was a misdemeanor.
Unique Henderson, was caught with
a of couple of grams of weed.
So, that's the difference between like this much weed
and like this much weed, so yeah,
Jason has tons of experience in the black market
and that's not a bad thing,.
He knows how to grow the plant well
because he's been doing it for a long time.
Unique also has experience growing on the black market,
but he's not able to bring that expertise
to the Colorado market to help anybody.
- [Voiceover] We cross town once again
to go to a cannabis investment seminar
led by Charles and Khadjah, two entrepreneurs
who came to Colorado from Texas to start a dispensary.
- We found out that because of his past record,
as an ex-offender
that he couldn't open a dispensary
and he couldn't even work in a dispensary.
In fact, he can't even trim the leaves.
He can't take the trash out (laughs).
- My understanding, when a person serves time,
and you, I guess, paid your debt back to society,
came home, not a problem,
entrepreneur, living a great life,
got off of paper, they call it, parole, probation,
been home, so why not?
Why wouldn't I be able to own a dispensary?
So that was a shocker.
It was like a
- It was disappointing.
- Yeah, it was disappointing.
Yeah, it was a gut blow.
- [Voiceover] Even when cannabis is legalized
in some states, it still exists in an unregulated
gray market, a gray market where people involved
in the industry are still at risk
of being targeted by local or federal law enforcement.
And, the people who are most at risk
are people of color.
When we got back to L.A., Amanda wanted me to meet
Virgil, a former dispensary owner.
- 2004 or five I opened up my first collective
in the city of Compton.
- [Voiceover] What was it called?
- (laughs) It was called The Holistic Caregivers,
acronym THC.
I was about doing things above board.
I was, I didn't cut corners because one,
I'm in Compton. I'm black.
I know if anybody's gonna get hit first
that was my mentality.
They coming for me first.
- I've probably spoken to two or three dozen
black cannabis entrepreneurs all across the country
for the past six or seven months,
and I hear the same story over and over again.
Because of this gray area in law enforcement,
black people who own dispensaries
are much more likely to get targeted by police.
They're much more likely to be targeted
by local politicians.
- There was a patient who
bought an eighth of medicine for himself,
and a couple of edibles, and some tea.
He bought the eighth and the edibles on Friday.
He had been to a rave on Saturday,
and if anybody knows anything about raves,
there's everything there, and on his way traveling home,
he veered off the road and hit a highway patrol man
who was citing a motorist.
They told him that they would cut him a deal
if he would say where he got the medicine from.
The judge, personally,
his words to me were,
"I feel that you are a drug dealer
"hiding under the cloak of proposition 215
"and with that being said I'm a sentence you
"to 72 months in federal prison."
- [Voiceover] The people in power,
the people who have money
who are investing in this industry,
and the people who are writing the laws
that are controlling this industry
have a similar goal in mind.
Their goal is to make the marijuana industry
appear legitimate and not dangerous.
For them, and this is a group of mostly rich white men,
for them, for something to appear safe
for everyone to feel good and okay
with us legalizing marijuana,
they want it to be a white industry,
and I do think that's intentional.
They sort of have this idea that
rich white guys on Wall Street are the people
that should be taking over this industry,
but I think, most of the rest of the country
doesn't necessarily trust rich white guys on Wall Street.
- Now, it's
there's no open door for us to get in.
So the person of color is out.
If they weren't in from the beginning then
- I got in trouble for what is legal now,
and I still get penalized for it, and it sucks.
- [Voiceover] In the end, it doesn't seem like
Unique is just a dude who slipped through the cracks.
He's a victim of a larger trend.
Even though much of America is retreating
from the cannabis front in the war on drugs,
there's still a lot of casualties,
and unless the laws change,
many of those casualties will continue
to be people of color.
(slow rock music)