Baltimore Sun
Sales of legal cannabis in Maryland totaled $1.1 billion in the first year of legalization. Three-quarters of those sales were recreational cannabis purchases, which have also driven more than $63.7 million in state revenue from a 9% sales and use tax in their first year. Although the wide scale of Maryland’s social equity program instantly set the state apart from others when it became law, state officials must now work with the new businesses see it through in practice.
“There was no blueprint for anything of this size,” said Audrey Johnson, executive director of Maryland’s Office of Social Equity. The nine-person office formed through Maryland’s cannabis reform legislation works closely with regulators to implement the state’s social equity vision. They’re also charged with helping new licensees get their businesses in order and ready to compete with large, multi-state cannabis companies that have already operated in Maryland for years.
“We’ve been talking a lot up to this point, but this is where the real action starts,” Johnson said.
For many prospective business owners, the challenge seems worth it.
Attorney Brandon Taylor and cinematographer Jerry Aquino, both Navy veterans, are eager to get their cannabis processing business, MunchNFly, operational as soon as possible.
Taylor, who came to Baltimore to work as a public defender and opened a private criminal defense practice two and a half years ago, saw firsthand how prohibition broke people and communities — while simultaneously watching the legal cannabis industry take off in states like Colorado and Washington.
The so-called War on Drugs, a decadeslong U.S. campaign to curb the drug trade through criminal enforcement, led to millions of Americans — disproportionately Black, Latino and other racial minorities — with criminal records for drug offenses. Meanwhile, executives in the legal cannabis industry throughout the U.S. are largely white.
“You see all these people making millions and billions of dollars off of marijuana, but in some states, people are going to jail for it,” Taylor said. That made Maryland’s social equity system look “like a golden opportunity, to kind of get into a game that has really drastically impacted people who look like me and came from backgrounds like me.”
Their brand’s specialty is infusing food products — mac and cheese, biscuits, mashed potatoes, Hawaiian sauce for chicken wings — with THC, the psychoactive component of marijuana. First, they need to get funding together, then find a location and get the permits to build out a lab, which they’ll also need to staff up.
Over the summer, the state started issuing the first new conditional licenses for all types of cannabis businesses — dispensaries, growers and processors — to the license lottery winners. Prospective cannabis businesses have 18 months from the date they received their conditional license to commence their operations. They also have benchmarks to reach every few months, such as getting capital, getting a space, entering into partnerships.
“They’re not saying, ‘Hey, you have 18 months, holler back at us and let’s see if you got a facility running,'” said Taylor. “It’s almost as if they’re step-by-step making sure things are done the right way — so when the time comes, the rollout is already way smoother.”
10/18/24-Baltimore Sun
