MARIJUANA POLICY ARTICLES

​Spotlight on Malaki Seku Amen, who negotiated the city’s cannabis equity program

​(SACRAMENTO BUSINESS JOURNAL)
For over a year, the city has worked with community advocacy groups to develop a program to provide opportunities for people affected by aggressive policing of marijuana laws to start businesses in the newly legal cannabis industry.  Those efforts came to fruition last week when the Sacramento City Council unanimously approved the Cannabis Opportunity Reinvestment Equity program, or CORE.

​Sacramento to prioritize cannabis applicants in some zip codes

(KCRA SACRAMENTO)
SACRAMENTO, CALIF. (KCRA) --Sacramento is moving forward with a new program to help ensure that the city’s growing marijuana industry benefits the most disadvantaged neighborhoods.
The city council unanimously approved the Cannabis Opportunity Reinvestment Equity (CORE) program, which focuses on zip codes with the highest rates of marijuana-related offenses to offer individuals and businesses incentives to become part of the cannabis industry.

​​Sacramento to help launch minority pot businesses in struggling neighborhoods

(SACRAMENTO BEE)
​The Sacramento City Council took a big step Thursday toward giving minority business owners and residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods better access to the billion-dollar cannabis industry.
 
The Council unanimously approved the Cannabis Opportunity Reinvestment and Equity (CORE) program after months of fine-tuning.

​The city’s CORE program directs cannabis business to a community devastated by the war on drugs

(SACRAMENTO NEWS AND REVIEW)
​A few months after having her gallbladder removed in 2015, Justeen Crawford recalls, she collapsed on her kitchen floor. She blames this on Latuda, a pain-reliever prescribed to her to help mitigate muscle spasms, persistent fatigue and chronic pain from fibromyalgia. In the hospital, Crawford discarded her belief in the “Just Say No” campaign and decided to look deeper into her doctor’s recommendation of a new treatment: cannabis.

Sacramento City Council approves cannabis program for disenfranchised groups ​

​(SACRAMENTO BUSINESS JOURNAL)
​The Sacramento City Council voted unanimously on Tuesday to create a framework to help level the playing field in the city’s recreational cannabis industry, aiming to ensure economic equity for disenfranchised groups and those negatively impacted by the nation’s drug war. 
 
The city's Cannabis Opportunity, Reinvestment and Equity (CORE) program would establishing a small business support center and mentoring program to help develop cannabis businesses.
 ​

​​Black entrepreneurs could get city boost to open marijuana businesses in Sacramento

(SACRAMENTO BEE)
​African Americans are nearly four times as likely to be arrested on marijuana charges as white people in Sacramento, a disparity black leaders cite as they argue that their community should receive special treatment when it comes to the city’s legal weed market next year.

​​Paying black people reparations for the war on drugs? Not as crazy as it sounds

(SACRAMENTO BEE)
It was almost 15 years ago, but Malaki Seku-Amen still talks about the day he drove through Del Paso Heights and realized, with no small amount of horror, just how little had changed in his old neighborhood since he was 8 years old.
The abandoned houses. The crumbling infrastructure. The struggling families.

“The devastation from the drug war was still there,” the president of California Urban Partnership told me over coffee last week. “All of the pain and suffering from criminalization.”

​California men incarcerated for weed push to be part of marijuana industry

(ABC 10)
Steven Clark began selling weed in 1991 when e was 17 years old, just before the birth of his first child.
He was arrested later that year in McClatchy Park and sentenced to four months in jail.
But the problem, he said, was not those four months. The problem was what came next.

​​​​Malaki Seku-Amen, CEO of California Urban Partnership

(SACRAMENTO NEWS AND REVIEW)
Malaki Seku-Amen strode down Balsam Street in Del Paso Heights, decaying couches on one side and an abandoned auto shop across the way. He used to live a block from here. When he was 8 years old, his mom received public assistance before becoming a nurse. Seven years ago, he returned. Nothing changed. ​ “That’s what gave me my epiphany: Far too many residents in neighborhoods like this don’t get the opportunities my mother did,” Seku-Amen said. After directing lobbying for the California NAACP, attending Harvard and creating economic strategies for the California Black Caucus and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Seku-Amen became CEO of the California Urban Partnership. 

​MARIJUANA & BUSINESS​​ Should potentially lucrative pot permits be reserved for minority communities?

(SACRAMENTO BEE)
For months now, Sacramento officials have been pursuing a plan to make the city a regional hub for California’s marijuana industry. They’ve approved permitting rules for industrial pot production and plotted ways to use tax revenues from marijuana to pay for city services, youth programs and policing.
​

​​MARIJUANA & BUSINESS
​Now that the program is approved, it will take at least a few months for the City of Sacramento to get some basic processes and systems in place so that people can submit their applications to run a legal marijuana business. If a CORE eligible applicant DOES NOT NEED any business plan development, legal, operating space approval or financial help, the City should be able to start reviewing that kind of application in about 2-3 months from now.