ATTN: Sign up to tell the Liquor & Cannabis Board that it’s time to #PayTheFee and release 20 cannabis retail licenses for Black ownership in Seattle now. Details in thread below.
First session today from 5-8pm.
Registration: linktr.ee/kcequitynow
PW: LCBequi
In Seattle, & across Washington, Black people have been excluded from ownership in an industry that was built on their backs – cannabis.
Of the 48 cannabis retail stores in a rapidly gentrifying Seattle, ZERO are Black owned.
Those with money & power want to keep things exactly the way they are. They want the illusion of inclusion with wall murals & Black security personnel, but they have no interest in real equity.
The policies & power structures that shape the cannabis industry were built & are maintained at the expense of Black people, & the subsequent harm and violence of decades of cannabis arrests & incarceration persist today in our city.
True equity means cultivating more Black-owned spaces where Black people have agency & control over outcomes for their own lives, families, and communities. This means resource allocation, & transformative restructuring of policymaking to center equity for Black communities.
To that end, the LCB must issue at least 20 new retail cannabis licenses for Black ownership in Seattle & loosen the dispersion requirements to allowed these stores to be located in high economic impact zones.
These businesses need to be located within our own community & given a chance to compete against stores which have been given an eight year advantage & a monopoly hold on the city’s cannabis industry.
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