Inside Denver’s struggles to diversify its $700M marijuana market

“It’s not the program’s fault,” Cohen said, praising the efforts of city and state policymakers. “There’s a high cost to all the [cannabis] regulations.”

As weed legalization spreads across the country, white-owned cannabis companies are overwhelmingly the ones raking in billions of dollars a year selling a drug that disproportionately landed people of color behind bars. To counter the trend, cities like Oakland, Calif., and Cambridge, Mass. have launched initiatives to diversify their marijuana industries and offer business opportunities for those stung by the war on drugs — only to find themselves struggling to get those programs off the ground.

[Read more at Politico]