and that's compounded even more so. We're running short on time but you know it's not to deemphasize the point that you're making right now. Can I quickly just finish the the points then. What I really want to make a point is the scale appropriate regulations and our ag and economic equity points. They are about access to land access to capital and access to the market. Therefore they will disproportionately impact those who have the least amount of capital and the least amount of access currently. Ag zoning doesn't mean you have to produce on ag land. It means that local municipal zoning regs don't apply to what you want to do. So if you have ag zoning for outdoor production then people could grow on their residential property. They could grow on ag zone land. They could grow on commercially zoned land. And if you made indoor production also available in residential areas as we heard last week from retailers a lot of people grow in their homes. They could have home-based businesses. All these recommendations I think would also impact this community of people that we're talking about here today. I'll leave it there as it sounds like you'd like to move on. Yeah and we'll have one more public comment period after our witnesses later today. And I see two more hands up. I think I actually need to just limit the public comment period right now. Again we will have one more public comment period but we have two witnesses coming at 1240. And I need to allow Kyle and Julie to kind of take just a quick break before we do those. So I'm sorry for the two folks with their hands up but we will come back to you at 2 30 when our witnesses are done. So with that Nellie could you throw up our away message and just pause the record. Well at this point you don't have to really pause the recording but maybe you could just throw up the away message until 1240. Okay it looks like we're all here. So we're back. This is the cannabis control board meeting June 17th. It's 1240 p.m. and we have Bo Kilmer. You know Bo has been so influential in cannabis policy nationwide. He's laid the groundwork really for cannabis tax and regulate and just home grow legalization in Vermont. He started people getting people feeling comfortable with the idea that if so many folks in Vermont are using this product regularly then maybe we should consider a safer tested packaged labeled products. And he was you know seminal in my thinking about cannabis policy and honestly if the cannabis board had a blank check I would do whatever we could to get him to come to Vermont and help us some more. But in the meantime he is very willing to come talk to us. And today Bo we are focused on social equity. What's been working across the state. What's what hasn't been working. How we can kind of learn the lessons and try our best to kind of get this right and maybe find a way that other states haven't haven't tried as we think about social equity and the definition of a social equity applicant. I would just say we're three board members Kyle, Julie, and myself. We're not going to understand all the nuances of this issue. We've been given the benefit of an advisory committee. We have some of those advisory committee members on right now that I'd like to kind of have them act as honorary board members because they're going to help us kind of craft our social equity programming and our social equity definition. So Nader, Neli could you re-enable Nader Hashim's camera if it if it was disabled. Great. So Nader is a was just recently I think yesterday or the day before appointed as our advisory committee member within expertise in systemic social justice and equity issues. And so he is here. Susanna Davis would you mind just popping up if you're willing. Great. Susanna Davis has the first of her kind role in Vermont. She's our director of racial equity and has been for about two years and she pursuant to act 164 is going to really help us dig into social equity. And you know Bo your time is incredibly valuable so I'd love to just turn things over to you but you know I would like to encourage Susanna and Nader and Julie and Kyle to ask questions of you depending on how you want to I'll leave it to you Bo how you want to present but if these folks have questions I think you know they're going to be instrumental in our work moving forward. Yeah no it's great and I mean I've prepared some slides but I mean my ultimate goal is to be as useful as possible so if at any point you have any questions just scream or raise your hand and great that's completely fine. Yeah so James if you could have someone give me the presenting ability. Nellie do you have the can you do that. I just did. Yeah all right let me put these slides up. All right can you all see that. Yeah fantastic well James thanks for the kind introduction and to say it is it's great to be back in Vermont you know as James mentioned I spent a fair amount of time there between 2014 and 2016 doing some work for the state and numerous phone calls with a lot of folks there just kind of helping people think through some of the various different options because as you all know if when you're considering alternatives to prohibiting cannabis supply you've got a lot of choices and I think Vermont ultimately implemented a very cautious approach that allowed for some flexibility I mean I just I was thinking about that if Vermont started with a commercial regime 2016-2017 and kind of the discussions we would be having about social equity would be quite different and so what I want to do for the next 20 minutes or so but as I said please feel free to interrupt at any time it's first of all just to provide a framework for thinking about cannabis policy and social equity and an important piece to this is recognizing that when we talk about social equity health equity has to be a piece to that as well and that's something there are other frameworks out there it doesn't give as much attention but that's something you're going to want to think about as well and then I also want to at the end kind of highlight seven different trade-offs or puzzles you know there are a lot of choices you're going to confront they're going to be pros and cons and there's some that we've identified by kind of looking at places that have already kind of started to you know take social equity and kinds of policy seriously and then some are a little bit more theoretical but things that you may want to consider you know the insights here based on primarily on three different journal articles if any of you i'm more than happy to send them for those of you who haven't seen them i'm more than happy to send them on my email just kilmer at rand.org and yeah it's we've been doing a lot more work kind of in this space and and i'm thankful for that i'm really happy to see how social equity has really kind of come to the forefront you know because it wasn't really there at the beginning you know when washington and colorado you know past legalization 2012 you know to the extent that equity was even discussed it was largely about reducing arrest inequities as well as incarceration although most of the people that are you know that were just as involved you know we're necessarily spending time behind bars but anyways that's kind of where the early discussions were but then over time you saw other states really begin to embrace this idea of expunging previous cannabis offenses or sealing them depending on the state and then even within that you know early on it would they would still kind of put the onus on the individual to go and have to petition the courts and then you saw some places kind of take that a step further and actually begin to go down the process of automatically expunging some of these offenses and then also you know especially in the past couple of years there's been an increased focus on you know trying to give entrepreneurship and employment opportunities to those from disproportionately affected communities we'll talk about that in a moment and then also how you can potentially use cannabis tax revenues to address some of these inequities so that the conversation really has evolved and like i said if vermont would have allowed commercialization 2016-2017 you know as i said this social equity conversation would be very different given probably the power that the existing companies would have already had but of course you know the big question is well who should benefit from these equity initiatives you know is it just those who are arrested or convicted for possession are you going to allow you know those with records for kind of maybe you know small time dealing sales you know will it be people who live in communities that were disproportionately affected by cannabis laws and if so how is this going to be defined by zip code police district those decisions matter quite a bit or you know should the beneficiaries maybe be some individuals who are confronting social inequities but that may have nothing to do with cannabis laws so there's a lot of options you have here and depending on the population you're trying to focus on that ultimately i think should determine kind of which lever policy levers you use so as i said look there are a number of kind of different frameworks out there to help decision makers think about this and so we kind of looked at what was already published in the literature and then we talked to a number of different regulators and so i'm thrilled that you're going to be hearing from shillene tidal next she was extremely helpful in terms of helping us kind of think through some of these issues but we ultimately came up with this framework in terms of thinking about the policy choices they've fallen to kind of six different categories you know arrests and penalties addressing previous cannabis offenses decisions about licensing fostering diversity in the cannabis workforce what to do with government revenues and then also health so i'm gonna quickly kind of walk through those before kind of getting to some of the different puzzles and trade-offs so obviously look i mean with legalization you're going to be reducing arrests and convictions i mean to the extent that we're not already decriminalized you may not see as big of an effect as you see it as you may have seen in some other places but you know it's not going to eliminate all police contacts so there's important questions that remain about well what are the consequences going to be for those who are arrested and convicted for you know underage use of public consumption driving under the influence depending on the choices you make there that also could have important implications for social equity and then also there's a question about well what's going to happen to the illegal market look i mean we've seen this it takes time to significantly reduce the size of the illegal market after you legalize i mean you're not going to shut it down overnight and but one of the questions confronting jurisdictions is okay as you move to this more regulated environment are you going to step up efforts to try to shut down reduce the or try to reduce the size of the illegal market to move people toward the the regulated stores and there could be and we'll talk about this later on but there could be potential equity implications with that as well depending on well what does target enforcement look like is this going to be you know applying criminal sanctions or will this be done more like through code violations or civil violations the decisions you make about if you decide to to go out to try to reduce the size of the illegal market the decisions about whether especially criminal versus civil could have important implications for social equity but a lot of that also depends on the characteristics of those who are already participating in the illegal market and as you know that varies quite a bit depending on kind of what state and what kind of county you're in or jurisdiction also this idea of addressing previous cannabis offenses expund we we recently did some work for the state of Virginia or Commonwealth of Virginia helping them think through this and we found kind of looking at their criminal justice data we found that if you know if you're just even expunging kind of simple cannabis possession offenses that's going to affect many more people that then could be affected by giving them employment or entrepreneurship opportunities I mean it was like the order was twice the order of magnitude I mean it was large I mean granted it could be a bit different there and those aren't mutually exclusive but this is something to think through and of course you know as I read before I know which offenses are going to be eligible you know I think the big question is what are you going to do with those that were convicted for kind of low level sales most places allow you know when they are doing expunging and sealing you know they are allowing for possession offenses there is a fair amount of variation though in terms of the amount you could have had and they're all and I realize that I think in New York one of the things they're trying to grapple with is trying to go back to the criminal records to see how much information there is about the total weight that may have been seized during a justice involved transaction but the big question is is this going to be automatic or is the owners going to be put on the individuals obviously if you put the if you put the owners on the individuals you know depending on the jurisdiction you know it takes time and effort you know some places you may have to hire a lawyer and that creates barriers whereas if it's automatic that makes it a heck of a lot easier and so we've seen some more states kind of moving in the automatic direction and you know it's been a while since I've worked with the criminal justice data in Vermont but you know states there's a lot of variation in kind of the IT systems that states have and so in some places it can be a lot easier to kind of automatically expunge I'm not sure what the situation is in Vermont but that's something that you kind of have to keep in mind unfortunately there are a number of even nonprofit organizations for example Code for America and there's some others that have been you know that have been working with different states to kind of help them write the code to expunge to make it easier to expunge or seal offenses not just for cannabis but uh that may be something the state of Vermont may want to uh think about so licensing this is a big one and even stepping back not even necessarily thinking about social equity you know deciding who gets to sell or supply and how much has uh is one of the biggest decisions you're going to confront because at the end of the day if you end up giving out too many licenses um that's going to you know increase competition and it's really going to push profits down and so and especially if you're thinking about social equity and trying to make and trying to build wealth in certain communities if you give out too many licenses it's going to make it even harder for some to make profits and so I mean I think the example here is Oregon Oregon gave out way too many licenses and uh I think there are various reasons for doing that but realize there are implications there um also you know the big question uh you're going to confront is you know will there be preferences for licenses or employment in the industry and if so which populations are you going to target there um I I think you'll probably hear from Shalene later on about you know you know will there be requirements for a binding equity plan and also are there going to be supports built in to kind of you know potentially help individuals that are in um in disproportionate effect to communities in terms of making it easier for them to apply maybe you know having fee waivers or providing training so there's a lot of decisions here but that first bullet is really important and this is you know this is somebody I talked to James about a while ago and I I mean I I think it'll be useful and I think you recently have had someone kind of estimate the size of the market so I I think based on that and then thinking about well how much you know how many tourists do you want to supply um using that as a gauge for beginning to think about how many you know how many you know how much production you want to allow then once you have that then you can decide how much how much of it you want to go to small medium versus large growers um that's going to be important if you just kind of go about just giving out licenses um you know pretty much to to a lot of people who apply that's going to have big implications not only for social equity but also arguably for public health so fostering diversity in the cannabis workforce um this is something so this is not necessarily thinking about entrepreneurship but this is actually getting um individuals from disproportionate affected communities kind of working in the industry so obviously questions about you know will there be recruitment and training efforts in these communities um we know kind of outside of the cannabis world that BIPOC owned businesses are more likely to hire BIPOC employees so that's also something to kind of keep in mind when you think about licensing and you know and depending on the state you know states have various laws um with respect to affirmative action another if one of your goals is to increase diversity in the campus workforce another option is potentially having some government stores you know where you could have the smaller jurisdiction or it could actually be a state agency kind of running it and then potentially using affirmative action now as I said I'm not it's been a while since I've gone through Vermont law and definitely not with respect to affirmative action policy so I don't know if this is something that could actually fly there um but that is an option that a lot of places have overlooked we'll talk a little bit more about government stores later on um what are you going to do with government revenues I mean this you could you know potentially use it to fund reparations or restorative justice efforts I'm sure some of you are aware of an Evanston Illinois they're using some of their cannabis tax revenues for reparations for black americans and so they recently just announced the details of that and I think initially the money is going to go to help help individuals especially in the realm of housing I don't know if it's for remodels or helping with mortgage payments but it's very much kind of targeted toward housing I mean there are a lot options there but they've they've made the decision that that's where they're going to put some of their cannabis tax revenues and so that is an option also you know as we talk about you need to be thinking about health equity as well so are you going to be putting money into health services or programs in disproportionately affected communities and then also you know another another option is to you know use some of those government those tax revenues to fund training and grant programs um and as I said Shalene's going to have a number of insights on on what works there and what doesn't um finally health um you know this is not when we think about licensing it's not just in terms about how many production licenses you're going to give out but also deciding on you know the number of stores and where they're going to locate uh this is important um we we know there's a growing body of literature suggesting that cannabis stores are concentrating in minority communities and places with high levels of deprivation and there's some evidence suggesting that you know the closer you live to a cannabis store it's associated with more frequent use now I've got to say we have to be careful here because it could just be the case that the stores are smart and the stores are just located in places where there's a higher number of cannabis users so these two studies and that second one is one I'm a co-author on I mean it's very much about the association but and I'm hoping that eventually there's going to be kind of more rigorous research on this really trying to tease out how much of it is because the store is there versus just that the store is located there because of high rates of cannabis use um but this is something that had to think about and also in terms of thinking about health the products that are allowed could affect health equity and I'm more than happy in the Q&A session to talk about what the research the overall researcher says about legalization of public health but I do want to spend just a little bit of time talking about cannabis potency and health and you know there's there more studies are coming out on this and I've got to say you know a lot of the measures they're using are pretty crude you know sometimes a lot of times people don't know how much they're consuming what they're using in these studies are are are pretty crude measures so it makes it hard to kind of precisely know what's going on and we also know that you know these the higher THC products can be more efficient you know especially for those with some medical conditions um that's seven and then I suspect you know especially as a as a board you're going to be having more discussions about products and at the end of the day we actually need to know more about titration that is you know say for example when when it was five percent THC and someone needs to smoke a whole joint you know well when it's 15 percent THC do they only smoke a third right it could be once again just even for those using for non-medical purposes it just could be more efficient um there's not a lot of research on that you know done here in the United States a couple studies in Europe um but there are two new reviews of kind of this emerging research that suggests that we need to take some of these potential risks seriously so there was one um a working group out of Washington State that found that the THC content of cannabis products contributes to adverse health effects and that dose response matter when it was particularly concerning for young users and those that already had a kind of pre-existing mental health conditions and they were worried that it could disproportionately affect individuals and low income and minority communities and right before that there was also another review of this work um you know from some folks in Colorado and they found that the evidence is moderate to strong concerning THC concentration and the association with the mental health effects um but in terms of the specific THC content for products they said you know the evidence is insufficient when examining you know does it increase it does it lead to an increase in dependence or acute health harms um you know absence of evidence isn't the same as evidence of absence right I mean this is just that this is an emerging field and I think researchers are still trying to get a good handle on trying to measure consumption but this is something that um that as a regulatory board that you're going to want to I'll pay attention to and um so that that said um you know in the process of doing this there are kind of a number of different things that you're going to have to consider and uh kind of label these in terms of kind of puzzles and trade-offs and you know and obviously the first one is if your target group or the area you're focusing on is too large not only does that mean that it's going to be fewer resources for each of those individuals but you run the risk of helping those who don't need it and um when we were doing some of the research on this we were talking to folks in in Seattle and gentrification is an issue if you say people from these particular neighborhoods you know you know should be given preferences for licenses if you've got gentrification happening you could have people who actually live in those communities that could be get this preferential license you know preferential treatment but at the end of the day weren't necessarily the folks that you were trying to target in terms of helping with social equity and and we've seen this in Los Angeles I forget how they I don't know if they used I forget what they initially started with in terms of the geographic area um but they soon realized that they had to narrow that down considerably so I think they've narrowed it down to police districts um so uh so this is something to keep in mind I think I think it's easier to start very narrow and then expand as opposed to being very expansive early on and then trying to kind of trying to uh um you know get you know refine and get to smaller areas um a second issue is that you know defining beneficiaries by race or ethnicity can lead to legal challenges um you know we talked to regulators I sure I'm sure you have as well in other states that you know while you know while for their social equity programs they really are trying to focus on helping um individuals um uh from uh BIPOC communities at the same time they're afraid that if they actually kind of you know specifically mentioned that that it could open them up to legal challenges and you know some states have treated this differently but you know we saw this happen in Ohio a couple times uh with respect to their medical program and uh there've been a few lawsuits kind of challenging their uh um their equity efforts and those efforts and those lawsuits were successful um and so uh but on the other hand you know you know depending on your willingness you may be you know you may be willing to like if you think this is the right thing you may be willing to deal with those legal challenges but that is something that you want to think about and you know a third piece to this is that you know increased enforcement against the illegal market could help the equity licensees right you know especially in terms of you know you know trying to move people from the illegal market to the legal market but as I mentioned before there's a there's a potential trade-off there and you know how what what does increased enforcement look like and could that actually end up uh exacerbating some uh uh inequities and it may be the case that it does but overall um you know I'm not it's still maybe worth it to do it but this is something um that you're gonna want to think through um and a lot of it will depend on the characteristics of those who are participating uh currently in the illegal market um fourth one is to realize that legalization could reduce total employment in the cannabis industry I mean you hear these numbers about that you know there's so many people that you know that that cannabis legalization has increased jobs but in a lot of cases it's just move jobs it's moved jobs from the illegal market to the legal market obviously they're payroll taxes there's there's other implications with it being legal um but in terms of the total number of people who are employed in this market um we really we suspect over time legalization is going to reduce that legalize I mean especially in uh the more commercial markets it's just so much more efficient to be having these you know with these huge grows and uh and you just don't need as many employees so I just would be careful when you hear people say oh we're gonna increase the the the amount of the number of jobs and the number of individuals up from bi-bi communities who are in those jobs that may not be the case they're gonna be legal they'll be legal jobs but in terms of money people um money that people are bringing in um or income it's not necessarily the case so this is something to kind of think about as well um you know and also increasing the number of licenses in an in area you know as I mentioned before it could you know to push down prices to push down profits as well as increase the availability of cannabis in that community and that's why there's concern about uh you know the emerging evidence suggesting that you know these stores are located in in minority communities in places with higher levels of deprivation um from a regulatory standpoint this is something you can address you can decide not only the number of stores but also in terms of the density that that that is a choice that you have um but this is something especially when you begin thinking about health equity um you know we we we saw this with liquor stores right a number of places you know we saw liquor stores also concentrating these communities leading to a number of negative effects now of course alcohol and cannabis have very different harm profiles and I think the evidence is still out um or the jury's still out with respect whether or not alcohol and uh and and cannabis are complements or substitutes I mean a lot depends on kind of what population you're talking about but this is something to think about in terms of the number of licenses but also the density of the licenses for the retail outlets and also when you're planning this and I think you're I think you know after talking to James and others about this I mean I think this is this is where you know you can really begin thinking about okay as we design this program and we think about the potential benefits you need to think about what's going to happen with federal legalization and you know obviously federal legalization would reduce some cannabis arrests although I mean most of the action when it happens when we think about cannabis arrest I mean most of that's happened at the same local level um but it can actually put a lot of your equity licenses out of business and so you know when you talk to people that are in the industry I mean obviously they're they complain about the federal prohibition and rightfully so it makes it harder to do banking harder to get financing and their their tax implications um but what you don't hear from a lot of folks is many of them are actually able to still stay in business because of the federal prohibition and um and we had estimated a while ago we just updated this but it's still the case that you can produce all of the THC that's consumed in the United States on a few dozen big farms that's it so with federal legalization you know that can federal legalization could look a lot in different ways but if you know if it's no longer if it's no longer prohibited to move cannabis products across state lines you could see the industry concentrating very quickly and so when you think about jobs and kind of your small entrepreneurs or small growers if you have this all concentrated in one part of the country and with increasing returns to scale this can make it a lot harder for these smaller businesses ultimately to compete and and as I said we don't know you know when or you know or if but I mean it sure seems like we're heading in that direction you know what federal legalization will look like but you know there's also you know who knows in terms of whether or not imports would be allowed but you know it you know it would also be you know in a lot of cases a lot cheaper to grow the cannabis offshore extract out the THC CVD other components and then move that back up which would have really important implications for the smaller growers and then also the big question is is if there is federal legalization and I've actually seen a couple stories about this recently but this is something we've been thinking about for a while if amazon is allowed to distribute what that's going to mean for your smaller entrepreneurs so this is something to kind of keep in mind when you're thinking about designing these regimes because you know you have licensed preferences you get people in the market but then if they end up going out of business it could have been the case that if they would have spent that time effort and money on a different industry they may have ended up doing better so this is something that an important trade-off that you're gonna have to think through and finally you know compared to the profit maximizing approach that we see in most places in the U.S. you know a state store model could generate more government revenue to address inequities and also kind of based on what we saw with alcohol and government control you have fewer public health harms and so this is you know whereas in the current regime you've got the profits going mostly to white males you know with a government store model that money then stays in with the state and then you and if you spend it correctly you could use it really to try to address inequities in these disproportionate factor communities now I don't know if that if there's an option for that within with what you're discussing in Vermont if it's possible for a small jurisdiction to have a you know to kind of have a government own store but it's definitely something if you care about social equity and you care about public health this is something that should at least be discussed you know early on when when people were talking about kind of the the state store approach there was a lot of concern about well what's the what would the federal government do right the you know the state you know if the state was doing that they essentially would be ordering their employees to violate federal law and but I think over time you know that concern isn't as salient I mean what we now have more than 40 percent of the U.S. population lives in states that have passed laws to allow commercial production and retail sales and you know I think there's some nervousness at the beginning of the Trump administration no one was quite sure what his department of justice was going to do but even though they rescinded the Coleman the Coleman Miranda or memoranda it really you know for all intents and purposes it didn't change things so I think that that's less of a concern now but it but it's something that I think that jurisdictions should be thinking about I mean they're pros and cons but it's but but if you're if you care about public health you care about social equity this this is something worth considering so final thoughts I looked at a lot of kind of outcomes that as you know they get discussed in legalization debate social equity is just one of them but it's becoming more prominent and I'm happy to see that I I think this is this is this is an important piece right right next to some of the other outcomes you know there's there's it's not controversial to say that we want to reduce inequities in most circles but the trade-offs here are going to make these some of these decisions a lot harder and I think ideally and this seems like something we're providing in a kind of a sweet spot for is really thinking about okay if these are you know what are the if these are the different groups or communities that we really want to try to benefit with legalization you know then beginning to kind of run the numbers like okay if we do this approach we think it could help that you know we could it could help build wealth by this amount if we take this approach it could build wealth by this amount I mean I think I think that's one of the things that's been missing so far from these equity discussions is actually just kind of running the numbers and saying okay if my goal is to help this particular population what what's going to be the most effective approach you know is it giving out license preferences is it doing something more on trying to increase employment opportunities you know will it be just you know with respect to expungement there's a lot of choices here and the final point I want to make is even as you're kind of going through this process anticipate the need for mid-course corrections no one's going to get that no one has gone this right and even in some of the places that have taken this seriously Los Angeles, Massachusetts, Illinois had great intentions they've had to make big changes or they've had to make significant changes so I think as you're developing these kind of regulations of thinking through or making it easier to make these mid-course corrections I think it's going to be really important because you're likely going to run into things that you weren't planning on and to the extent that social equity is a goal I think you're going to have to make some of these adjustments so with that I will close and James and I thank you so much for the opportunity and you know I look forward to answering any questions you may have and you know if I don't know the answer I definitely will do my best to try to point you in the right direction to the person who may have it so thank you so much yeah so Julie could you just kind of manage the question process sure um if it's okay with you I'll ask the first question since you offered um can you go back Bo and talk a little bit about the health impacts of the concentration of stores I know that you address this in one of the papers that you wrote about the concentration of stores and then use in that area and then the subsequent health effects can you I know you touched on it a little bit but can you talk about that a little bit more and then I'm also curious about you know a concentration of stores and then the impacts on youth in that particular area yeah so as I said this is so there there are a number of studies now which kind of document that where cannabis retail stores are opening it we saw this one medical we're seeing this with non-medical as well um that they are concentrating in BIPOC as well as BIPOC communities as well as places with higher levels of deprivation they're all these different indices now in terms of the health effects there isn't a lot out there I mean people are just I mean it takes a while to kind of get these data so there have been a couple studies which have looked at this and they found that you know people that live closer to where stores open up end up having more free end up using more frequently that first study focused largely um the events I think it was by Julia Dilley and the first one I had listed there that was focused on adults in Oregon and so what I don't think it was focused on youth at all the second paper which I was a part of was looking at stores both licensed and unlicensed in Los Angeles it was focused on young adults so it wasn't I mean so it's not adolescents but it's not necessarily kind of all adults finding that those who live closer to stores were more um were more likely to be we're using more frequently and that actually was nice because we've been following or my colleagues have been following this group of about 2,500 young adults I mean they started I think when they were 13 in Los Angeles following them for about 10 years so they were able to control for a lot of factors um but as I said we have to be really careful with these studies because they're not based on they're not using any type of kind of real kind of quasi-experimental design and so it's hard to rule out well was it because the store was there that people were more likely to use or but the store is just smart and you know the the proprietors so I mean I look at that and but it's consistent with you know some other literatures we have with alcohol and tobacco but but I mean I definitely would consider this an emerging area and so far though they're really just focused on you know the the frequency of use not necessarily kind of other health harms right I mean that's the other thing as I'm sure most of a lot of you have run into you know so much of the research especially on the health consequences you know so much of it focuses on well did legalization affect whether or not someone consumed cannabis in the past month well from a health perspective we don't really care as much about that as we do you know kind of more frequent use the types of products that are consumed um you know whether or not someone's meeting criteria for a cannabis use disorder but part of that is just the nature of the data you know I I don't think the researchers always want to rely on that but that's what data were available and so one of the things that I had been seeing a change in is beginning to change some of these survey instruments so we can get better information not only on how frequently people are using what they're using but you are seeing people then try to get more information on you know the different health outcomes as well um but uh so I know that may not be entirely satisfying um but but yeah like I mean there's a there there are a lot of there are a lot of researchers kind of in this space now I gotta say back back in the early days when I was spending time in Vermont there were a lot of drug policy researchers or people kind of looking at this but now with it there's been so much policy change it actually for you know you actually can begin to kind of do some more thorough evaluations so there's a lot of people kind of working in the space which is encouraging but uh yeah so so we don't have but in terms of kind of other health consequences you know for example does you know if stores open how does that affect driving under the influence like that's something I'm really interested in um and especially when people talk about you know kind of uh uh consumption rooms where like social consumption like essentially we have cannabis clubs and they're like bars but essentially people are using cannabis you know what does that mean for impaired driving I you know step I really don't know um you know because on one hand you know if people are going to the cannabis the you know the cannabis club you know smoking a couple joints then going to a bar you know we know that the interaction between alcohol and cannabis is you know can really increase the risk of getting into an accident but if people are instead of going to the bar and having you know having a bunch of drinks or then going to the cannabis club that may actually from when you think about impaired driving that actually may be a net win so it's actually interesting so so that's one of the things kind of as a commission as you're kind of looking at the research on this I would focus on especially with impaired driving focus on the studies that look at the total number of crashes or the total number of accidents as opposed to those that are believed to be linked to cannabis because first of all it's it's as we know THC it's it could be hard to measure the THC and then even when you do it's not necessarily correlated with impairment and so and when you when you only focus on studies that look at whether or not THC was involved you you're you're omitting kind of this bigger picture in terms of what what what are the potential you know trade-offs and like substitutes and and complements with alcohol in other drugs so that's why I think the better research in this area is is that are those studies that focus like I said on the total measures excellent thank you um Nader has a question yes thank you I just have two quick questions if it's okay and I think the first one was partially answered I think but relating to licensing I was wondering if you could provide any direction as to how we could measure how many stores or how many licenses in an area are too many licenses and what metrics we would use to quantify that in the future that's a great question and I think it's one that not a lot of people are asking or even fewer attempting to answer um and I guess what I would do is um I'm sorry I got knocked off there for a second can you can you hear me yeah great um okay so James I feel like didn't didn't you recently have someone kind of do an estimate on consumption in the states we had uh Vincente Cedarburg do uh market analysis in August of 2020 okay and did they break it down did they just come up with state totals or did they break it down kind of by different counties by like neighboring states that would you know residents of New York and mess or New York and I guess Rhode Island and others that would come to visit us they broke it down by people that are coming strictly as tourists that might also purchase um you know so so it's not totally up to date probably need some updating but based on New York and New Jersey yeah yeah I mean that's that's gonna be that that's a whole separate issue we could talk about but so I think what I would do is to the extent into what Nada was asking about I think the first thing I would do is if you got a state level estimate just just even amongst state residents and trying to kind of break that down and so kind of looking at whether by county or something like trying to get the number of people who use or actually in that you actually want kind of the total amount consumed you know for example by city or by county and uh and then in terms of thinking about okay so how many stores to allow um I guess I mean one thing I I mean one thing I would do is at that point begin to you know either you or have someone begin to look at kind of what this is where I think we might be able to learn from other jurisdictions in terms of what they've done and I know there's a fair amount of variation so Julia Dilley who's a researcher up in Washington does a lot of work on cannabis legalization in Washington and Oregon and she actually um she's got this slide where she shows the number of stores per capita it just by state and you see that in Washington state it was much lower than it was in Oregon um so um so I would I would initially start there um and and then also and and this is where I I would start kind of by looking at other places but then also I think this is where you need to build them the flexibility right so um I I mean my my preference I would start small I would give out a small number of licenses kind of see how that goes and if it's obvious that you know that maybe another store needs to open up um it's a lot easier to kind of do it that way as opposed to if you just give a bunch of licenses out and then decide later on oh wait that was too many and then it's a lot harder to try to bring that back in so now I know that may not be entirely satisfying but initially getting a good sense of kind of local market conditions and then also getting to look at what other states have been doing in this space and then kind of taking that making some decisions and then starting small I mean that seems like the most kind of risk averse approach that definitely helps thank you um and I I just had one more question that was a bit more general uh you mentioned at the end uh mid-course corrections and you know obviously Vermont is quite different from places like Los Angeles and Seattle um I was wondering if you have any input on what potential mid-course corrections we might expect down the road yeah I mean part of it depends on you know um kind of how you start off like for example as I mentioned like for you know for example Los Angeles in terms of when they were defining disproportionately affected communities I don't know they may have started at the zip code level and then realize that by doing it that way they you know you end up helping a lot of people that weren't necessarily the targets of the social equity program so then they then they moved down to I think police district but then also I think there was a recent change where then in order to get an equity license you had to have a previous arrest in the you know for cannabis which which wasn't um which was one of the criteria before but then they kind of narrowed that down so narrowed down geographic areas then they also narrowed down kind of the populations and you'll talk to Celine here in a little bit I mean what they ended up doing in uh Massachusetts was I think they ended up deciding that when they were going to give out the licenses for delivery and maybe something else that they were initially going to limit all of those just to equity applicants or they have I think it's social equity and economic empowerment applicants there um which wasn't something that was initially so I so I definitely think um I mean at the end of the day it really gets down to which populations are you trying to help and and then you know and then I say based on that you know is it anyone that's had a cannabis arrest or a cannabis conviction in the past is it those who live in communities where there have been a disproportionate number of arrests compared to other parts of the state um I think once you once you kind of figure that out um that in theory I mean look I understand politics and all that stuff but you know stepping back identifying the population you want to help I think is going to be the first step and then once you have that population to find then you can look at all these different lovers that I talked about and I'm sure Celine will tell you about some others and then kind of pick okay if my goal is to help this population the most these three lovers will probably be the best you know yeah I guess the the other thing that I would say is you know and I don't know how much power the the commission has in terms of helping to allocate tax revenues um yeah okay so but anyway so that's that's potentially important because if it turns out that you realize that hey look one of the best approaches is going to be taking our cannabis tax revenues and putting it into using some of that money into and putting it into uh efforts in communities to help build wealth I mean you may be putting that money into programs that have nothing to do with cannabis um right in terms of kind of building wealth in some of these communities but you know a lot of that's going to depend on well you know can you get the resources there you know and that's and that's where you know the the the politics gets involved yeah pepper um so I have a question that's related but I actually would like to defer to Susanna if she has one we invited her here and she's going to be very instrumental in our um piece so Susanna if you have a question just because we're sure on time I'm okay for now thank you and thank you brother this was really informative yeah no and Susanna as for all of you if at any point after this you have any questions just feel free to shoot me an email like I said I'd be more than happy to answer if I can if not point you in the direction of someone maybe in another state who's been kind of dealing with some of those issues so so Bo my question follows up on what we were just talking about um you know Julie reminded us earlier today that uh today is the actually anniversary of former president Nixon declaring the war on drugs 50 years ago um and so but it does tie into this question about historically impacted areas and policing districts free and reduced price lunching and where we can find that data and if the if it is if there are is good data dating back 50 years and um you know a lot of people who were born that might be seeking licenses now you know that their neighborhoods have changed you know where they grew up has changed and then um also just you know we've been hearing a lot about potentially prioritizing Vermont applicants there's actually some language in the in act 164 our enabling legislation that gives some priority to Vermont applicants it gives them some technical assistance but you know like uh for us um as a board you know in Vermont we've we've decriminalized um cannabis uh maybe a decade ago and we've really stopped enforcement so we're not going to see a lot of those cannabis convictions here in Vermont that we might see from out of state applicants and we don't want to be um you know we're i'm not suggesting that we would give preference to Vermont applicants and you know at the disadvantage of people coming from out of state but it does seem like you know these kind of evolution of policy over time or police targeted policing over time um and gentrification as it builds in might really just impact you know if we have a generic definition of high impact area or disproportionately impacted area and it's you know it the it's evolved over the course of the 50 year war on drug then um how do we as a board try to start to kind of define social equity applicant in a way that actually you know brings the people in that we're trying to bring in yeah well that's interesting in terms i didn't realize that about out of state licenses so does the commission have the ability to initially limit licenses to vermont residents um i don't think that's in the statute anywhere i know that you know when i when we were originally working on this uh in uh 2015 that was a hot topic of discussion and i think colorado had residency requirements of i think six months or a year but i there's nothing in our legislation that would limit our license ship to vermont residents but i don't know i mean as a commission do you have the ability to make to when you're kind of doing the licensing scoring to to allow that to allow preference for vermonters yeah well so the one piece where kind of vermont residents are singled out in our legislation is that we um our agency of community development and a few other organizations need to provide technical assistance in the application process to vermont residents so they will have some help that other folks will not have in actually preparing an application yeah yeah no that's that's just it's a bit concerning because you know the the issue is is you get the multi-state actors right um you know those those from out of state that got licenses in other places and you know they're going to be you know and especially once and once they can move product you know if they can eventually move product across state lines it's going to make it a lot harder for them smaller the smaller entrepreneurs to compete um but but you raise a really interesting question about well when we think about you know because the way that's been defined in some places is and i know that we're talking about this in vermont i don't know if they ultimately decided on this as they looked at cannabis possession or maybe just yeah at least cannabis possession arrests kind of in different um you know in different jurisdictions kind of over time and then they looked at those that were made up and above the median or you know in terms of a rust rate i think they actually maybe maybe even did it by race as well um and race ethnicity and then from there you know said okay all of these areas that are you know in the you know in the 75th percentile or higher or you know some they have some threshold like that then they use that to define it as a disproportionately affected community that they would get preference to um i i think you're right i i think to the extent that vermont has decriminalized and so i i so it may be useful to go and i don't know how far back your data um the data you have on arrest goes um but i mean i definitely think you know doing something you know historically as well i i think i think that's something that places haven't thought that much about but i think you're right um yeah because just because someone lives in the community now that wouldn't be considered a DAC doesn't mean they weren't you know you know 20 years ago um yeah but but at the end of the day it's a lot of this comes down to you know how you know how much you want to address race ethnicity like some some of these states they want to but they decide just not to mention it at all they try to use different proxies to try to get at this because they're worried about getting sued and and rightfully so we thought i remember we talked to some regulators in a state that they were worried that even if they allowed license preferences based on race even though they had a much larger social equity program they were worried that even if the licensing component was giving preferences by race or ethnicity that that could end up you know if there were lawsuits on that it could shut down their whole equity effort right potentially so they they were very kind of risk averse on this but you've seen other play like you know Ohio definitely has gotten sued um but no i i think when you talk to Shilin next she'll have some thoughts about that as well because i think massachusetts had to deal with that um yeah thanks yeah kyle or susana do you have questions julie are we running behind schedule um we i think we planned for Shilin at 140 okay unless nellie tells me that that's incorrect so i think you could go ahead and ask your question but that might be the last question okay well great uh great to virtually meet you read a lot of your work um and so it's great um i guess i had a comment um and it's more about a comment that you know i think we really need to drill and i know you spend time in vermont you know assessing our market on a certain level and you know that we mentioned that new jersey new york coming online is going to change that dynamic a lot and i think in consideration of that and looking at some of the questions that were asked earlier about what's the the right type of a number of establishments um in a given area you know you take an area like like stow which i'm not a resident of stow but i believe there's like four thousand year-long residents of stow and i would imagine that it's one of the higher concentrated tourist areas of the state so how do we really drill down into a license structure that is equitable and makes sense um so that there's not too few too many or a couple months out of the year when people are really coming uh to stow to ski so on and so forth and then my other well i guess if you if you have any response to that first my other my other comment is is something that you had mentioned and it's something that keeps me up at at night um from a small cultivator perspective in in vermont and in federal legalization and how we can anticipate things kind of ahead of time not really knowing what federal legalization if it happens what it would look like but i mean i used to work for agribusiness at the national level in a highly concentrated or consolidated industry and i know that it doesn't help small cultivators and i'm they are going to be front and center or marketplace but i don't want as you kind of alluded to things to kind of go awry if all the thc consumed in the in the country either is grown overseas or on a few dozen mega farms across the midwest yeah so getting to your first question i mean that's really interesting about seasonality in tourism right in terms of the stores i mean once again i would start small and then like i said it'll be a lot easier for you to you know start off with a couple licenses see how that plays out um and then over time add more if you need to um yeah but that is interesting to know what happens in the in the summer time when there may not be as many tourists there um i mean i guess well i mean the other interesting thing to think about is is delivery allowed in vermont no but we're supposed to make a recommendation about it we're supposed to do it in april we'll be making it in either october or january yeah i mean the other option a place like still where you don't have a lot of full-time residents would be to have you know um as a one option would be as opposed to having a lot of stores there potentially giving stores nearby and other communities the ability to do the deliveries that's that's one idea um but in terms of but no cow you're raising this issue that that a lot of places are going to be confronting like okay we want to help these small entrepreneurs especially those have you know come from disproportionately affected communities also we get federal legalization they're gonna they're gonna be potentially hurting so i mean i think so there's a couple different i mean so this gets to this bigger issue of who are you trying to help because you know and may be that yeah you're giving training programs to help people get into the cannabis industry but some of that money may be better spent helping people get into other potential uh uh you know industries and and i think and i think being thoughtful about this um you know anticipating that that's gonna happen and what type of support will you know will there be for these smaller entrepreneurs as they just hey let the market decide hey they're out they're gonna lose their their earnings or will there be support programs to kind of help them and uh and and also in terms of you know and then beginning to think about helping them think about when to get and you look there's money to be made especially in the early in the early years trying to help people understand when to get out of the market potentially or to sell you know yeah so so that's why this i that's why i think really thinking through the populations but then this idea of being able to secure some of the tax revenues for for specific programs i think that's something that's probably a bit more enduring if we imagine a world where there's a lot of commercialization um that said i don't know if uh Vermont if there could be any allowances for kind of county run stores or state stores um but if that's a possibility it's i think it's something that's worth exploring they're pros and cons um but it's a way to secure more money more revenue for the state that can be used to equity for equity programs and uh in other efforts well i feel like i could ask you questions all day bo but i know we're we're a little yeah no no she's leading is fantastic and i know many of you i mean she's been so helpful um as i've been kind of thinking about these issues and so i don't want to take away from any of her time so so i want to thank you so much for this opportunity like i said it's great to be back in Vermont and yeah reach out if you have any other questions i want to help out in any way i can thank you both thank you guys bye shaleen are you here thank you here i'm here hi hi so i think we'll we'll dive right in shaleen i um i don't have a prepared introduction for you although i also don't know where i would start with the resume that you bring to the table in terms of your experience in cannabis regulation and the equity and and the conversations that you and i have had about them um so i will kind of let you take it away and you know you can introduce yourself and um and kind of share your your information and knowledge with us great great thank you so much for having me um it's nice to see you all i think i know of all of you i've only talked and talked to julie before um so i will give you a brief presentation and then i'm i'm really happy to answer questions i mean i think a lot of it will just be telling you how we did things in messachusetts and letting you customize that um but i do want to give a big shout out to vermont in particular and the reason is um i've been since my term ended at the end of last year i have shifted my focus to federal legalization and particularly worrying about what it's going to do to state programs and state equity programs and um one of the things i've been looking at is the model of actually just legalizing possession just taking possession and limited cultivation out of the controlled substances act and then taking it slow otherwise and to my knowledge vermont is the only state to have done that um and it's great to have that model so um i have some slides um that i asked nelly to show for me if she could because i'm scared of sharing her screen and i don't know how to do it um and i'll go through um kind of what the best practices are thank you so much nelly so this is um what we know so far about cannabis and social equity which is not um any conclusions but a lot of good information um so i'll just briefly introduce myself so from 2017 to 2020 i served as commissioner of messachusetts cannabis control commission we have um five commissioners um it's an independent agency and we were appointed based on five different um expertise areas i think i think similar to you all um so mine was uh social justice and i'm currently um a visiting fellow at the drug enforcement and policy center at the ohio state university and i also vice chair the cannabis regulators of color coalition which exists to do um activities like this and make sure that you know that you are not alone and we are sharing everything that we've learned in other states that have done this first so um moving on to the next uh summary big picture that we have um if we look at what has happened in other states um like i said there's no conclusion but we've gone a long way since um five years ago when messachusetts and california first attempted um equity and i just want to emphasize that we did not get it right the first time it was a continuous process of listening changing figuring out what the challenges were figuring out what the new challenges were after we had made changes and then addressing them but best practices are starting to emerge data is starting to look better the top three takeaways i think are one um you can't think of an equity program as a separate thing that you're doing you have to build a foundation right first or otherwise it will never work the second thing is that when it comes to what the benefits are um what the eligibility is uh how you define someone who was harmed by the drug war um i think there's no one right answer i think the right approach to take is to make sure you're listening and that you are being very transparent about it but it's always going to be different for different states and then of course like i said keep uh planning in advance um to making adjustments and i think a part of that is um being clear you know we'll collect data and then in six months you know we'll have a listening session um go i don't know if your statute has you go back regularly um to discuss or recommend statutory tweaks but if it does um i think you should plan for needing those um and then of course uh you're not alone all of the other regulators are here to talk you through this because it's not easy so let's start with that foundation um the first thing is making sure that you are understanding um how big the question is right like regulating cannabis in general uh is really difficult but i think this is the most difficult aspect because how can we repair the harm that's done um by the war on drugs it was it had its has its tentacles in every single area of our lives and so we're never going to be able to harm it unless we can do the exact same thing and there's only so much you can do as a cannabis commissioner so just understand um your role in it and i think acknowledging the harm that was done goes a long way and then listening to people from impacted communities um in the beginning when i started the chairman of the commission who was very different from me like in pretty much every possible way we kind of went on a little tour together of disproportionately impacted areas and we talked to a lot of people um about just broadly what their their vision was you know what do they see as the harm what do they see as repairing the harm and i found over time he and i were very often on the same page and i and no one else was and i often look back and think it might have been because of those few days that we spent going on that tour and keeping keeping up that communication um this is an important bullet point um it's helpful to think about equity in three different ways the first way is stopping the harm and i think that is where criminal justice measures are really important making sure disparities don't continue um expungement anything that has to do with the criminal justice system that's usually going to be out of the scope of you know business licensing but i think it's important to acknowledge that piece of it the second is reinvesting into communities and that means if you are from a community that was harmed it doesn't matter if you are interested in the industry or not you should be getting benefits into your community and typically in the newer states and i'm sorry i don't know how this is done in vermont but in the newer states it's usually a percentage of revenue 40 50 70 percent of tax revenue are the most recent figures that are directed via grants into disproportionately harmed communities and then industry benefits and i think that's what commissions like ours have the most control over but it's really important to recognize that that's just one piece of equity so on that note creating a cohesive set of licensing frameworks social equity programs and workforce development to ensure meaningful participation meaningful participation happens to be the mandate that was in our statute um so we spend a lot of time thinking about what that means and in our listening tours um our official ones we heard a lot that there was no one size fits all um some people wanted to be entrepreneurs actually the vast majority of people who attended wanted to be entrepreneurs but a lot of people wanted to be um managers or move up in the industry or own ancillary businesses um and many wanted to um just have entry or reentry programs so we ended up creating all four of those as separate tracks in our equity program so after thinking about how to approach it um this is the necessary foundational work and this is i think the most key piece that gets missed a lot um and i i liken it to if your social equity program is trying to help people to cross the bridge but you have not built the bridge yet your program is not going to work so this part is building the bridge sequential licensing is extremely important so i just finished up a project uh with with um the Ohio State University looking at different social equity programs and how they have fared and i found that the thing that all of them had in common um that made them not a success is the fact that no matter what was going on with the program that caused the challenges while they were having challenges the other bigger usually established medical operators were able to open and so a lot of that i think is due to the excellent advice to start small right and then go incrementally and i think that's absolutely the way you should go but you should start with those marginalized equity businesses first and that is going to allow you to see the challenges they are absolutely going to be unforeseen challenges that you'll need to address and while you are doing that you won't have other companies that are dominating the industry until it's too late which is something that we have seen in a lot of places which brings me to my next bullet point um we got very lucky in massachusetts because that's what happened but we have a strict ownership uh limit where one person or entity cannot own or control more than three licenses of each type and it's a lot of investment on the commission to examine those contracts and make sure that there are penalties if you don't uh if you try to break the limits i think that's actually something that's going on in massachusetts right now um they're having a meeting with some pretty major enforcement penalties and if you do that then you have the room to make an equity program that works guidance for local officials that is super important because they don't have the time that we have you know to spend all our time thinking about this and so what happens is they go through this uh default kind of path where it's not intentional racism but it's systemic that you were likely to go with the company that's going to approach you that has experience that has a great um you know multi-state plan they're ready to go and you haven't even thought about equity right because you're this very busy you know city level official and you're just trying to do what's right for your residents and then you find out when it's too late that you haven't been equitable and neither have you know the hundreds of other cities so doing that off the bat is really helpful even just a model ordinance or any kind of guidance that you can give conscious staff hiring really really important i think that the first hires that you make is probably the most important decision that you'll make in terms of how equity plays out because it's something that you need to think about in every small decision and commissioners can't control for that you can only hire the right people who are going to hire the right people who are going to bake equity into everything you do and then last um this is conceptual but removing the barriers to entry um as much as you can is of course going to reduce the capital that is needed and in general make it easier for everybody but um especially those who are disproportionately advantaged and for whom these barriers are more more um difficult than others so you know trying to make sure that all of your regulations are evidence based and that um you're thinking about people who don't have a lot of resources so that brings us to the big questions um designing an equity program so the most common factors um when you're defining how to identify someone as a disproportionately harmed person is arrests and convictions that's the most direct way um certainly no matter where they're from or what their life is like if they've had an arrest or conviction um from marijuana it has affected their life and then residency is also very popular um the imperfect but common standard is uh to designate based on arrest records and other um similar statistics areas of disproportionate impact geographically and then if you can prove residency in five of the past 10 years you qualify so in massachusetts we have both of those as well as if you can show that you have a parent or a spouse that had a drug arrest then you qualify as an individual and that gets you into the training programs um and then as a business if your majority owned by people who meet that criteria then you get the business benefits and then we also have um less significant benefits if you're 10 or more owned by those people um so that we can encourage uh ownership as a type of compensation but we're also differentiating between those who are majority owned and those who are not so with the benefits um i can say over time every program that has tried to do this has um had more drastic benefits being added being added because we're not seeing it work right so it's like every year there is a higher floor for the minimum that you need to do for an equity program i think the best one so far is oakland california it's very comprehensive um and one thing they've done a great job is legal services accounting services other professional services for those applicants uh in oakland and in boston a few other cities um they have 50 percent of licenses set aside for people in the program um in massachusetts at the state level we don't have any set number of how many businesses there will be so instead we set aside a license type um which is delivery and social consumption um and delivery has been implemented at this point and our thinking there was that uh it's the lowest barrier type of license so for the first three years um only if you are one of these designated businesses owned by the people who qualify you can deliver and then after three years we set in advance a list of um criteria for the commission to determine whether we've met the goals because chances are it's going to be completely different commissioners at that point so they look at the data they decide has this worked if it hasn't they continue it and maybe add even more benefits if it has then they let other businesses come in um the role of other non-social equity businesses you're going to find a lot of different opinions on um my personal opinion is that the government is the one that has caused the harms by the war on drugs and the resources to fix it and the one that works for the public um so i think that it makes sense for the government to be the one to fix the harms um but some states have a role for corporations um i think probably one of the best ones is what they have in Oakland where you get a licensing benefit if you incubate a business by giving them part of your property and that part is really important because property is probably after capital the most difficult barrier for applicants it's very difficult to find one that's zoned properly once you do um the rent is going to be 10 times higher than it would otherwise and so um if you're an applicant and you can get some benefits from the state and then you can get property from another business i think that's a really good combination and then finally um i think evaluation and adjustment is uh something that can make and break your program especially if you are clear with communication from the beginning i think that's another thing we learned in massachusetts is we set expectations really high um but people uh felt that it didn't work you know overnight and then we think we lost some credibility at that point so i wish we had said this hasn't worked very well in other states we couldn't get the time because we were the first but you could say you know here's our plan we're going to come back you know in this many months and listen to your challenges and and change our regulations and just be clear about that from the beginning there might be all my slides yes so happy to take your questions now thank you shallene i really appreciate you taking the time um uh one of the things that i i mentioned to you before um was about trust so you know we're asking folks to come from a legacy market into a regulated market and maybe they haven't had a great experience in the criminal justice system or they you know intentionally um operating outside of you know a typical system um and it sounds like there are some ways to build trust um i wonder if the tour that you went on that you spoke about it was that an effort to build trust or are there other things that you know other commissions have done to build trust that's such a good question i'm really glad that's what you're thinking about right now um we had both an official listening session and then kind of an unofficial tour so the listening session was of course open to everybody um and we took care to put it um in the areas where the people we were trying to reach were um and then we got yelled at rightfully because we we did it during the day during work hours um so I was like okay here's our first example of listening to you is we're gonna hold another one we're gonna hold it at night and then a lot more people came and then um we talked to the people who are already doing the work because I think if you are trying to make your own credibility that's a lot more difficult than if you can connect with people who already have credibility and you can show them like the first time you meet them they have no reason to trust you why should they but if they say here's something you can implement and then you do it and you go back to them um that trust is going to eventually filter to you great thank you um pepper kyle susanna nader i'm not sure if you're still here are any questions so let me just jump in if you don't mind um shillene thank you so much for being here i just wanted to introduce um susanna davis is our state the state of vermont uh racial equity director and she um has been charged in our enabling legislation to help us define social equity applicant and develop some social equity programs so we've asked her to join us as kind of an honorary board member today um just so that she can tap into your knowledge as well um and nader um hashim is um former representative former state police who you know really has led the effort in the legislature on criminal justice reform in a lot of different ways and he was recently appointed by the speaker of the house to be our um to our advisory committee in the capacity of a person with expertise in systemic social justice and equity issues and so we also invited him here today because he'll be helping with this um this piece of our work as well um and i would like to thank you for being here so much i'd like to put a plug in for your social equity 2.0 um webinar series you know i look forward to those more than almost anything else that i listened to and it really clued me into a few issues that i just was not aware of and i'd like to ask you about if you don't mind um um so the one is related to the kind of community co community host agreements and um local control and how that impacts the ability to deliver on the social equity and economic empowerment uh you know promises that are in the legislation that we have at least and if i don't if you don't mind me kind of piggybacking on that also um another issue that you um kind of cued me into um in your conversations with uh in your first um social equity 2.0 was around um limiting predatory practices against social equity applicants um and kind of these you know lending agreements that maybe means that you're a 51 percent owner but oh by the way you know you're actually you know taking loans from people that are um you know amassing your profits essentially so if you wouldn't mind just speaking about those two issues the kind of local control and the kind of predatory lending practices if you wouldn't mind absolutely yeah um and thank you for watching those sessions you were absolutely the target audience i'm glad it was helpful um i also wanted to say to uh susanna that i saw um or at least i read a live tweeted thread of her last presentation i thought it was excellent and and very much on point so um so yeah these are two big red flags host community agreements and predatory practices so host community agreements in massachusetts were meant to be an agreement between a business and a community that would cover things like signage and um hours of operation and what you know a local community should control and it would also allow the business to reimburse the city for any um costs that came up uh like uh traffic studies or extra security on opening day but what happened was the cities ended up just charging whatever they wanted um to the businesses and over time uh it's very much been abused um and it really prevented our our equity program from succeeding so um i thought a lot about this and i think there are two ways you could go um and one is the legislative route and trying to make sure that at the very least um municipalities have the same consistent equity mandate as at the state level and then also incentives on top of that maybe if it's something very small like we have a three percent local tax but if it was just uh you know one more percent of the state tax which is another 17 if that was shifted to municipalities for each dollar um that comes in to an equity business in a town i think that would be really helpful and the reason i phrase it that way is because there are a hundred different barriers that take place that you can't predict until they actually open and so once you get to that point where they actually open and you're getting the incentive at that point now the municipalities have a reason to help versus you know you trying to legislate every one of those barriers um that's one but i know that everywhere but especially in new england you know it's it's very difficult to to legislate that that sort of balance so instead um it would be so helpful if you just um to the extent you can invest in providing guidance to the people who do want to help at the local level and it might even be as simple as you know helping one city to do it right you know and then once they do it right making sure that that model ordinance is available to everybody um and you know nonprofits at the local level advocacy groups they can really be helpful you know as in getting people involved in the process so if you can't reach the local officials if you reach them through you know their constituents i've seen that be really successful here but just thinking about it from the beginning i think you're going to ahead of the game and of course we can share you know ordinances from boston, cambridge, oakland all of these places that have done it really well so predatory practices that's the other one um you know i think there's a difference between what's actually written right on the paper in terms of your regulations and then what's done in practice and this was really key for us because we have that ownership limit but we could have just taken it you know at the letter of the law and said well if you're not you know a written owner or written you know controller of this company then you know it's not a problem and just let it go and if we had done that i think that none of our equity businesses would have actually been run by the people you know who are purportedly running it it took a lot of work um to hire a contractor an accounting firm to check the uh the contracts and then also um this goes back to the trust that julie was asking about because you really need the businesses who are being approached with these practices to feel comfortable coming to you and that's like i think the by far the way that we found out about this was the businesses would tell us hey this other company approached me and they offered me this um and sometimes you know they're real slick about it they'll like say i won't talk to you unless we sign an nda and these companies really need capital right so they're incentivized to be part of this they're not incentivized necessarily to come and tell you know the government about it but if you create that trust and you're very clear that you are going to enforce this and you know you have to be the company that is actually running the company um that's clear and then the one very important thing i will close with on that is you have to think about which party is going to be the one to face the consequences if this does happen and if it just if it's just that the smaller company loses their license that's not really fair um so i would think about writing into your regulations that if you are a bigger company and you approach a smaller company with something that is attempting to circumvent um you know the eligible eligibility requirements for the equity program then you would face penalties for that and we have a lot of language written on that that took years of refining that we can share with you thank you hi shallene kyle here is here it's great to meet you and as james alluded to earlier i'm a big fan of a lot of your work i'm glad that you just mentioned consequences for this predatory atmosphere and who's actually responsible because that's something that i'm continuously thinking about um i was you got my brain spinning in a good way when i looked at your you described your multi-tiered equity program i think that's really really cool and i'm interested to kind of dig in more to that and figuring out how we can right size something like that um for a state up here to help businesses or entrepreneurs or individual interested folks you know depending on where they're at and what they're trying to accomplish um i had a a question and i recognize you worked for the state and not cities or municipalities in massachusetts but but boston setting aside i think you said 50 licenses for social equity applicants and you might not be at liberty to know too much about how they got to that number or um the legal risk that that boston may be willing to take on and we heard from bo kilmer and we we know that there's jurisdictions that you know are more hesitant than others on how they what words they use describe things so on and so forth my my only and i'm i'm not necessarily overly cautious i want i want this to be a big part of what we're doing but i also don't want to advise i'll call municipalities in vermont and not necessarily cities based on our size um to go ahead and pursue some type of localized program like that uh recognizing that it could open up a can of legal worms that that they might not be equipped to really respond to in a way that will keep the integrity of what they're trying to do at a local level absolutely that's a great question um i can definitely speak to that because we spent a lot of time um both at the state level and then helping out cities so i think that um what you don't what would be the most legally risky is if you have a specific licensing quota based on race which is what ohio did um granted at that time we didn't have data on the industry and now you have data on the industry so i think it's a lot less risky now than it was back then but it's still the most risky option um what we did was uh for our economic empowerment program which is is very similar to the equity program we came up with six criteria and one of them is black and latino descent specifically and that was based on well documented data that every state has that shows that the war on drugs has been disproportionately um waged against those communities but the other criteria where things like um residency arrests and who you hired so you could qualify in a variety of ways and i think that's really the key question is can you still qualify if you are not black or latino and i think that helps um lower your risk the other thing that helps lower your risk is if you have a lot of um evidence that this was based on data so we um we commissioned a report and then we just now after several years they commissioned another report we had a lot of discussion about it in public so if anyone um questions you know how we came up with those those areas or those races you know they'll be able to do it in some places it's indigenous populations as well depending on on what it looks like um the other thing i want to note is that in Cambridge they only allowed economic empowerment applicants for the first two years and medical operators in the state did sue and it was eventually dropped after a backlash but before it was dropped um there was a motion for summary judgment that was denied and it did suggest that the state's program was going to be held up because it was not a race quota so i think it's important to um i'll just quickly recap so you should be able to qualify in ways other than race it should be well documented that's it thank you so much i have more if uh but susanna not her i don't and i i'm actually i have to jump um come wait for a different board meeting but i just wanted to say thank you so much this has been really really insightful inside insightful um really appreciated thank you very much and thank you to the board for for inviting me reach out to me anytime that can be helpful i just wanted to also say thanks and some of my thoughts were mostly swirling around the predatory practices which which has been discussed at length so i don't want to uh beat a dead horse or anything like that but thank you sure i can add one more thing on that um we found what i was talking to regulators in other places um we found that people were trying the exact same approaches here in california illinois um that i would have otherwise never known about if the regulators in those places hadn't told me so it's good to to be in contact about that too so i had a question just um our legislation um kind of demands that we move very quickly uh you know we were supposed to kind of be sad on a specific day and then within four weeks have an executive director and then within two months have the whole structure of the market figured out and then you know go through a flawless rulemaking process you know all kind of trying to go to a specific date where we had to open kind of our retail stores um we are behind schedule um pretty significantly and i'm just wondering you know i know massachusetts was behind schedule a little bit as well and i'm wondering how these sort of aggressive deadlines that um are kind of expected of the board i know you know you had a ballot initiative which kind of set the date where you also were supposed to get going but um how do these aggressive deadlines impact social equity applicants and our ability to kind of deliver on these social equity um kind of undergirdings of our of our statute without question those are opposing forces because the faster you go the more you need to default to systemic things already in place that already favor big corporations and do not favor equity businesses um so anything that you can do to make sure that it's the equity businesses that open first even if that takes longer uh is really going to help and um i know at the time it is not you um the the legislation that they windows that they put out are just totally unrealistic and i know at the time i was trying to balance those forces if i could go back i would have said it's a matter of a few months and it is a matter of future generations that are counting on us just like with alcohol prohibition so you know everybody can just calm down for a few months i wish i'd said that more yeah that's that i'm you know i we don't have a general council yet we don't have an executive director yet i'm trying to um you know use my whatever platform i have right now to hopefully try and reset expectations and kind of get people to realize that you know it's not if if this legislation calls for us to prioritize social equity applicants and to provide um services for them we got to make sure those services are available um and that uh we can actually deliver on some of that um and not just focus so squarely on the deadlines that are in our legislation right this is more of a messaging thing than a policy thing but i often found that um in the public discussion the the business profits and the rights of consumers would get conflated and people would act like if the stores weren't open you know people were still being arrested and that's that's not the case you know like stopping arrest is an immediate need um but business is making money is is not yeah you know i think it also somewhat ties into the the piece that you did about sequential licensing and maybe you weren't talking about this but offering you know making sure that people that are cultivating um have a place to process and test and then you know a retail operation and making sure that you know we're aware of the growth cycle versus how long it takes to actually set up a retail operation and how long you know the test thing is going to take and whether we have the capacity to even test you know i'm making a note to add that so when i talk about the sequential i think because i think we kind of dropped the ball on that i mean that's a really important point yeah thank you yeah it makes us nervous a little bit yep yeah i think natter has a question thank you um one one thought just pops into my head um kind of onto a different track um regarding arrests after um commercialization i was wondering if you found that people who were using marijuana i don't know if you have these this data in front of you but if people who were using cannabis were still finding themselves uh being arrested or investigated for other for other issues um that so i'm trying to find out how to phrase is the best way but people who were using cannabis getting investigated because they were using cannabis even though it was legal at the time and being investigated for other crimes sorry if i didn't articulate that very well but that makes any sense no you are doing that perfectly well um yeah i don't have the the data in front of me but i can tell you from my my personal knowledge and memory because we did have we do have a research department um that under our statute had to research these issues and do reports and present them to the commission and the public so um i would say no for that part and not because of um us or the law but because we have in my opinion excellent supreme judicial court in messachusetts that does not allow things like um the order of marijuana to be used um for us and so and of course after legalization you know possession possession arrest went down you couldn't profile people that way um and i don't know any way that that continued but what we did see was um in terms of trafficking distribution um the disparities either stayed the same or they got worse um and you know police training did not fix that and legalization did not fix that so i would say that um you know it didn't fix the profiling but it it did stop the arrests and anything that would be based on possession or consumption arrests so did i hear the um the kind of enforcement of the illicit market the kind of distribute the distribution and the um trafficking increased in massachusetts following kind of the opening of retail stores no no no the the disparities the racial disparities did so it was still disproportionately black and latino people who were being arrested for that and maybe at a higher rate um and that that reports on the the commission website um as far as enforcement of the illicit market there was actually um a concerted lobbying effort by the legal dispensaries to crack down on the illicit market um and i think the general consensus was that that was absolutely premature um and that was really unfair to legacy operators that did not have a pathway to the legal market yet and once you create that pathway then you can start thinking about enforcement other question i have so much to think about right now any other questions from um our group no i mean is it i know you offered susana but i mean are you available as a resource kind of offline if things come up there's nothing better i could do with my time honestly that i could think of so absolutely yes yeah thank you for for for that offer i think after all our presentations but especially hearing from you and boha my head is swimming with ideas that i hope are good ones but you know recognizing that people probably had those ideas in other states and some have been great and some have not worked out as as envisioned itself well i will leave you with this um first you might want to go to the mass cannabis control commission website and just browse through those reports they're like hundreds of pages long but they'll they'll spark these ideas and then the second thing is do not be afraid to innovate and experiment because i mean a lot of this stuff you know colorado ten years ago said six plans so we said six plans but it's a completely arbitrary number right so someone just made things up so you shouldn't feel free to make things up too see how it goes very good thank you so much thank you thank you pepper i'll turn it back to you i think the last thing on our agenda is public comment unless there's something else that we should discuss um no i mean again it's uh incredible to have those resources all of our witnesses today thank you julie for taking the lead on putting that group together um we will be meeting next week uh on thursday we will likely very likely uh have a physical location somewhere uh in Montpelier potentially at our office building um if we have access by then and um but we'll keep folks posted and if anyone again wants to receive updates about the board's work we do have a online portal where you can kind of submit your email address and we'll we'll make sure that we communicate with you about any you know information that comes up not our thanks for joining us feel free to stick around for public comment and it's really great to have you helping us out and i you know i i don't know if you want to say a little bit about yourself i hate to put you on the spot but um i have a tremendous amount of respect for for you and the work you've done both as a state trooper and in the legislature oh thank you james um yeah you know i i came into this position pretty quickly i think i was appointed officially yesterday um you know my i'll just briefly describe my background um i was a state trooper for seven and a half years i was a drug recognition expert during that time and you know partway through my career my i started really seeing the impact of the war on drugs on people and started seeing how those disparities were playing out and that led me into a different direction which got me into the legislature where i served on the judiciary committee and now i'm working as a paralegal halfway toward halfway to becoming a lawyer but working as a paralegal right now at a law firm in braddleboro and you know i'm just really excited to be back at the table and yeah i i look forward to this work unfortunately i do have to hop off and go back to my other job but um i do appreciate the opportunity to be here for a little while at least thank you thank you so much for joining us thank you so much for joining us and i love work so um i think unless kyle or julia if anything left to add i think we will go to public comment and that will be our last agenda item for the day so again if you have a comment we're going to start with the folks that joined through the link um and can raise their virtual hands and then we'll move to the folks on the phone after after that and i know that we kind of had to bump a few people uh last time so i'll start with you david hello again um i just wanted to acknowledge uh two social groups that deserve to be part of this equity conversation that weren't brought up the first one being in the northeast kingdom is the rural equity issue and however amazing the presenters in their testimony has been there were a few things that did not acknowledge um the importance of this market in terms of keeping money in the community for example when bo kilmer was talking about uh limiting the initial licensing for retail operations i would imagine if you are only going to issue out say half a dozen licenses to begin with um the northeast kingdom wouldn't get one because disproportionately we are a very small population um uh considering you know the state um there are already people here who are who are planning on opening stores are are hoping to get a license um you know but we're what 45 000 people so um i would really hope that this marketplace from the cultivation standpoint and the retail standpoint um if if the money can circulate within the region right so the growers the cultivators in the northeast kingdom can sell to uh retail operations in the northeast kingdom and that money stay in the northeast kingdom rather than going off to montpelier or um you know burlington area um it would be really unfortunate to see you know a bunch of our residents have to drive out there to spend their money i think also um most of them wouldn't drive out there to spend their money they would spend their money in the black market and i think part of what we're trying to do here is prevent that from happening um i i also want to bring up another um demographic group that that has not been recognized at all in this um and i'm not exactly sure if they can be the same way that people of color um and some of the more impacted groups uh can be acknowledged um as as priorities but um you know we're we're 50 years uh since the commencement of the war on drugs but we're also this year just in a few months 30 years from the first legal retail cannabis outlet in the united states uh that that was the cannabis buyers club in san francisco which opened in 1991 uh due to uh san francisco's proposition p um it was uh voted with 80 percent uh support uh denis perone um a gay man um opened up the club with the intent of supplying people dying of AIDS um with with the ability to die with dignity um and so you know the lgbtq community has been at the forefront of of this they are the pioneers of this and um i don't know if there's a way that that can be acknowledged in this legislation um but um i think it needs to be said there were a few other things here that that concerned me um erica um who spoke it and i don't mean to just call her by her first name i i just don't know her last name but she mentioned cannabis as being a hallucinogen that's a dated term um cannabis is not a hallucinogen um it is a powerful medicine it is a powerful drug however comparing uh the sale of cannabis to that of a pharmacy i think is a real error um you know pharmacies offer thousands of of drugs tens of thousands of drugs we're only talking about one i'm going to emphasize my opinion here that a uh retail operation is going to be not too far from that of a liquor store or a bar um and her comment about um um prioritizing people who are who are entrenched in the community who are invested in the community i want to point out that that is a privilege it's a privilege to be invested in the community uh people who have time and money can afford to be invested in the community we're trying to give an opportunity to people who are otherwise not have the time and income to be invested in the community an opportunity to be invested so um and then the idea of keeping out um out of state people who are people of color people with prior convictions we want to attract a lot of this energy to our state we want this state to grow we want taxpayers here we want to we want these laws to attract not only tourists but people who are um going to invest in this as an industry um and the best way to do that is to open up these priority groups not only to people in in-state but but people who are willing to come here to move here to bring their money to bring their knowledge and to bring their um their their their demographic their diversity right um yep i think thank you David yeah thank you very much for that yeah thank you uh grim thank you i recognize i already spoke um and i will do my best to to limit my comments i want to thank Shaylene and and Bo for for their time and their expertise here today um and i was i think most of my responses at this point are just some of the things that Bo um said you spoke to sort of a bipolarity of profit maximization in the industry versus government stores and i think that there's some middle ground uh there and i think that's in the scale appropriate regulations that we've articulated he spoke to limiting the number of licenses and i think that's one way of addressing um production but you can also limit the scale of licenses so in our recommendations which you know or you've seen we limit we recommend a craft scale of licensure and if you want if you're concerned about overproduction you could start with the craft scale of licensure there's craft retailers there's craft deliveries and we would recommend that there be no limits on the number of those licenses um there's a limit on scale and those retailers can only buy from craft producers and that would be one way of limiting the possibility of overproduction and equitably distributing to the smallest scale of folks which is also the most accessible scale of license uh i was also really surprised that um zoning wasn't spoken to by either of the guests as a barrier but i did catch that shaleen mentioned that um one of the main barriers was zoning and that it um that in fact the cost of property that was a properly zoned for cannabis production went up substantially so i think that's one of the potential unintended consequences here is by saying you can't have this in agricultural land or residential areas you are encouraging development in commercial areas you could otherwise have a plant going in the ground and i think one of the most accessible someone also spoke to the low cost of delivery licenses it's also extremely low cost to just put plants in the ground you don't need to build a warehouse you can have a small license and just put plants in the ground and i think we're ignoring that i'd love to hear their comments on a lot of the scale appropriate regulations we have put forth differentiating between indoor and outdoor um testing wasn't mentioned and i know all the growers we've spoken to have mentioned testing as a as a point a entry a barrier to entry um he mentioned uh increased enforcement's could help equity licenses potentially and i think that really is making some assumptions about who constitutes the legacy market and not acknowledging the inequity of their positionality and the goal of bringing them in right away shaleen spoke well to this to some extent um but i think you know one of the issues we're already facing is that these people are feeling like they're being treated as criminals they're not comfortable necessarily coming to talk to you they're not comfortable necessarily coming to talk to the legislature and they're sort of being treated that way still and have that stigma attached to them um he talked about employment reduction uh as a potential result of legalization and i think um he also mentioned like legal large licenses and efficiency and i think that really again speaks to the importance of small licenses in businesses in a number of licenses as opposed to the scale um we can't control federal legalization but we can certainly provide an equitable and scale appropriate model and encourage supply management you know in agriculture we see these models in canada and other parts of the world that try to bring more equity to markets we can set an example here in Vermont of what a national market could look like and we can position people in the small business side um to be prepared um we've already talked about appellations a little bit with you in a new end uh in our conversations with the head of the humble growers alliance they talked about them looking towards that as a way of um achieving some equity for for folks uh going forward at the small scale um i'm also for example i'm a small beef producer in one of the most concentrated sectors of the u.s food economy i am able to make even uh able to participate in that because i have access to direct sales um and if this were an agriculturally designated crop for outdoor production those people would also have access to direct sales you could certainly limit what that would look like etc he mentioned using revenue to address inequity outside of access to the industry shaleen did too and i really think that's a place where you all can act the legislature chose not to and sort of dismissed that idea but i think it's really critical um and i am i am a vermont i grew up in vermont and i absolutely do not support you know prioritizing people who have lived here for a certain period of time i think as was said by the last speaker um giving people regardless of where they're from opportunity to engage in this industry equitably with others is is really critical um and i'll leave time for others to speak there great thank you graham and i know that you know like all of your public comments you're giving us some big ideas to think about um and uh we do intend to kind of engage in a much more granular level on some of the ideas that are being brought before us over these um set of initial meetings once we have our stakeholder process or you know state advisory committee and we have an executive director and consultant in place so we can really start to do the work of the board um is there anyone else um that joined via the link that would like to provide public comment and if you could just raise your virtual hand if so we have um one person it looks like who's joined by phone um if you would like to provide public comment um you can unmute yourself by hitting star six okay well thank you um again julie thank you kyle thank you to all of our presenters it's been um incredibly powerful day and in my in my impression um we've learned a lot today um next week uh we'll probably be meeting same time um thursday uh roughly nine to two and um there aren't any further comments from the board um i will entertain a motion to adjourn uh i'll move to adjourn second all in favor hi hi hi okay um nely could you please stop the recording and um sign off when you're ready