 So Will Jones is the director of the community engagement and outreach at Smart Approaches to Marijuana. He comes from a legacy of civil rights leaders in Washington, D.C. He's an experienced speaker and community activist. He works on issues of social justice at the local and national level. He partnered with drug policy advisors and leaders in D.C. in 2014 to found two is enough D.C. to raise awareness of the predatory practices of commercial industries targeting communities of color with substance use and helping to reduce marketing and improve policies that drive inequities. He's been featured on TV, radio, print outlets talking about cannabis policy. One of the reasons that we invited him is that so many of our staff and our partners had seen him on various things and really appreciated his perspective. He's been on NBC, Reuters, TV, CBS, BBC World, Al Jazeera, C-SPAN, Washington Post, Puffington Post. He's earned an MPA from George Washington University in the School of Public Policy and Administration. And then just like all of us, we have lots of different experiences that bring us to this room. And he's also a husband and a father and serves as a D.C. firefighter and EMT. So, Mr. Jones, thank you so much for joining us today. We are so excited to have you. I invite you to unmute your phone and talk and I'm going to mute myself. Thanks for that introduction. Good evening, everyone. It's great to be here with you all and share as a keynote speaker. And congratulations to those that are receiving awards this evening for your work in prevention. I think that's such it's an important field in the work that you do is so important. So congratulations to you. I'm going to talk about perhaps what may be the next frontier in prevention for you all there in Vermont and definitely in other states. And that has to do with cannabis policy in legalization as I know that's coming to you all, I believe in October of this year. And so I'm going to give a brief overview of kind of what the field is looking like right now. But also specifically focusing on how legalization has been impacting minority communities. I know that's one of the things that was discussed in one of the questions earlier this evening about advertisements, the level of saturation of advertisements in certain communities. And so that's something that you guys are already aware of. So I just want to help us, I guess, see, you know, as we're celebrating the work that's already been done to also kind of give a preview of maybe how the work may change in the future and just things to be aware of in data and trends that are happening so that you all can continue to do the great work that you are doing. So let me share my screen. I hope that works. There we go. So again, I'll be focusing more narrowly specifically on the impact of legalization and commercialization in communities of color and the intersection with social justice. But I think there will be some things that will broadly apply just across legalization as well. And since we just have 10 minutes, I am going to be going to this faster than I might ordinarily go through it. But my contact information will be at the end and very happy to dig deeper into any one of these slides. You know, to follow up with anyone, whether that's by email or phone conversation, or even over Zoom, you know, I'm happy to dig deeper on any of the topics that I touched on. So when it comes to marijuana legalization, there's three core arguments. And actually, if you forget that just for anyone that's not aware of the organization that I work with, Sam here, I'll say we're a bipartisan national organization. And we work on issues of marijuana policy at the local and federal level. We provide education as well as working with legislators. And our goal really is to see marijuana policy move forward in a way between the extremes of incarceration and arrests on one hand. I think we all are aware of some of the harms of just treating substance abuse as a criminal justice issue. But we're also want to avoid the extremes of commercialization on the other hand. And so we're navigating that space in between that in ways that can move marijuana policy forward in a way that doesn't negatively impact public health. So back to the three core arguments. And that's arrest and incarceration, business equity initiatives, and reinvesting in communities harmed by war and drugs. Those are the most common topics that I've heard in this space. Again, specifically when we're talking about issues of social justice and marijuana legalization. So I want to analyze these things really quickly, just give a bird's eye view of what's going on in this space and again, think that we can work out for in the future. I think it's really important though to start out to remember our past and not that long ago in all of our lifetimes in the 90s. Executives from Big Tobacco from R.J. Reynolds said stuff like we don't smoke that shit. We just sell it. We reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor, the black and the stupid. That was their explicit marketing tactics in our lifetimes. And so we have to be very aware because one of the questions that I often pose people actually that I always pose people and why I have this slide up is why do we think things will magically change if the same companies are just selling a different product, right? And so here you see these slides. And again, if you do not remember anything else that I say in this presentation, if the rest is kind of boring and droning on, I hope you remember this slide and this question sticks in your mind. But you see here in this, that's me and my daughter actually a couple of summers ago. Now I went to get her some ice cream at nearest convenience store to us. And this is what it looks like in 2022. And the closest store where I lived at the time and when I began working on this issue, the closest store to my house in any direction was a liquor store. And so I think we need to think honestly if these companies that you see here in the picture behind me are now just selling a different product, why do we believe that anything will change in terms of how they market, who they target and who has the most negative health impacts from these addictive products? And so we're seeing a lot of similarities between the tobacco and alcohol industries. We're seeing investments from big tobacco industries over nearly $2 billion from Altria, which is the parent company of Philip Morris. We've seen investments from the alcohol industry, so Molson Coors, Corona, Blue Moon, Heineken and others. Again, and this is a very lucrative industry, the Washington Post said that it can bring in more than NFL if it's legalized at the national level. And so to me what I see taking place and how it appears to me is that issues of injustice are being appropriated by corporations and by businesses that are looking for a way to change laws so that they can for profit, for their profit. And so just as an example, this was the campaign that was ran in DC that said legalization and discrimination. And I always say if you think that the systemic issues of discrimination and equality in our country or your state are going to be solved simply by creating a new lucrative industry, you have a naive and very shallow at best understanding of the depth of these issues in the United States and how they persist still in 2022. And in many ways we see the history repeating itself again, tobacco companies that not that long ago are partnering with organizations in minority communities. In this quote from Brown and Williamson, tobacco companies is really insightful. It said clearly the sole reason for B&W's interest in the black and Hispanic communities is the actual and potential sales of B&W products within these communities and the profitability of these sales. This relatively small and often tightly knit minority community can work to B&W's marketing advantage if exploited properly. And I will repeat that last line if exploited properly. That's what these companies are doing and they're on the right where you see PACS, Marijuana Policy Project and Houseplant making the same types of partnerships in roads in minority communities that tobacco companies did in the past. And this is important again if you're a brand like PACS or Houseplant or whatnot, you want to have that instant name recognition, that instant brand recognition in a community with your product. And so we're seeing again some of the same patterns take place unfortunately. These are just some quick images on the left. You see Big D Lickers and then Benning Heights Market. Again, when I'm working on this issue, some of the actually the ecosystem in my house. And on the right we see some marijuana related businesses in Colorado. You're really similar to me, but more importantly I think is the placement. More importantly to be aware of this is a placement. They're disproportionately located in communities of color. One pot shop for every 47 residents in Denver, Colorado. More pot shops than Starbucks and McDonald's combined. And so I say, you know, just to paint that picture, imagine you're walking down the road. You see a McDonald's or a Starbucks replace that with a dispensary. Add some more and that's the level of saturation that we're talking about, particularly in minority communities. And so I'm going to breeze through these again. Most of the time already, but I want to give just again a bird's eye view of what's happening in terms of rest incarceration and the other two topics. So even the ACLU found that extreme racial disparities of marijuana arrests persist even in legalized or decriminalized states. And what we're seeing is that even though there have been reductions in certain categories of marijuana arrests, very specific categories of rest marijuana related rests, the overall rate of arrests of African-Americans in Colorado, Denver and in other states as well has remained unchanged or even gone up in these states since then. And again, to me, this is because there's a systemic underlying issue that is not being addressed. And even if marijuana is legal, if you haven't dealt with those underlying issues, holding people out of forced law or bias accountable, holding those departments accountable, then you're going to have the same issues pop up in just a different excuse. Maybe they'll say, well, it's legal, but you have too much on your person or you're using in a place where you shouldn't, or there's a whole host of excuses. And I don't want to paint law enforcement with a broad brush either and say that all of them enforce law with bias, but for those that do, they should be held accountable. Legalization does not hold them accountable. And so we see persistent, if not increased, bias in arrests depending on, there's multiple ways to interpret this data, but we can just say, again, overall arrests increased. Certain on view arrests are more likely in Colorado than the years following legalization for Blacks than prior to legalization. The juvenile arrest rate, this is very important school to prison pipeline because it's still illegal under the age of 21. Minority youth, according to the data, best available data, that was from the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice, saw that there was actually, well, it did actually drop a small bit for white youth, I think 5%. It increased 35% for Latino youth in 54% for Black youth. So just things we got to be aware of moving forward. Adult arrests kind of already touched on that. And again, I'm not going to dig through all these numbers, but just to show you're tracking them, we're talking about them in the trends are that even after legalization that the, there was no significant decrease in arrests in Black arrests in Massachusetts here, you see a decrease after 2020. That's when COVID hit. So every state across the board saw significant reductions in arrests after when COVID hit. In the same story with incarcerated population, I know in DC our prison population was decreasing for several years prior to legalization. Same thing in Colorado. And then for some reason, after legalization, that decreased change in increase. I don't have time to fully break down this slide, but just to say there is no state that post legalization in the years following legalization saw any significant reduction in their prison populations. While, and this is what the second dotted lines are, there actually were some significant reductions in prison populations on legislation that was passed that was actually specifically narrowly targeted at criminal justice reform. So it's an interesting contrast there. And why in my opinion, marijuana legalization is stealing the oxygen from the room from greater reforms that could be done in this space. Just California again, don't have time to break down what's happening there. But just in, there was a, if you go back here, there was a small bump, not huge, but in 2017, small bump in their prison population, which is right after they legalized, and then it continued on its prior trajectory. Business equity initiatives, people, I think this quote from the founder of the National Diversity and Inclusion Cannabis Alliance is very insightful. And it says, people had dreams and hopes of building generational wealth. And it's done just the opposite. It's ruining lives at this point. Because these promises of equity are not being upheld nationally, it's still less than 4% ownership by African Americans in the cannabis industry. Even within the medical marijuana industry, which has been around a little bit longer, even in places like New Jersey where it's been there for 10 years, only one license holder was black. And so there's a lot of concern by people that are excited about legalization, but are seeing how this is actually hurting, not harming the equity isn't being realized. And people that have made investment, made dreams, and things like that are really just being left out to dry and it's creating hurt rather than help. One other quote I'll just highlight as time is really up on selling your business dream as a social justice movement. This is from the president of the Minority Cannabis Business Association. And so then again, you see headline after headline after headline, repeating the same story that the promises and they sound wonderful. I will be the first to say that these things sound great. But the reality is, again, headline, headline, headline, so many more. They're not materializing. The systems of inequality are still in place. And so we're not seeing the promises for equity take place. Just more headlines again, don't have time to break all of this down, but just to show you that there's so much that's there and that is not being addressed by legalization when it comes to equity initiatives. And then lastly, reinvesting communities harmed by the one drugs. Again, great idea. Same kind of concept of though kind of I almost call them like campaign promises of legalization, right? And then what actually happens is the racial wealth gap is actually being compounded, not helped. And just to emphasize that point, I have a very short video from Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez. It's less than a minute and I like sharing this video because again, for our organization, Sam, this shouldn't be a partisan issue. Sometimes it is, but it shouldn't be. And so we're looking at what people are saying on both sides of the aisle and then trying to take a step back and say, so what are the overall takeaways that we can have from this? So, you know, she is an advocate for legalization, but even she is saying, hey, this is compounding the racial wealth gap, not helping. So I'm going to play that really quick. Let me make sure I have my audio shared computer sound and then I will be done. Compounding the racial wealth gap right now based on who is getting the first mover advantage. According to an industry trade publication, 73% of cannabis executives in Colorado and Washington are male, 81% are white. In the state of Massachusetts, just 3.1% of the marijuana businesses in the state were owned by minorities and just 2.2% were owned by women. Is this industry representative of the communities that have historically bared the greatest brunt of injustice based on the prohibition of marijuana? Absolutely not. It doesn't look like any of the people who are reaping the profits of this are the people who were directly impacted. That's correct. And so again, just wanted to share that to say people on both sides of the aisles are seeing that a lot of these promises aren't painting out. And then again, I bring it back to that initial image I showed in question of, you know, why do we think anything's magically going to change just because old corporations are selling a new product? We already know how they operate. We know who they harm the most. And you guys work in prevention. So I think we just have to be aware of this new frontier moving forward. This is just a personal side. I always tell people kind of, what's my why? Why am I motivated to continue working on this issue and be passionate? When a lot of people tell me, hey, the train's already left the station. Why are you saying anything? And for me, it's just important to say what my truth is to share that I have that in my family history. That's my great-grandfather and great-uncle. They were the first to sit in desegregate schools in Washington, D.C. And I draw an interesting contrast on the right there. You have John Boehner, who's now going to make $24 million if marijuana was legalized at the federal level. And I say, you know, there's not always a big paycheck at the end of the day if you're doing the right thing. And yeah, I know you all working in prevention. You would love it too if your paycheck for working there in the community was $24 million. Unfortunately, we don't always have that paycheck, but the work that you guys are doing is so important and that's something to be proud of. And that's why I continue to speak out on this issue so that, you know, I can look back and say, hey, I spoke up. I shared. I did my best to speak the truth as we're moving into this new frontier of marijuana legalization and commercialization. This is, again, my contact information. So happy to continue the conversation or dig deeper into any of the slides or topics that I went through. I think it went a little bit over, but I hope that was some good information for you all. Thank you. Thank you so much, Will. Thank you for your patience with us as we got things going and for doing this and for multitasking through all of it. That was amazing and impressive. And I don't know how long you'll be able to stay on with us. I know you're going to have to jump off, but thank you for coming and for your time today. We really appreciate it.