<\/p>\n
Seven years ago, Ivelisse Correa told her father that she was going to open up a marijuana dispensary. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Correa\u2019s father had been arrested when she was a freshman at East Hartford High School, and he\u2019d gone to prison for three-and-a-half years, she said, after the remains of smoked marijuana was found in his car. For Correa, the prison term also meant that her father wasn\u2019t there to see her graduate from high school.<\/p>\n
Correa said the dispensary was a way for her to \u201cstick it to the State of Connecticut\u201d for her father\u2019s arrest. She said that she would like to go into the venture with her siblings, if it\u2019s possible, with some of the money they will inherit from their father, who died in April.<\/p>\n
When the legalization of marijuana was being debated in the state legislature last year, it looked like Correa might finally have her chance. The new laws were supposed to prioritize precisely people like her \u2014 individuals who had been directly impacted by the \u201cWar on Drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n
But when the law was finally rolled out, dismayed, Correa didn\u2019t even bother to apply.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was never a fair shot,\u201d she said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t meant to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
Under the law passed last year, fifty percent of licenses to operate marijuana businesses \u2014 as cultivators, retailers and manufacturers\u00a0 \u2014 must go to businesses owned at least 65 percent by \u201csocial equity applicants.\u201d A social equity applicant is someone who grew up or lived for a number of years in a neighborhood that was heavily impacted by the war on drugs, such as Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven and some of Connecticut\u2019s other cities.<\/p>\n
Correa, who grew up in East Hartford, qualified as a social equity applicant. With her status, she would be able to enter a special social equity lottery, separate from the general lottery, to compete for a limited number of licenses to operate a dispensary.<\/p>\n
But the rules established under the law allow businesses to enter the lottery as many times as they want, as long as they can pay $250 for each application they enter. Correa and other advocates say that this favors large companies, many of whom come from outside the state, who can afford to put multiple applications into the pool.<\/p>\n
The small number of licenses that the state Department of Consumer Protection has made available make the competition even more fierce. The lottery for retail cannabis shops drew over 15,000 applications competing for four licenses this year.<\/p>\n
Andrea Comer, deputy commissioner of the Department of Consumer Protection, told CT Examiner that the department decided to limit the number of licenses initially to make sure that there was not an imbalance between growers and retail operations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Comer, who is also the chair of the state\u2019s Social Equity Council, said that beyond putting up some initial \u201cguardrails,\u201d neither the department nor the council have much control over how the licensing is rolled out in the state. Everything from the fees that applicants have to pay, to the number of applications that companies can enter, is written into law.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAny sort of loophole that legislation created\u00a0 in terms of allowing multi-state operators to sort of dominate the industry in Connecticut is really a function that the legislators have to address,\u201d said Comer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In late April, Correa received an email from a law firm based in Missouri that asked to partner with her in applying for an equity license. In the email, an employee of\u00a0 the firm claimed that the company had partnered with social equity applicants in other states, and that the firm would \u201ctake care of the financing and investing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to Correa, the firm offered her 55 percent of the venture, but after they received the license, the company would pay her for her share. Under Connecticut law, a social equity applicant must own 65 percent of any venture that was part of the social equity lottery, and must remain the owner for three years.<\/p>\n
In an email to CT Examiner, the firm\u2019s principal, Tobias Licker, said that while the company was \u201copen to partner with social equity applicants and help handle the application process\u201d they did not buy out their social equity partners.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIf a social equity partner would win a license they would have to partner with someone to provide financing and know how. That\u2019s not us,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Licker is also registered as the owner of GMT Consulting, which has applied for four dispensary licenses in Missouri, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Correa said she spent a few hours considering the firm\u2019s offer. As a single mother, she could have used the money to spend on things for her children, or to fix the transmission on her car. In the end, though, she decided against it. She didn\u2019t want to be used by a corporation.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf I win, I won\u2019t own anything. And I\u2019m back at square one, and all I did was become part of the problem,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Correa wasn\u2019t the only one feeling as though the cards were stacked against her. Becky Goetsch, the owner of Running Brook Farm in Killingworth, also decided not to apply for a license as a micro-cultivator. She, like Correa, was sure she didn\u2019t have a chance.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t have deep pockets. I can\u2019t afford to flood the lottery with numerous applications just to be competitive. I was planning on submitting one application and hoping for the best, but I didn\u2019t even do that because the numbers creeped up so high that I felt like my chances of getting one \u2026It was just a waste of my time.\u201d said Goetsch, who is also president of the Connecticut Hemp Industry Association.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Goetsch added hemp to the list of her crops in 2019. It\u2019s a crop, she said, that could grow during the five-month period when the rest of her crops were out-of-season, making it a valuable addition to her greenhouses. She said that CBD also appealed to her as someone interested in plant medicine.\u00a0<\/p>\n For a hemp grower, switching to marijuana production is fairly simple \u2013 both products come from the same plant. The difference is in the concentration of one chemical component, known as THC \u2014 the compound responsible for causing people to get high. Federal law dictates that the THC concentration in hemp has to be below 0.3 percent, while marijuana has a THC concentration of above 0.3 percent.\u00a0<\/p>\n Brant Smith, who owns the company Hydroclonix LLC and whose growing facility is located in Cheshire, said he believes the local hemp farmers should have been grandfathered in along with the medical marijuana companies. Instead, he said, the market was primed to favor growers coming in from out-of-state, as well as the existing businesses that grow marijuana for medical dispensaries.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n For Smith, transitioning to marijuana farming would mean a huge increase in profit \u2013 he could go from making $400 per pound of hemp flowers to making $3,000 a pound.\u00a0<\/p>\n Smith also said that although he was located in Cheshire, the majority of his workers were from Meriden, which is identified as a disproportionately impacted area, according to the social equity council. Smith said that while he supported the idea of social equity, he felt that the way the licensing lottery was set up, it would favor large corporations using social equity applicants as \u201cfigureheads.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m all for social equity, but every license that they\u2019re going to hand out cultivation-wise, except for the medical marijuana people who are grandfathered, is going to be, in my opinion, a social equity person as a figurehead and a large multi-state operator behind them, or a wealthy person,\u201d said Smith. \u201cIt\u2019s not what they intended at all, I don\u2019t believe.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n State Rep. Anne Hughes, D-Easton, said that one way to fix the lottery system would be to run an initial round of applications specifically for small farmers and social equity applicants, and require the larger operators to wait until a second round to apply. Hughes said that large, multi-state operators were already buying up tracts of property in Connecticut in preparation for when they could begin cultivating the plants.\u00a0<\/p>\n A bill signed into law this year establishes a working group to study the feasibility of integrating hemp farmers into the cannabis market. State Rep. Jason Rojas, D-East Hartford, said in an emailed statement that the legislature heard from a number of hemp farmers during the session, and that legislators felt the working group was the right way to address the issue.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cGiven the fact that this is an industry that is in the process of being developed, and there is a complicated regulatory framework for hemp at the federal level, we felt the appropriate next step was to convene a working group to study the issue and how to integrate hemp into the cannabis market,\u201d Rojas wrote in an email. \u201cI am hopeful that the working group will be able to provide the legislature with findings and recommendations for the start of the next legislative session.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\u201cI don\u2019t have deep pockets.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nHydroclonix LLC growing facility located in Cheshire<\/p>\n