Bed-Stuy Talking About the Business of Weed

Some folks got together in Bed-Stuy last week talk about weed – and not a joint was burned all night.

It wasn’t that kinda party, though the topic was hot.

A standing room only crowd packed the Magnolia Tree Earth Center, 677 Lafayette Avenue across from Herbert Von King Park, on Nov. 7 for “The Business of Cannabis: A Community Forum.”

The upshot?

There is more money in weed than weed.

A lot more.

SRO crowd at Magnolia Tree Earth Center for “The Business of Cannabis” seminar

Organized by The Brooklyn Cannabis group, a collection of local businessmen, the seminar was held to give African-Americans interested in exploring money-making opportunities in the rapidly legalizing cannabis world insight into the industry.

“The train is here,” Bedford Stuyvesant realtor, resident and co-organizer Al Florant told the crowd. “You don’t want to look back five years from now and say you wish you had gotten on when you had the chance.”

Event organizer Al Florant

The expert panel leading the discussion included Michael Lambert, deputy comptroller for Public Affairs in New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s office; Sirita Wright, co- founder and CMO of EstroHaze Inc., which according to its website is “a multimedia company highlighting the businesses and lifestyles of multicultural women in the cannabis industry;” and Gia Morón, executive vice president of Women Grow, a group founded in 2014 to support and increase female leadership in the legalized cannabis industry.

From left to right: Deputy Comptroller Michael Lambert, Estrohaze COO Sirita Wright, Women Grow Communicaions Director Gia Morón

Joining them from the audience as the evening progressed were 56th District Assemblywoman Tremaine Wright – the New York State Assembly is expected to refine the state’s marijuana laws in the coming 2019 session – and Michael Quattrone, President, and Amy Holdener, Vice President of Operations for Citiva New York, a national cannabis company that recently opened a medical dispensary at 202 Flatbush Ave., across from the Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn.

Lambert supplied figures showing why so many investors are anxious to board the weed train.

According to a study by Stringer’s office, legalized marijuana sales could generate $3.1 billion in yearly sales in the state, $1.1 billion of that in New York City. That translates to a potential $436 million in tax revenues for the state, $336 million for the city, and another $570 for local governments statewide.

That would mean an estimated $1.8 billion a year in after-tax receipts for industry businesses.

(Those figures are based on sales of recreational marijuana, which is currently prohibited in New York State. Dispensaries sell various combinations of mostly oils and gels made with the non-hallucinatory marijuana component, CBD, not THC, the element that gets you high.)

But with some 30,000 medical marijuana prescriptions already in effect in New York State, “this is not a trend, and it’s here to stay.”

Sirita Wright and Morón both cautioned that education is a vital part of deciding where and how interested investors enter the cannabis market.

“Everyone is still learning about this industry,” Morón said. “Part of your investment should be in educating yourself.”

Wright, a former Black Enterprise writer, said she has been writing and speaking out about cannabis as she’s watched “people of color being locked out” of it.

“You don’t see people of color, particularly women, leading discussions on this,” Wright said. “Cannabis is medicine. You can grow other herbs in your home, why can’t you grow weed?”

Assemblywoman Wright, who has sponsored several community meetings on the topic, urged audience members to follow closely as legislation overseeing it is crafted in Albany. One rider now part of the proposal would require 50% of taxes collected to be spent in communities most affected by illegal drugs.

Assemblywoman Tremaine Wright

But panelists made clear that the cost of entering the emerging market remains high, which, coupled with the federal government’s vague stand on the issue, still makes investing in the “touch,” meaning the actual growing of the plant, a prohibitively expensive, risky financial proposition.

And the costs come early and often.

Several years ago, Citiva put up $250,000 just to file an application to become one of five companies eligible to open dispensaries in the state.

They ended up eighth on the list. The application fee was non-refundable.

“That hurt,” said Quattrone, who was one of the first to enter the industry in Denver and now runs several dispensaries around the country. Company stock is traded, and Quattrone joked that employees get great insurance.

The state had also mandated individual licenses fees, to service the industry. That means a license to grow, another to process, another to transport. Which means more fees, and, sometimes, more costs to be in compliance with said licensing.

States generally do not want to give licenses to people without financial assets or with no retail experience.

Even having a hot $500,000 to put in a company doesn’t mean you can legally do so. Only accredited investors, defined by the Securities and Exchange Commission as someone who has earned over $200,000 for the past two years ($300,000 for couples) with the reasonable expectation of making the same the next year, or with a net worth of $1 million, not counting the value of their home, can lawfully make investments in the industry.

An audience participant asked how he might get a license to grow weed on a 21-acre plot he owns upstate.

Both Wright and Morón had repeatedly warned the audience that the “touch” part of the business, actual growing or processing weed, was prohibitively expensive.

Quattrone drove the point home.

Citiva is building a 160,000 square foot grow facility – an area just short of four football fields – in upstate New York at a cost of $36 million.

Fortunately, an industry is the sum of its parts, and in the parts, there is profit.

Just like Citiva’s facility will need heating, plumbing, lighting, security, fertilizer and a host of other components to be viable, Morón and Wright said the emerging cannabis industry has a host of needs which offer lucrative opportunities for investors lacking the big money and political influence to compete on the grow end of the business.

Architects will be needed to design dispensaries, doctors and pharmacists to diagnose patients, security firms, retail workers, delivery staff, marketing, accountants, human resources departments, electricians, plumbers, sales directors, custodians, and a host of other services that businesses need to operate efficiently.

That wide range of professional needs also makes the cannabis industry an ideal destination for baby boomers who find themselves aged out of their former professions, Wright said.

“This is good for the boomers and the business,” she said. “Expertise is transferable, and investors are always interested in the experienced team behind a business.”

As the evening wrapped up, panelists cautioned that much of these projections of riches were still just that, projections. “Very few people are living off their earnings so far,” Moron said. “This is a long-term investment, not a quick fix.”

For now, the cannabis industry investing still comes with considerable risk. While 36 states have sanctioned legalization, the Trump Administration’s Justice Department under US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been particularly antagonistic to legalization.

Weed company stocks surged when Sessions was fired earlier this month.

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Below are links to websites panelists suggested interested parties use to educate themselves on the cannabis industry. Descriptions are taken from each website:

Women Grow: Founded in 2014 in Denver, Women Grow is a for-profit entity that serves as a catalyst for women to influence and succeed in the cannabis industry. www.Womengrow.com

Cannabis Cultural Association: The Cannabis Cultural Association is 501(c)3 nonprofit based in NY which helps marginalized and underrepresented communities engage in the legal cannabis industry. www.cannacultural.org/

Estrohaze: EstroHaze is a multimedia company highlighting the businesses and lifestyles of multicultural women in the cannabis industry. https://estrohaze.com/

Arcview: Arcview is the first and largest group of high net worth cannabis investors. https://arcviewgroup.com/

Canopy Growth: Canopy Growth advances the world's perception of cannabis by focusing on research, product development and innovative production capabilitieshttps://www.canopygrowth.com/

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An open letter to the Democratic National Committee: Please Resign, on Behalf of the Party and the Country (by Clem Richardson)

Dear Members of the Democratic National Committee: On behalf of your party and your countrymen to whom you have given so much, I ask one further service.

Please tender your resignations immediately.

As a group you are clearly reluctant, if not unable, to address the challenges we currently face, much less those ahead.

As the men and women who make up the DNC, you are charged with organizing the opposition, the resistance to the tiny contingent of aberrational conservatives who have hijacked the Republican Party and now lead our nation.

Yet scant weeks before the mid-term elections, which we’ve been told will finally deny the Republican Party its Congressional majority, I, a former newspaper reporter, columnist and editor, have no idea what the Democratic Party’s 2018 agenda is.

Though I have met some of you and know more of you by reputation, I have no clue who runs the group, who are its thought leaders, what are the issues for which the party will ride and die.

And if I, a baby boomer who still feels it is my civic obligation to start my day watching and listening to the local news and BBC America before reading the Daily News, New York Times, CNN and BuzzFeed briefs on my cellphone, have no clue where you stand on the above, it’s a safe bet that most of the voters you’ll need to win in November don’t know either.

That this can be happening now, when President Trump and his coterie of far-right wing ideologues threaten our national identity, is not simply troubling. It’s negligent. It’s incompetent.

This is how the Democratic leadership has behaved for decades, offering policies with little bite, and expecting the populace to rally to their banner simply because they were not Republican.

But the party did, and continues to do, little to counter conservative Republican voices that daily stoke Middle American fears of convenient enemies like Mexican criminals and Muslim terrorists. Democrats, meantime, had muted responses to concerns like the decline of the coal industry or the then-budding opioid crisis. The party did not offer strong alternatives to the status quo, even if those alternatives would have been difficult to implement.

Yours is a pragmatic strategy, saying what you oppose without saying what you stand for. And successful politicians are nothing if not pragmatic.

But right now, America needs public servants of imagination who, despite having endured the sometimes bitter reality of working for an indulged, often ungrateful and ungracious public, can still imagine using government to make our country better.

It has been a neat trick the Republicans have pulled over the years: first convincing a majority of Americans that government is the problem, then using the power of elected office to shrink government and hamstring what its institutions can accomplish by cutting taxes and thereby reducing revenues and staff.

What government is left cannot or is sorely pressed to deliver needed services.

Yet only government and laws created by fair-minded legislators can counter the political power of wealth.

We need leaders who believe in government. Only government can create and deliver what our nation needs: affordable health care; safe schools, roads and bridges; net neutrality and a safer internet. Only government can lead the fight against global warming, the true elephant in the room.

This is the only course open to the DNC. Yet it is clearly a path you are reluctant to take.

Granted, compared to the Republican Party’s typical public lockstep, getting Democrats to agree on an agenda is like herding cats. But the tedium of vigorous debate before arriving at a decision is a strength of democracy. It takes courage to believe that people can reach solutions through a thoughtful process of discussion, negotiation and compromise.

That’s the nut. The DNC must champion American democracy, as imperfect as it might be.

The greatest argument against current conservative political policies is how we live today. Most families either can’t afford college or must allow their children to become indentured servants after graduation to repay student loans. Many families are one health crisis away from financial ruin or are already living that way. Our national infrastructures — roads and bridges, the electrical grid, etc. — limp along with no coherent plan to repair them. We heed disdainful men as they deny global warming exists even as global temperatures crawl upward year after year and we increasingly reap the whirlwind.

DNC members, remember that you are the opposition, which means you offer alternatives.

If America is to be saved; if we are to maintain our legacy as a haven for the poor, the tired, huddled masses yearning to be free, you must champion the cause. Primary results in Florida, Georgia, Vermont, Boston and New York City affirm that voters are listening and casting ballots for candidates who offer clear breaks with the status quo.

The cavalry isn’t going to rescue us unless you lead it. Be our heroes.

Or resign and let someone else do it.

Published 9/12/2018 in the New York Daily News Online Edition

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A Love Deferred (by

"It was a rough time for us, when they accused our boys of that heinous crime.”

We were in a midtown Manhattan hotel conference room in 2007, attendees at a Duke University Black Alumni Connection meeting, my first. I thought I had misheard the speaker, an impassioned former Duke athlete who by the end of his speech had pledged $60,000 to either DUBAC or the Reggie Howard Scholarship Fund—I no longer recall which.

But his words I never forgot.

“They accused our boys.”

The speaker was African American, and he was addressing a crowd of some thirty or so African Americans. The “boys” he spoke of were several members of Duke’s lacrosse team, who recently had been exonerated of serious charges.

I had never, before or since, heard an African-American Duke alumnus declare his or her love for all things Duke with such intensity. And though part of me wondered what was in the Duke blue Kool-Aid he’d chugged over the years, my incredulity was tinged with more than a little envy.

Such love does not develop unrequited. Duke must have loved him back.

I’ve known African-American graduates from other colleges who loved their alma maters. They make much anticipated yearly returns to campus each homecoming game, where they party with former classmates. They belong to and support alumni organizations in their cities and, clad in various combinations of school colors, think nothing of driving hours to support visiting football or basketball team appearances.

Not so much me and Duke.

This is true despite the fact that my four years there more or less created what is now my life and career. I met my first wife, the late Angela Ducker Richardson (like me, Trinity ’76), when we were freshmen. I am still in touch with a raft of fellow graduates, white and black, and have been colleagues with several during my thirty years as a newspaper reporter, editor, and columnist.

I have fond memories of my Duke years: lively debates with professors Raymond Gavins, Henry Olela, Edwin Cady, and George Eliott Clarke, whose offhand quote, “I don’t know everything about T.S. Eliot, I just know more than anyone else in the world,” is forever etched in my brain.

I loved the African-American cafeteria ladies who watched over my roommate and me like we were their sons. As a senior, I was elected president of the Association of African Students, now the Black Student Alliance. It was the same year Reginald Howard became the first black elected president of the Associated Students of Duke University. We marched on the Allen Building in the fall of 1976 to back a quixotic demand that the school create a black studies department. I wrote a few articles for The Chronicle and founded the Prometheus Black literary magazine.

Yet I have returned to Duke just twice in the thirty-seven years since I graduated: in 1977 for homecoming; and in 1999, when I was attending an aikido seminar in Hillsborough and took a minute to drive through the, for me, now unrecognizable campus.

So where is my love for this amazing institution to which I owe so much? I never risked offering it.

Seven years before my parents left me standing in the fire lane outside Wannamaker Hall to begin my freshman year, my father sat me down at our Formica-and-steel kitchen table in Charleston, South Carolina, to explain that the future was upon us. President Lyndon Johnson had signed a law integrating schools. In Charleston, it was to be implemented piecemeal: Schools would remain segregated, but for four years, individuals could choose which school they wished to attend—which meant blacks could go to previously all-white schools. Schools would be fully integrated in 1970.

“Everyone is going to have to go eventually, you might as well go now,” Dad said, an uncharacteristic fierceness in his eyes. Never having finished high school, he was among the legions of Negro parents who wanted better for their children and saw education as the way to get there.

So I and maybe ten other neighborhood kids walked to the main highway that ran alongside our neighborhood to catch a school bus full of white kids—several rear seats were left vacant for us—to St. Andrews Junior High School, where we entered a particular hell. There were maybe forty of us in a student body of more than 600, and though the federal government said we had a right to be there, many of the locals, kids, teachers, and administrator made it clear they were not of like mind.

There were heroes. Keith Polinkus took a beating for sitting with me at recess. Miss Ann Cale, my English teacher, was the first teacher of any race to tell me I might have a future as a writer. But those years were permeated with racial tensions on and off campus that only dissipated when the integrated basketball team started winning, finishing second in the state.

So by the time I strolled into the Cambridge Inn for the first time, I was living with a kind of racial posttraumatic stress disorder. I had spent years going places the white people already in those places wished I would not go. Duke was just another place forced by the federal government to take me in, while also leaving me at the mercy of those who ran it. It would be up to me to find my way out.

If Duke offered racial détente, many of her African-American students did not see it. If our racial senses were hyperattenuated to insults real and imagined, it was because we’d experienced racism in myriad forms before and after we got there. I recall an old white lady throwing a bag of popcorn at a burly black football player who blocked her view as we cheered on the then luckless Blue Devil basketball team in Card Gym. Was that racist, or just a nasty person doing a nasty thing? Would she have hurled the popcorn at anyone who got between her and the game? Was the professor who attributed my grade in her class to my being a notorious cutter of classes being racist, professorially arrogant, or did she really believe I cut her classes, which I had not?

The emotional guesswork became overwhelming. Eventually it became easier to shut down than engage. Duke, for me, was a business arrangement, an exchange of goods for services under an agreement forged by an outside authority and forced on both parties. Duke got integrated. I got an education. Case closed.

I contacted African-American alumni and asked them about their Duke years. “Duke was a beat down for me, and if I did not have internal strength it would have beaten me down more than it did,” said Leidene King ’93. “But if I had to do it over again, I still would go to Duke, because even though it broke me, I am the woman I am today because of Duke, and I am pretty fabulous.”

There was love, too.

“I consider myself a proud Duke graduate, especially after the Duke50 celebration last October,” said Keith Hill ’76. “I’ve gone back to Duke at least a half dozen times since graduation. As I said in the Duke50 video, going back to Duke’s campus for me is like Superman going to his fortress of solitude. The campus is one of the most serene places on Earth.”

As to my feelings, I’ll need another anecdote. A few years ago, I was invited to an appreciation dinner for the late Gerald Boyd, the former New York Times managing editor. Boyd was the first African American to hold that position, making him the highest-ranking African American in the paper’s history. He had been forced to resign because of a plagiarism scandal involving an underling. I was pressed to deliver a toast, even though I barely knew Boyd.

We raised our glasses to these words: “To Gerald. Know that the first soldiers to storm a beach seldom make it to their objective. But they make it easier for those who come behind.”

Maybe it’s not important how I feel about Duke, if those coming behind me can love her in my stead. Maybe it’s enough to have been part of the process of helping black and white Americans learn how to live together in a different way.

The beach has been stormed, the great citadel is now—at least compared to then—peacefully occupied.

Published in Duke Magazine