Entrepreneurs like Raft Hollingsworth are working to ensure minorities get a fair share of Cascadia’s growing cannabis industry
Whether it’s Snoop Dogg trading recipes and weed jokes with Martha Stewart or Rick Ross nursing blunts and making snap judgments about up-and-coming musicians, black America’s relationship with cannabis is most often portrayed in mainstream culture at its most reductive; served in microplane-thin slices and apart from the dominant narrative.
By the numbers, black Americans have gotten the worst from cannabis prohibition. A vastly disproportionate percentage of the black population has either been arrested or incarcerated for marijuana-related crimes despite being no more likely than white people to engage in offending behaviors. A report by the Drug Policy Alliance found that in the state of Washington between 2001 and 2010, people of color accounted for 25 percent of marijuana arrests, while accounting for just 14 percent of the population
Meanwhile, as progressive medical and recreational cannabis regulations sweep the US state-by-state (and all of Canada prepares for legalization in August of this year), many of these new laws include language that bars non-violent drug offenders from owning cannabis businesses or working in the industry—offenders who are, by the numbers, disproportionately black.
In this way, systemic racial inequities are being maintained and transmuted rather than recognized and dismantled.
As much as Hollywood glamorizes black people getting one over on the man and becoming rich in the underground cannabis market, this stereotype fails to capture what doing so in real life really looks like.
In real life, if you’re doing it right, there are no vanity purchases or hyperbolic displays of wealth. The day-in and day-out is a methodical if monotonous series of tasks designed to blend into plain view while doing things that if discovered could land a person behind bars.
It’s less rap video, more spy drama—necessitating double lives and trade craft that never quite live up to popularized images of drug lords enjoying the get-rich-quick lifestyle.
“I’ve always grown stuff. When I was a little kid we had a garden and a little yard where I grew flowers—I bought seeds and grew perennials and annuals, pumpkins and roses and all kinds of weird plants.”
Perhaps nobody’s story dispels the myths quite like that of Raft Hollingsworth, master grower and co-founder of Shelton, Washington-based recreational cannabis producer Hollingsworth Cannabis. Hollingsworth grew his first weed plants nearly 13 years ago—back when legalized marijuana in the United States was nothing more than a mirage of progressive European nation states refracted across the sky from halfway around the world.
“I’ve always grown stuff,” says Hollingsworth. “When I was a little kid we had a garden and a little yard where I grew flowers—I bought seeds and grew perennials and annuals, pumpkins and roses and all kinds of weird [plants].”
So when he started experimenting with weed during his freshman year at the University of Washington—at a time when per-pound prices on Greek Row averaged around $4,000—he did what came naturally and began cultivating cannabis in his dorm room, starting with a single plant of Northern Lights #5 sprouted from seeds purchased online.
“I found a light on Craigslist that was a street lamp, a 250-watt, high-pressure-sodium street light,” he explains. “I bought it and rewired it and built this indoor grow.”
It was the first of many in an increasingly complex and ambitious series of underground operations that Hollingsworth helmed throughout the Seattle area in the years before legalization.
Throughout college, he operated a low-key garden, producing enough herb to keep himself high but not much more. By the time Hollingsworth was out of school and entering the workforce, the novelty of endless homegrown had worn off and he began seeing the commercial potential for his cultivation skills.
“I [stopped] using everything I grew to support my habit,” he remembers. “I grew up a little bit, I got a little older.”
Slowly but surely, Hollingsworth transitioned from personal to commercial cultivation, steadily reinvesting his profits in the expansion of his business. Jerry-rigged street lamps were swiftly retired in favor of professional-grade grow lights, second-hand ventilation swapped for intricately engineered HVAC air-scrubbing solutions.
By 2010, Raft had expanded his modest enterprise to encompass no less than four separate grow houses throughout the Seattle area—the largest of which was in a relative’s former 1,600-square-foot home, outfitted with 32 lights and converted basement-to-bedroom for the sole purpose of cannabis cultivation, with dedicated spaces for drying, trimming, and curing harvested plants.
At the piecemeal operation’s peak, Hollingsworth was pulling down roughly 20 pounds of product every two months and dispensing his wares to medical marijuana (MMJ) collectives across Western Washington.
“That was a good enough living for one person,” he estimates. “Two people, maybe.”
At the time, he was bunking with his girlfriend on a couch amidst the residential arboretum that had formerly been a family home—tending to plants in the wee hours while working full time for the City of Seattle as a Rec Leader at a local community center, where he spent most of his time organizing and facilitating after-school programs for teenagers.
Not only was the workload of a double life overwhelming, but as a black man in America, Hollingsworth was—according to a 2013 ACLU report—3.73 times more likely to be arrested and incarcerated for marijuana-related crimes than white folks engaged in similar activities. With the deck stacked against the color of his skin, jail time was a real concern, as was asset forfeiture of the family properties from which he operated his gardens.
“It was a grind,” he laughs. “I can’t do that anymore.” Luckily, Raft Hollingsworth didn’t have to live two lives for much longer.
In 2013, a year after Washington voters passed the state’s landmark adult-use cannabis laws—and on the heels of the Cole Memorandum, a recently rescinded Obama Era pledge to insulate the recreational cannabis industry from federal intervention—Raft watched as wholesale prices plummeted, dispensaries opened by the dozen, and the Craigslist “container sales” market (pay for Ziploc and the weed’s free) ramped up to peak activity.
“It wasn’t tenable,” he says, looking back on a frenzied and unstable market.
By the time Washington’s recreational cannabis laws went active in 2014 and adult-use dispensaries opened their doors, Hollingsworth had pulled the plug on his growhouse empire and made his exit from the underground weed game.
He spent 2013 familiarizing himself with state and local cannabis policy (dutifully reading and studying every update from the Washington State Liquor Control Board listserv), learning the laws as they were being written while crunching costs on various styles of industrial cannabis production. Before long, he had a rough business plan that represented his safest bet on Washington’s highly speculative, nascent recreational cannabis industry.
“I called a family meeting,” he recalls, convening at his parent’s place, which in recent months had been used to house the very plants that he hoped to turn into a full-scale, legit family enterprise.
“Raft showed us a PowerPoint presentation of his plan,” says his sister, Joy Hollingsworth. “I was hesitant.”
But she fell in line as the rest of the family gathered around the idea: Raft’s father sank his $120K retirement fund into the project, while others offered what they could to secure land, licensing, and equipment, as well as ancillary goods and services. Many in the family eventually quit their day jobs and left long-term careers to start working full-time on Raft’s weed startup.
In January of 2015, Hollingsworth Cannabis released its first flowers to the recreational market, today operating via a compound of greenhouses in Shelton, a tiny lumber town in Washington’s Mason County.
Joy describes the family operation as small and tight-knit, not aiming to dominate the market but merely claim a livable share.
“It’s not a get-rich-quick business,” says Raft.
A prior conviction can have the effect—for so many people in communities of color disproportionately targeted by cannabis prohibition—of excluding them from ownership and employment in the current adult-use market.
Presently, Hollingsworth Cannabis employs 10 full-time staff members, a number that swells to between 15 and 20 during the harvest season. It’s sustaining itself, banking some cash, and creating jobs—a story of success, however modest that success might be. It’s what doing well for yourself as a black person in the cannabis industry looks like in 2018. Which is, coincidentally, what doing well for yourself looks like for pretty much anyone in the cannabis industry these days.
The major difference is that Raft’s success required a degree of luck—of beating the tall odds against the law—that isn’t necessarily typical to the black experience in America’s cannabis trade.
Raft is one of the fortunate ones—a black veteran of the War On Drugs who wears no scars.
Had law enforcement found themselves upwind of the house he operated out of before legalization, Raft would not have been eligible for cannabis business licenses under current Washington state law. A prior conviction can have the effect—for so many people in communities of color disproportionately targeted by cannabis prohibition—of excluding them from ownership and employment in the current adult-use market.
As is the case in Washington, states like Colorado and Oregon also place limitations on non-violent drug offenders working in the above-board cannabis industry, and at present, it’s estimated that black Americans own only one to five percent of the legal cannabis businesses in the United States.
But efforts are underway to heal Drug War wounds and help people of color transition into the legal cannabis industry.
California is the clear torchbearer to these efforts. Oakland’s Equity Permit Program moves qualifying people of color to the front of the pack when applying for medical cannabis business licenses, and the program is expected to be adapted for the state’s recreational market in 2018.
To be deemed eligible, an applicant must earn 80 percent of the average median income or less, while having lived for 10 of the past 20 years in a high-concentration cannabis arrest area, or have been arrested for cannabis-related charges in Oakland in the years following the establishment of California’s medical marijuana program.
Some local governments have been taking steps to eliminate the stigma of a past pot convictions. Spokane, Washington’s city council voted in 2015 to vacate all misdemeanor convictions related to marijuana possession, and in February of this year, the city of Seattle announced it would do the same. Clearing records can help remove the scarlet letters that make it more difficult for past offenders to to obtain housing or apply for traditional forms of employment. But there’s still much work to be done on clearing cannabis-related convictions: felonies are handled at the county level, and though officials in Seattle-area King County have expressed interest in vacating felonies related to marijuana, each county in the region is subject to the whims of its elected officials and courts.
As a complement to these progressive changes related to criminal records , nonprofit organizations like the Oakland-based Hood Incubator are being created to help people navigate and take advantage of programs intended to boost people of color near the front of the line.
For example, Hood Incubator’s pre-seed accelerator guides minorities through the process of creating business opportunities in Oakland’s cannabis industry: “The program provides startups with technical assistance, business education, access to cannabis industry resources, and mentorship,” reads the organization’s mission statement.
Last year, eight people graduated from the program—a small but momentous step forward in restoring racial equity to the industry.
There’s great interest in how California—and, in particular, Oakland—has chosen to approach the restoration of black and brown equity in the cannabis industry. As a result, lawmakers around the country are taking notes at the local, state, and federal level.
Ultimately, though, Oakland’s bottom-up approach has yet to benefit more a mere fraction of black Americans. A comprehensive, system-wide overhaul is long overdue.
Organizations such as the Minority Cannabis Business Association—founded in part by Portland, Oregon grower and cannabis industry activist Jesce Horton in 2015—work to increase awareness of equity issues in the business. MCBA, which describes itself as a ”business league created specifically to progress the cannabis industry by increasing diversity”—has been vocal in its efforts to end the War on Drugs and to increase representation of minorities as cannabis business employees, owners, and investors throughout North America.
One such effort is the Marijuana Justice Act, which, if enacted into law, would end federal cannabis prohibition in the United State and create a $500 million Community Reinvestment Fund for the populations most damaged by the War on Drugs, as well as establishing legal protections and processes to end the continued, racially disproportionate enforcement of cannabis laws.
Twice has the Marijuana Justice Act been introduced to Congress with the support of the MCBA, but the current political leadership at the federal level isn’t interested in legalization—putting it miles behind the the US population as a whole, which has demonstrated increasing support for legalized cannabis (recent Gallup and WSJ polls found that between 60 and 64 percent of Americans support federal cannabis legalization).
Getting the job done will likely take a combination of the two approaches—that is, change from both the top and the bottom. There are plenty of ground-level opportunities that would-be black entrepreneurs could be taking advantage if only non-violent drug charges weren’t rendering sizeable swaths of the population ineligible.
The unfortunate question is how people of color can economically benefit from the cannabis industry despite regulatory impasses that bar these individuals from getting their hands sticky.
“You don’t have to grow weed to make money in the weed industry,” says Joy Hollingsworth, expressing a think-outside-the-grow-room optimism in the face of unfair regulatory limitations.
She’s absolutely right. The biggest opportunities most certainly are outside the garden and don’t require potentially out-of-reach licenses. That list includes plant nutrition, marketing, packaging, equipment manufacturing, technology, and software development. Basically, anything farmers and dispensaries need to operate and better compete with one another.
What’s more, in states like Oregon, where recent outdoor cannabis surpluses have led to cut-rate wholesale prices and slimming profit margins, insulating your hard-earned investment from this most competitive sector of the market can be a wise move.
Raft Hollingsworth says that Washington cannabis producers are facing a similar market correction, with wholesale prices dropping as low as a dollar per gram.
“A lot of people are going out of business who are competing with people who are going out of business,” explains Raft. “There’s so much speculation… and it’s a huge bubble. It’ll take another year or two for the market to stabilize.”
He reiterates his sister’s advice, suggesting that people of color who are presently barred from working in the industry and don’t want to wait for laws to change should instead invest in agriculturally-zoned real estate in new cannabis markets, or focus on goods and services that support the industry.
“People selling picks and shovels, man,” says Raft, speaking metaphorically. “We buy more packaging than anything. The ancillary business is booming.”
Of course, this advice is a bittersweet consolation for an unjust system—one that requires an immediate coordinated effort to provide opportunities to people of color. If not, the War on Drugs’ racial injustices will persist into an era that will inevitably culminate—when the federal legalization of cannabis occurs across North America.
For nearly a decade, Matt Stangel has written about art, music, and culture in Portland, Oregon where he currently serves as Cannabis Critic for Willamette Week. He also creates music under the moniker import/import, and his compositions can be heard live with the group No Phone.
All photos courtesy of Hollingsworth Cannabis.
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