Who Gets to Sell Weed in Chicago?

Britteney Black Rose Kapri smokes marijuana in her home in Chicago. [AJ+]

A new AJ+ show titled ZIP Codes With Imaeyen investigates the ways in which where we live shapes how we live. In its latest episode, “Why It's So Hard To Sell Weed In Chicago,” AJ+ presenter Imaeyen Ibanga takes viewers to ZIP code 60649, part of Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood, to explore how Illinois has tried to include people from historically criminalized communities in its cannabis industry. The industry has boomed since the state legalized recreational marijuana in 2020.

That year, the state planned to award 75 recreational marijuana dispensary licenses using a points-based lottery system that was intended to diversify the industry. But even though “social equity” applicants were the focus of the lottery, Ibanga shows how many potential beneficiaries were left out of the lottery after legislative bargaining resulted in larger advantages for military veterans. Belicia Royster, who Ibanga features in the piece, is part of a super-suit over the lottery process.

Over Zoom, Ibanga and I talked about what she found while reporting on the lottery program, how she approached interviewing people who shaped or participated in the application process, and what’s next for ZIP Codes.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What prompted you to cover the marijuana industry?

This story, about an Illinois social equity program that seems to have gone awry, was brought to me by my producer, Sarah Nathan. You can't talk about creating a $1 billion industry for legal marijuana without thinking about the fact that marijuana was a key tool in the war on drugs. I wanted to look at who that affected and what it did to their lives. There are people in jail serving lengthy sentences for selling marijuana, and yet there are now legal dispensaries on the street.

As we looked into it deeper, I thought it was something that I would be interested in because, though I am someone who has no relationship with cannabis, you can extrapolate from what happened in Illinois and apply it to the nation as a whole. People are moving closer toward either federally decriminalizing or legalizing marijuana.

What do you think is the tension at the heart of the lottery program?

The super-suit [that includes Belicia Royster] alleges that the state essentially created a protected class by adding the veterans’ points, which require vets to be the majority holder. All the recipients of the licenses achieved a perfect score and as Belicia says, "Who knew you had to be perfect to run a weed shop?"

What other issues did you find with this lottery program in your reporting?

The state only allocated 47 licenses to the Chicago region out of the 75 licenses. Chicago is one of the biggest cities in the nation, so 47 weed businesses for 9 million people – that's not too many.

It costs thousands to apply and a person can apply as many times as they want. So some people might be scraping to find enough money for just one application, while others can flood the lottery.

When the state is saying they want to target communities that were overpoliced and disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs [in this lottery program], they also are talking about targeting communities that don't have much wealth. So even though the social equity licenses were discounted, how discounted were they? And in its first year after legalizing weed, Chicago arrested three times as many Black people for possession than anyone else.

Also, people receiving any type of federal assistance are barred from participating in the [state’s legalization of recreational cannabis]. So from the start, different kinds of people who were supposed to be targeted under this program are being locked out.

What other racial, gender or class disparities did you find through your reporting?

The state of Illinois denied our multiple requests to see the application or collect information about applicants. We can't even discern the gender breakdown because we don't know who applied. So that was opaque, and so were other identity categories we might have used to filter data. If you were like, “How many people in the LGBTQ+ community [applied]?” you wouldn't know. I couldn't tell you how many are originally from Chicago.

How did this specific experience of navigating the lottery system shape people’s perspectives on what the government can or can't do for them?

I don't know that anybody's views changed for the better. There's one scene in the opening of the documentary where I ask, “Do you think the government handled this well?” And the man behind me says, “I don't think the government handles anything well.” I didn't ask anybody about their political leanings, but the one thing they all had in common was that they just felt the government was not doing what it was supposed to be doing.

What did you learn during your reporting? Did that change your understanding of the industry?

I guess I had envisioned a cannabis shop as a smoky environment with people getting high. But actually, it’s forbidden from smoking in any shop. One I went into felt like a Chase Manhattan bank. Obviously many people tried to get me to smoke weed or take an edible. I was like, “I appreciate your hospitality, absolutely not.”

In your vision of putting this together, what visuals did you want to highlight?

While working with Sarah Nathan and cinematographer Michael Bendeck, we spent a lot of time thinking about images. For example, ZIP code numbers are visible in every single shot, and those are filmed on location to show how things look around the area. It was Michael Bendeck's idea to put a GoPro on a bong while somebody was using it.

What episodes can audiences expect next from ZIP Codes?

Every story is a race, class and gender story, which means these are all about identity. What you can expect from ZIP Codes are more examinations into how where we live shapes how we live. We will definitely be in the South, Midwest and Northeast this year. I’m really excited to show it to you all.

Watch the latest episode of ZIP Codes With Imaeyen, titled “Why It's So Hard To Sell Weed In Chicago,” on YouTube.