NAACP Leader Calls For Medical Marijuana Industry to Get a Black Business Owner

California's multibillion-dollar medical cannabis industry is largely a white man's game. It's rare to see a person of color owning a marijuana dispensary or running a major cannabis business; most black and brown people you see in the industry are working security or maybe behind the budtenders' counter. 

The fact that the Green Rush is more of a White Rush is not news. One of the organizers at a marijuana investors' summit last year joked that the event was "the most white and male convention you can go to." Citing its own research, BuzzFeed reported fewer than 1 percent of the country's estimated 3,200 to 3,600 dispensaries are black-owned. We can name a single black-owned dispensary in Oakland; and according to our own informal count, as many as 22 of San Francisco's 28 dispensaries are owned by whites (though a couple are Russian, so there's that).

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