In 2013, Joy Hollingsworth moved with her family from Seattle out to the country with a plan to build a cannabis business. Washington State had recently legalized recreational marijuana, and Barack Obama had just been re-elected. For Ms. Hollingsworth, a former basketball player, and her brother, Raft Hollingsworth III, a former University of Washington student who had been growing medical marijuana, it seemed like as good a time as any to buy a farm and turn a profit. So began the Hollingsworth Cannabis Company, a Black-owned family business in what has become a very white and increasingly corporate-dominated industry. [continues 1108 words]
SEATTLE -- Five years after Washington launched its pioneering legal marijuana market, officials are proposing an overhaul of the state's industry rules, with plans for boosting minority ownership of pot businesses, paving the way for home deliveries of medical cannabis and letting the smallest growers increase the size of their operations to become more competitive. Liquor and Cannabis Board Director Rick Garza detailed the proposals -- part of what the board calls "Cannabis 2.0" -- in an interview with The Associated Press. It's an effort to picture what the legal marijuana market will look like over the next five years, after spending the past five years largely regulating by reaction as the difficulties of building an industry from infancy absorbed the agency's attention. [continues 818 words]