CHICAGO _ Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Wednesday beat back an attempt by black aldermen to stall the start of recreational marijuana sales in Chicago for six months, setting the stage for the city's legal cannabis bonanza to start Jan. 1.
Aldermen angered by the lack of minority ownership in the cannabis distribution and retail business on Tuesday advanced an ordinance to the full City Council floor to ban recreational sales in the city till July 1. The City Council voted 29-19 to defeat the proposal following an intense and often heated debate.
Heading into Wednesday's meeting, Black Caucus Chairman Ald. Jason Ervin, 28th, had expressed confidence he had the 26 votes necessary to pass his plan.
Mayoral staffers were pressing hard for aldermen to consider opposing the delay because of a series of pledges they said Gov. J.B. Pritzker's administration made to increase diversity in the market.
Wednesday's showdown was the culmination of a monthslong standoff.
Black aldermen and other council members had used the threat of a delay to push for minorities to get a much bigger cut of what promises to be an extremely profitable Chicago marijuana market, while Lightfoot has argued it makes most sense to kick off Jan. 1 while working to make sure there's ample diversity in the industry's ranks.
State lawmakers built various provisions into the legalization law aimed at increasing equity and representation by groups like African Americans and Hispanics who were most adversely impacted by the war on drugs that long criminalized cannabis possession. But members of the council's Black Caucus said those steps were totally inadequate to level the playing field and help minority entrepreneurs get into the business.
Lightfoot earlier this week expressed confidence the ugly public floor fight would be avoided, telling reporters "I think we're going to get there" on a deal to avert the delay vote.
But on Tuesday, the council Committee on Contract Oversight and Equity voted 10-9 to advance Ervin's proposal to the floor, despite staffers from the mayor's office trying desperately during the meeting to get someone on the committee to change sides.
That left Lightfoot with several not-great options to stop the ordinance from passing.
By far the best case for her was to simply convince a majority of the 50-member council to vote against it, though that seemed like a difficult mountain to climb as her Lightfoot's City Council floor leader, Ald. Gilbert Villegas, told reporters Tuesday it looked like Ervin had the votes to pass it.
Failing that, she could have tried to get two aldermen to use a parliamentary maneuver to delay the vote on Ervin's plan till the next City Council meeting, currently set for mid-January, when the first batch of 11 recreational dispensaries would already be up and running.
But the deferral would have left the door open for a majority of the council to vote to schedule another council meeting for later this month and pass the delay measure then.
Lightfoot could also have vetoed the ordinance, leaving her in the position of unilaterally defeating a proposal that black aldermen said was important for their constituents.
Pritzker and his top marijuana policy adviser on Wednesday criticized members of the Chicago City Council's Black Caucus for what they described as shortsightedness on the issue.
"This was crafted over two years, not a month and a half of quick debate," Pritzker said at an unrelated news conference. "And we're proud of the bill as it was put together."
As the city has pressed toward legalizing recreational marijuana, it has revealed a deep divide along racial and class lines.
So far, the first set of licenses have been issued to mainly white business owners and most of them opted to place their firms either in higher-income communities on the North Side and Northwest Side or gentrifying areas such as the South and West Loop.
For some, it seems, white Chicago is preparing for a marijuana utopia.
Meanwhile, for African Americans and Latinos that for years were stigmatized for using the drug and arrested at disproportionate rates, legalization looks like white businessmen getting rich off the very product that sent them to jail and cost them jobs and housing. As white businessmen prep for a business boon, minorities have been offered a route toward amnesty.
Even the new law legalizing use is imbalanced, activists have pointed out _ residents that rent can't smoke without their landlords' permission and residents that live in subsidized housing aren't allowed to indulge at all. Because using marijuana won't be legal in cars or in parks, that leaves fewer places for lower-income Chicagoans to participate.
"Legalization was never about social justice or righting the policy wrongs of the past _ and so no one should be surprised about who (is) going to profit," said Kevin A. Sabat, the president of Smart Approaches to Marijuana and a former Obama administration drug policy adviser.
In his work, Sabat often has pointed out that decriminalizing the drug so that African Americans and Latinos aren't roped into the criminal justice system isn't the same as legalizing it. He said he supports Ervin's effort.
"Delaying the start of this massive, unchecked social experiment is the right thing to do," Sabat said. "Lawmakers should take a deep breath and think about ways to reign in the predatory marijuana industry, not let them expand."
Wednesday's City Council vote exposed a harsh truth: While many can see and acknowledge the injustice, few are willing to take drastic steps to try to right the historic wrongs.
The conversation about who actually will get to sell marijuana, buy it and consume it freely without fear of punishment or policing has risen on social media and it's being discussed in diners and restaurants, in hair salons and barbershops across communities.
Community organizer Anton Seals Jr. hears the conversations and tries to remind his neighbors, friends and other residents that he encounters that there are efforts to make sure African Americans and Latinos eventually get into the mix.
"By pausing sales, how does that really advance social equity applicants? What comes after that?" said Seals, who through his organization Grow Greater Englewood has been lobbying and encouraging businessmen to apply for licenses. "The people who have money, advantages will still have that in six months. So will there be an expedited process to get a permit for social equity applicants? Will there be grant money so we can start dispensaries? These are the questions I'm asking."
"Are we going to just be mad, or are we going to do something?" he said. "We've been out here telling people to please apply for a license in January. Some people think it's all a done deal, but there is still tremendous opportunity."
But Pritzker's administration called the measure the governor signed into law over the summer the most "equity-centric" policy in the county and one that's becoming a model for other states.
Aldermen who are raising objections to the recreational pot law were largely silent during the five years that the medical cannabis industry, which is composed almost exclusively of white-owned business, was growing in Illinois, said Toi Hutchinson, a former Democratic state senator from south suburban Olympia Fields who now oversees marijuana policy in the governor's office.
"To characterize this as ... anything other than the strongest, most equity-centric thing that is happening in the country right now is offensive on its face," Hutchinson said.
Licensing fee revenue from existing medical marijuana dispensaries that will begin selling to recreational customers on Jan. 1 is being used to fund a revolving loan program to help so-called social equity applicants _ those with connections to communities that have been disproportionately affected by the war on drugs _ enter the industry. Pritzker's office announced details of the loan program Tuesday.
"We needed sales to start so that we could fund the money into community reinvestment programs because equity is way bigger than just who owns it," Hutchinson said. "It's also what you do with the money, and it's also how you undo the harms that were actually done during the entire prohibition."
The idea that Chicago would delay the start of sales is "extremely disappointing" because it will diminish the revenue available for those programs, which would benefit communities on the South and West sides, Hutchinson said.
"This proposal right now seeks to describe this in a way that is patently false," she said. "And we need help, not hurt. So this is going to do more harm than good. If it doesn't go our way, it will do more harm than good to the very thing we all say we're supposed to care about."
Hutchinson said she has had "many meetings with my friends," but "we're just waiting and watching like everybody else."
At the City Council meeting, black aldermen rose and spoke passionately about the unfairness in the process and their rage with how this process played out. Members of the public did too.
Willie J.R. Fleming of the Anti Eviction Campaign said the council should press on with recreational legalization because a delay could send dispensary owners to the suburbs. That would place well-paying jobs out of reach from black and Latino residents who need them.
"Chicago will not get a second chance for this opportunity," he said at the meeting. "As a social justice advocate ... (the proposed delay) hurts. We were not consulted. I didn't attend one town hall where I was consulted."
