Pot prohibition cost Black communities. Can Black firms profit now?
For most of her life, Dr. Chandra Macias has been in the middle of America’s changing attitudes toward marijuana.
Growing up in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s, she witnessed what could be called the old outlook on the plant during the U.S. war on drugs: Marijuana is unqualifiedly dangerous, and those who possess or sell it are criminals who should be locked away.
“We saw a lot of people [in our communities] go to prison,” says Dr. Macias, a cell biologist who studied cancer and who now owns a growing medical marijuana business. “We were being disproportionately targeted and incarcerated, and it destroyed a lot of families.”
Through her research, Dr. Macias played a role in what is becoming the country’s new outlook on marijuana – including an emerging bipartisan consensus that marijuana has medical applications and fewer comparable risks than alcohol and tobacco, and that a half-century of criminalization was both misguided and wrong.
Dr. Macias, who studied biology at Howard University and got her Ph.D. in 2001, was among the first to apply for a business license when the District of Columbia legalized medical marijuana in 2010. In 2014,.
