A new memo from pro-legalization advocates offers some insight for marijuana businesses, investors and consumers on how they can better support social responsibility in the increasingly legal industry.

The four-page document unveiled by the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) on Friday proposes guidelines to help assess whether a business is operating in a manner that recognizes the historic harms and injustices caused by prohibition. Specifically, the memo asks industry players to take a harder look at their policy positions, internal operations and practices, whether their company supports up-and-coming marijuana businesses and how invested they are in the local communities in which they operate.

As the document notes:

Repairing the harms of prohibition entails:

1) ensuring that the harm is not continuing;

2) supporting the development of an accurate historical record of the harms caused by marijuana prohibition, including how it has oppressed black and brown communities; and

3) supporting initiatives that create a remedy for past harms.

DPA, along with the Marijuana Policy Project, has been a driving force in funding moves pass marijuana legalization ballot measures and shepherd cannabis bills through state legislatures. Without its work, the market for legal cannabis in the U.S. would be much smaller, if it existed at all.

“Marijuana policy reform was not done to get people rich,” Justin Strekal, political director for NORML, which maintains a cross-country grassroots advocacy network that has helped push legalization, told Marijuana Moment. “It was done to end the oppression of those who choose to consume it. While reform has led to a growing marketplace, tragically the oppression continues and is even perpetuated by some in the industry itself.”

Other measures that address the costly effects of the drug war, according to the DPA guidelines, include opposing any rules or laws that would intentionally shut out people who have been arrested or convicted on marijuana-related charges from working in the industry, investing in communities that have been disproportionately impacted by cannabis enforcement and creating opportunities to help people from marginalized communities participate in the industry.

“The harms of marijuana prohibition have been devastating, particularly for Black and Brown people who have suffered dramatic rates of arrest, mass criminalization, heavy-handed policing, seizure of property with little or no process, and large-scale deportations,” DPA Executive Director Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno said in a statement. “Given this history, those investing and operating in the cannabis sector have some responsibility to support repairing the harms of prohibition.”

The organization suggested a list of questions for companies to consider concerning a range of topics: Among them, whether they support home grow—which ensures access for those who can’t afford retail marijuana or live too far away from a dispensary—how inclusive they are in who they hire and if they support scaled license tiers.

Other questions include:

• Does the company support a free and fair marijuana market that does not give it disproportionate advantages?

• To which causes or candidates is the company donating money?

• Does the company have a policy against drug testing employees?

• Is the business a social benefit corporation? B-Corp? Non-profit? Cooperative? Or collective? If not, what percentage of its profits is donated to nonprofits?

Jag Davies, DPA’s director of communications strategy, said the new guidelines are part of a broader shift in the organization’s work over the past few years toward emphasizing racial and restorative justice provisions in any legalization bill they’re involved with.

“It started with Prop 64 in California in 2016, which we played a leading role in making sure that it had a number of criminal justice and restorative justice provisions that other previous legalization bills didn’t have,” Davies told Marijuana Moment in a phone interview. That work continues with their campaigns for legalization in New York, New Jersey and New Mexico, he said.

“The debate is really not about whether legalization is going to happen. It’s how it’s going to happen and to what degree it’s going to repair the harms of criminalization and to what degree it’s going to repair harm among the people who were worst harmed by marijuana criminalization,” Davies said.

The National Cannabis Industry Association, which works to represent the interests of legal cannabis businesses, said in a statement shared with Marijuana Moment that the organization “fully supports social responsibility and equity in the industry, as well as repairing the harms caused by prohibition, and we will continue promoting those values to our members.”

In addition to supporting limited home cultivation and federal legislation like the Marijuana Justice Act, the association also helped the Minority Cannabis Business Association draft a model social equity ordinance for cities that was published this month.

But there’s still a long way to go before all of the cannabis industry’s major players start walking the walk, advocates say.

“The Drug Policy Alliance correctly identified one of the biggest problems emerging in the reform movement: the ‘I got mine and you’re on your own’ mentality,” Strekal, of NORML, said. “It’s a travesty to see business leaders making millions of dollars and bragging about how great they are while they do nothing to stop the practice of arrests in a nearby state or bring wholeness to their neighbors who have had their lives disrupted or destroyed by criminalization just a few years earlier for essentially the same activity.”

Photo courtesy of Nicholas C. Morton.