Oakland’s long-touted program to help black and brown pot entrepreneurs succeed alongside bigger marijuana businesses is dead.

Officially, it’s around still. But it may as well not be.

The program was crafted so Oakland natives and longtime residents, especially those arrested and jailed for marijuana-related offenses during the failed war on drugs, could get a stake in the legitimized cannabis industry.

For two years, the city sold a dream to hundreds of hopeful people: 616 applicants sought assistance under the equity program as of last month, city records show.

I’ve tracked several of those applicants and have watched them struggle as they’ve been misled and let down.

“Just about anybody you would ask — if you did a poll on the streets of Oakland — would say they believe in social, racial and economic justice,” said Robert Selna, an Oakland land-use attorney who represents marijuana businesses, including equity applicants. “Few can argue against the program that claims to promote those things, but the program only says those things. It doesn’t actually do those things.”

The equity program was born in May 2016 when the City Council unanimously approved laws to regulate the city’s medical cannabis industry, while promising to revisit the debate over the tacked-on program.

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The cannabis ordinances required the city to give at least half of all available cannabis permits to equity applicants. To qualify for the equity program, applicants had to be city residents earning less than 80 percent of the city average. And they had to either live in a specified high-crime zone for at least 10 of the past 20 years or have been convicted of a cannabis crime in Oakland after Nov. 5, 1996.

General applicants could also apply under the equity program by agreeing to “incubate” equity applicants by providing 1,000 square feet of free space for three years.

Several factors — understaffing in the city manager’s office, the flawed partnerships Oakland forced general and equity applicants to form, and the lack of supportive resources provided by the city to equity applicants — led to the program’s demise.

Many equity applicants haven’t even moved into their spaces yet. Some are mired in disputes with their incubators about theft at their spaces. Several incubators blame city departments for the slow approval process of building plans and inspections.

The nails in the program’s coffin will be hammered in the coming weeks when a big part of the program expires. That’s the part that limits how many general pot business permits the city can hand out. The limits were designed to even the playing field for equity applicants.

“It makes me angry to think that across America people are calling out the Oakland model when the Oakland model isn’t what they think it is,” Matt Hummel, a member of Oakland’s Cannabis Regulatory Commission, said at the commission’s Oct. 4 meeting.

To me, the meeting felt like a vigil for the equity program. More than a dozen equity applicants pleaded for the limits to stay in place. It is painfully evident just how unprepared the city was to manage the program. No day-to-day data are available. What does the city know about the program beyond who has submitted an application? Not much at all.

“If something goes awry, unless the applicants reach back out to us, we don’t necessarily know what’s taking place,” Greg Minor, an assistant city administrator, said at the meeting.

Selna told me the city should have done better.

“If this was a priority for the city, then put some real leadership and resources behind it,” he said. “If it was a priority, the city should’ve demonstrated some leadership and prioritized it and they haven’t.”

And if this really was about reparations for the war on drugs, the city should have incubated equity applicants itself, because it was the city’s Police Department that perpetuated the war.

I don’t want to tap-dance on the program’s grave, but two years ago I wrote that the program was a half-baked plan.

“In reality, these programs are giving the people of underserved communities false hopes of self-empowerment,” said Alexis Bronson, an equity applicant whose uphill journey I’ve followed. “Some will persevere, but the majority will not.”

Yes, businesses fail. But at least most businesses get a chance to succeed first.

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. appears Mondays and Thursdays. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr