Maryland’s medical marijuana commission will be required by statute to “seek to achieve racial, ethnic, and geographic diversity when licensing medical marijuana growers,” to encourage “applicants who qualify as a minority business enterprise,” and to “seek to achieve racial, ethnic, and geographic diversity when licensing dispensaries.”

Now, the usual justification for race-based decision-making is remedying past discrimination in a particular industry or agency, but it’s hard to see how that would apply here, since the marijuana business — at least, the legal marijuana business — is quite new in Maryland. So it must be that pot grown and dispensed by African Americans is somehow different from that grown and dispensed by white Marylanders. Who knew?