1. Introduction
Since 2012, twenty-four states have legalized leisure hashish for adults. To various levels, state legal guidelines allow the manufacturing, distribution, retail sale, and on-site consumption of hashish in licensed institutions. [1].1 As well as, leisure hashish is decriminalized within the District of Columbia and the territory of Guam. Though the legislative provisions range in these jurisdictions, they’ve the mixed impact of decriminalizing leisure hashish for 54% of the US inhabitants. A current development within the decriminalization of hashish is that states have positioned extra emphasis on incorporating social fairness targets with the legalization of leisure hashish. Previous to this shift in coverage emphasis, hashish legalization was extra targeted on limiting regulation enforcement prices, creating regulatory frameworks for the medical makes use of of hashish, and the event of hashish markets as a supply of latest tax revenues. [2]. New York and different states which have lately handed laws to legalize leisure hashish exemplify the elevated consideration to hashish legalization as a instrument to advertise social and financial fairness. A particular function of the New York Marijuana Taxation and Regulation Act (MRTA) of 2021 was its social and financial fairness provisions. [3]. The provisions put aside a minimum of half of the state's leisure hashish dispensary licenses for members of communities disproportionately affected by punitive drug legal guidelines and offered enterprise help to fairness candidates. As well as, the Act earmarked revenues from taxes on leisure hashish for tasks and applications that straight profit black and brown communities disproportionately affected by the warfare on medicine.
The rising emphasis on linking the targets of social fairness with the legalization of leisure hashish must be seen in opposition to the background of the stigmatization of each marijuana in society and of the entrepreneurs who’re the supposed beneficiaries of the provisions of social fairness. Understanding how states have approached the creation and implementation of a majority of these set-aside companies gives perception into the diploma to which social and financial fairness applications can obtain their targets. That is the case when a nexus exists between a extremely stigmatized business and a bunch of entrepreneurs, in addition to in financial sectors which might be extra mainstream.
At its coronary heart, this text asks whether or not, underneath its present construction and implementation, leisure hashish legal guidelines obtain social fairness targets. Extra particularly, it examines the differentiation within the social fairness provisions of state legal guidelines that regulate companies for leisure hashish dispensaries. The strategies of this evaluation are two tasks. First, content material evaluation of public coverage paperwork is used to look at social fairness provisions in state and native hashish legal guidelines relevant to massive US cities (2020 inhabitants > 600,000). Second, spatial evaluation is used to achieve insights into how the geography of hashish companies promotes or hinders the regulation's foremost social and financial fairness targets. The outcomes of the evaluation are used to generate suggestions to reinforce social and financial fairness outcomes from the implementation of the leisure hashish coverage within the nation.
