Making Weed Less White

Like many women in male-dominated industries, Wanda James is a serial overachiever. She purged the word “can’t” from her vocabulary during military service as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy. Subsequent stints in the corporate world, the restaurant industry, and the political sphere imbued her with savvy. All of that proved invaluable when James decided to enter the overwhelmingly white world of legalized cannabis. In 2009, she says, she and her husband, Scott Durrah, became the first Black entrepreneurs in the country to operate a licensed dispensary, cultivation, and edibles business when they opened the Apothecary of Colorado in LoDo. Even now, James knows of fewer than 20 cannabis licenses held by Black or brown people—and that’s in a state with 2,770 marijuana licenses and more than $8 billion in sales since 2014.

The disparity is frustrating to James, because before Colorado OK’d marijuana, Black and brown Centennial Staters bore the brunt of drug enforcement efforts. In fact, according to data from the American Civil Liberties Union, Black people are nearly four times more likely