What we've learned from other states and provinces is that, without capital resources, and business skills and permits training, it's hard to get people into the industry at the retail level.

Address both the capital and skills education if you want it to succeed, otherwise new owners will just sell out to cartels pretending to be angels.

Consult Wu Tang Financial in the International District near Uwajimaya for your diversification matters.

I've always found the whole "gee, why aren't more black people running pot businesses when they were the ones always getting arrested for pot?" line of reasoning incredibly condescending. The marijuana industry in the US has always been mostly white, while marijuana enforcement has been mostly targeted at people of color. Beyond stereotypes, there's no reason to think minorities should represent an especially large portion of a legal pot industry. Minorities are underrepresented as business owners in all industries, which needs to be improved. Thinking that marijuana legalization represented some sort of unique opportunity to achieve that is pretty much just racism.

Something tells me that the kids selling weed at the corner of 23rd and union don’t quite have the skills to run a pot shop, with all the licensing and regulation, along with following employment law, insurance and other complicated regulatory hurdles.

Methinks those kinds of kids will simply move onto another business whose main skill sets are a willingness to be jailed or killed.

Wow the people who commented on this article are racist! Really impressive how comfortable they are espousing such racist tropes in such an anonymous way. Or, maybe they're all just Libertarians who have fallen for Russian trolls on the internet. Methinks it's a little of both.

Of course this is a smart idea since A) there are plenty of people of color who want to get into the legal marijuana business and B) it's difficult for them to do so because our Puritanical/racist national background makes it difficult (criminal offense on your record? no license for you! Oh, it's for a crime that's not a crime anymore? Too bad!).

Oh, and a special shoutout to @6: You really think people who sold drugs on the black market have no business skills or ability to navigate the regulated world of business? Why don't you say that and attach your real name to that statement? It's one of the most blatantly racist, completely ignorant things I've read on Slog/in The Stranger. And I'm old.

Racism?

In MY Starbucks coffee creamer stratefied upper management TechBroPig Curly's Gold hunting billionaire Seattle??

https://youtu.be/3grk-slP0LU

"You really think people who sold drugs on the black market have no business skills or ability to navigate the regulated world of business?"

I'm sure they have all the necessary social and intellectual skills.

https://youtu.be/FDwwAaVmnf4

It's almost cute how cringey this is, compared to the overt rebirth of Jim Crow silently codified and enforced behind horse blinders of identity and socioeconomic status and tribal loyalty to abject stupidity.