A fund created by Massachusetts state lawmakers last year to subsidize equity-owned cannabis businesses there remains empty, according to a report. 

Boston Business Journal reports that a “bill passed by the Massachusetts legislature last August created a new fund that promised millions of dollars to equity-owned cannabis businesses,” but that “nearly a year later, not a single dollar has been handed out because the fund remains empty.”

“Chapter 180, passed last summer, created a Cannabis Social Equity Trust Fund, intended to take 15% of the revenue collected from the sale of cannabis and give it to social equity and economic empowerment businesses, two licenses that are given to entrepreneurs who come from marginalized groups or who were harmed by the war on drugs,” according to the report. 

According to Green Market Report, the “issue appears to be a technical one; the law that created the fund was written so that none of the revenues would be transferred from the Marijuana Regulation Fund – where the 15% collections are currently sitting – to the Cannabis Social Equity Trust Fund until it’s first all put into ‘something called the Consolidated Net Surplus account.’”

Adult-use cannabis sales began in Massachusetts in 2018 –– and business has been booming. 

Earlier this month, the state’s Cannabis Control Commission reported that the state collected $132.8 million in recreational cannabis sales in the month of June, the highest tally of the year thus far. Since sales began in 2018, the state has collected $4.74 billion worth of adult-use cannabis sales.

Sales of adult-use marijuana in the state are taxed at “6.25% for a state sales tax, 10.75% for the state excise tax and three percent for a local option tax for cities and towns in Massachusetts. 

As in other states that have ended the prohibition on pot, Massachusetts has tried to include social equity provisions within the new cannabis laws. 

The bill that created the cannabis social equity trust fund was passed last August and subsequently signed into law by Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker. 

Baker said at the time that “many of the provisions that this bill adopts … improve regulation of the cannabis industry.”

“This law will rebalance the playing field, where so far wealthy corporations have been able [to] buy their way through the licensing process and too many local, small business owners and Black and brown entrepreneurs have been locked out,” state Sen. Sonia Chang-Díaz said at the time. “The reforms and funding we fought so hard for will be game changers, putting Massachusetts back among the leading states for racial justice in our economic policy on cannabis. I’m so grateful to the many community members and grassroots leaders who came together and held the state’s feet to the fire to make this happen.”

The measure also included a provision that would have assessed a proposal to allow students to use marijuana therapies at school, but Baker vetoed that, saying the provision was “highly prescriptive — making it clear that the agencies charged with producing the study must identify ways to make medical marijuana widely available within schools, rather than considering whether such an allowance is advisable.”

”The voter initiatives that legalized medical marijuana in 2012 and 2016 included strong measures to keep marijuana away from K-12 schools and school children. Both laws explicitly stated that marijuana would in no circumstance be permitted on school grounds,” Baker said. “Because the study proposed in section 26 clearly works against these important and well-established protections and disregards the clear intentions of the voters in legalizing marijuana use, I cannot approve this part of the bill.”

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Individuals enrolled in Massachusetts’ driver’s education program will receive a new lesson starting next year.

According to State House News Service, the Registry of Motor Vehicles, which oversees the program in the Bay State, “indicated Monday that is adopting the AAA curriculum, which is called ‘Shifting Gears: The Blunt Truth About Marijuana and Driving,’ in partnership with members of the Cannabis Control Commission.”

The outlet reports that the Registry of Motor Vehicles “plans a formal announcement on Friday at the Worcester Registry of Motor Vehicles,” and that it “indicated the curriculum will be adopted in January, and will update the driver education module to include research-based information on cannabis and an explanation of how tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active chemical in marijuana, affects cognition, vision, reaction time, and perception of time and distance.”

Per local news station WCVB, the program will make Massachusetts “the first state in the nation with legal recreational marijuana to add lessons about cannabis impairment to driver’s education programs.”

“The current driver education module addressing impaired driving will be updated to include research-based information on cannabis, explaining how tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active chemical in marijuana, affects cognition, vision, reaction time, and perception of time and distance,” officials with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation said, as quoted by WCVB.

In a statement quoted by State House News Service, the Registry of Motor Vehicles said that next year’s driver’s education enrollees will represent “the first generation of driver education students to be licensed since cannabis became legal in Massachusetts, and AAA research shows that impaired driving crashes may increase and continue to injure and kill motorists and their passengers.”

Such curricula will likely become even more prevalent as more states enter the era of legalization and end prohibition on recreational pot use. 

Last year, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, signaled that he wanted to address the problem of stoned driving in the state, which legalized weed in 2016.

Baker threw his support behind legislation called the “Trooper Thomas Clardy Law,” which bears the name of the late Massachusetts State Trooper Thomas L. Clardy, who died while making a traffic stop in 2016 after his vehicle was hit by a motorist who had THC in his blood.

“This legislation aims to make the Commonwealth’s roads safer and save lives, and we are grateful to the Clardy family for offering their family’s name and support for this legislation, which will help us avoid impaired driving incidents in the future,” Baker said in a statement at the time. “This bill will provide law enforcement officers with more rigorous drug detection training and will strengthen the legal process by authorizing the courts to acknowledge that the active ingredient in marijuana can and does impair motorists. The bill draws on thoughtful recommendations from a broad cross-section of stakeholders, and we look forward to working with our legislative colleagues to pass this bill and make our roads safer.”

But the legislation went up in smoke in the Massachusetts legislature earlier this year after some Democratic lawmakers expressed concern over the reliability of the testing devices.

Officials in Virginia are currently considering their own potential mechanisms to rein in the problem of marijuana-impaired driving, after the Commonwealth legalized recreational cannabis use last year, becoming the first state in the U.S. south to do so.

And in New York, which legalized marijuana last year and is currently preparing to open its regulated weed retailers, officials are said to be “scrambling” to find a reliable marijuana DUI test. 

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Lawmakers in Massachusetts passed a bill late Sunday night that will bring a host of different reforms to the state’s recreational cannabis industry.

The legislation “aims to promote greater diversity in the legal marijuana industry, ratchet up oversight on the host community agreements that marijuana businesses are required to enter into with municipalities, and to lay the groundwork for cities and towns to green light on-site cannabis consumption establishments within their borders,” NBC Boston reported.

The compromise bill “emerged just before midnight Sunday after nearly a month of negotiations and quickly passed through both the House and Senate,” according to the station.

It will now head to the desk of Republican Gov. Charlie Baker, who expressed hope this month that lawmakers would get something passed.

Democratic state Sen. Sonia Chang-Díaz, who co-sponsored the measure, called it a “great bill.”

“It will rebalance the playing field, where so far wealthy corporations have been able to buy their way through the licensing process and too many local, small business owners and Black and brown entrepreneurs have been locked out,” Chang-Díaz said in a statement, as quoted by The Boston Globe.

The bill will usher in changes to the state’s nearly six-year-old legal weed industry. According to NBC Boston, it will “direct 15 percent of the money in the Marijuana Regulation Fund, which is where revenue brought in by the state’s marijuana excise tax, application and licensing fees, and industry penalties is deposited, into a new Social Equity Trust Fund,” while also giving “the Cannabis Control Commission the authority to review and approve host community agreements before a business obtains its final license, and clarifies that a community impact fee in an HCA cannot exceed 3 percent of gross sales and must be ‘reasonably related to the costs imposed upon the municipality by the operation of the marijuana establishment.’”

Voters in Massachusetts approved a ballot initiative in 2016 that legalized recreational pot use for adults. Lawmakers in the state subsequently rewrote the law the following year, and it has been the subject of legislative dispute ever since.

As The Boston Globe reported, some legislators have “spent years lobbying for a rewrite, arguing a few straightforward fixes would address glaring problems,” most notably an “onerous municipal approval process that has been implicated in two federal corruption investigations, and a lack of institutional financing that has allowed larger corporations backed by wealthy private investors to dominate at the expense of smaller, locally owned businesses with more diverse ownership.”

Proponents celebrated the bill’s passage on Sunday night.

“Legislators tonight made history with this vital — and overdue — grant and loan fund,” said Shanel Lindsay, a cannabis attorney and the cofounder of advocacy group Equitable Opportunities Now, as quoted by The Boston Globe. “This bill is an important step forward in undoing the harms of prohibition and over-policing and will provide an important path for families of color to create jobs in their community and generate generational wealth.”

Despite the problems with the law, the cannabis industry is booming in Massachusetts.

Earlier this year, Massachusetts officials reported that the state collected more in taxes from pot sales than it did with alcohol sales, a first since the cannabis industry went live in the state.

The growth of the legal weed market has been accompanied by some concerns. Late last year, Baker introduced legislation aimed at curtailing stoned driving.

“This bill will provide law enforcement officers with more rigorous drug detection training and will strengthen the legal process by authorizing the courts to acknowledge that the active ingredient in marijuana can and does impair motorists. The bill draws on thoughtful recommendations from a broad cross-section of stakeholders, and we look forward to working with our legislative colleagues to pass this bill and make our roads safer,” Baker said at the time.

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