How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America's Weed Boom
&quot;Henderson was more than qualified, so why didn’t he get the gig? ... he has two drug possession felonies on his record&quot;<p>You know, people with illegal bookmaking convictions are kept out of the gambling industry for good reasons.  It started off as a dirty industry, and to the extent you keep anyone with a hint of grime out of it, you avoid it regressing to that state.  That keeps regulators off your back and eventually helps you turn it into a family-friendly mass market industry.<p>It&#x27;s also really difficult for people with fraud convictions to get job as accountants, no matter how good they are at forensic accounting.  Trust is the commodity being sold.<p>Do you really <i>want</i> someone with a shitload of existing drug connections, being the poster face for the industry you&#x27;re trying to vanillify?  The whole premise of legalization wasn&#x27;t that your local corner boys get to go industrial after they gain mass market access, it was that the &quot;drug trade&quot; becomes roughly parallel with the &quot;tobacco trade&quot;, where the worst thing that happens is penny-ante tax evasion.