San Francisco pot proposal aims to help victims of ‘failed drug war’

Each of San Francisco’s 11 supervisors has called for “equity” in the city’s cannabis laws, meaning they want to create a racially diverse industry that gives former drug offenders a shot at success.

On Wednesday, Supervisor Malia Cohen presented an ordinance to help the city achieve its social justice goals when sales of recreational marijuana become legal throughout the state in January. The city won’t issue permits to sell recreational cannabis until an equity program is approved.

Cohen’s proposal — modeled after a similar program that Oakland approved in March and another that’s being considered in Los Angeles — would prioritize permits for dispensary operators with marijuana arrests or convictions between 1971 and 2009. Also eligible for priority would be entrepreneurs who committed other nonviolent crimes during that time period, or who earn 80 percent of San Francisco’s area median income, or who were displaced from their homes within the past 22 years.

Equity applicants must also prove that they have lived for at least five years in a city census tract where at least 17 percent of the households had incomes at or below the federal poverty level.

“We consider (this) a robust proposal for how to codify an equity program,” said Cohen’s legislative aide, Brittni Chicuata, laying out the supervisor’s 10-page ordinance at a meeting of the board’s Rules Committee.

Its members — Supervisors Ahsha Safai, Norman Yee and Sandra Lee Fewer — voted 2-1 to incorporate the equity program into a meticulously detailed set of regulations that the Office of Cannabis introduced in September. Fewer dissented.

The committee will hold a special meeting next week to vote on the cannabis regulations again before sending them to the full board the following week.

Chicuata said that Cohen chose the 1971-2009 period because of its historical significance. In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. Beginning in 2009, rising real estate prices and changes in the labor market forced many low-income households and people of color out of the city. It was also the year that former District Attorney Kamala Harris stopped prosecuting people convicted of marijuana crimes.

“We wanted to recommend something that gets at the community-level impacts of the failed drug war,” Chicuata said.

Cohen’s law would also fast-track permits for businesses willing to nurture equity applicants by providing mentorship and technical assistance, or rent-free commercial space for at least three years. These incubators would also ensure that at least half their employees meet the equity criteria, and that San Francisco residents do at least half of the work.

The equity program coincided with two new reports that the Office of Cannabis, city controller and Human Rights Commission released Wednesday.

Those reports overlapped at many points with Cohen’s program, in that they also recommended an incubator system and urged the city to prioritize residents of neighborhoods that suffered most during the drug war, said Office of Cannabis Director Nicole Elliott.

Cannabis business owners who attended the three-hour meeting offered their own definitions of “equity,” most of which were a little more far-reaching than Cohen’s.

“San Francisco should make the equity program as broad as possible,” said Alexandra Butler, founder of Hepburns, a collective that sells pre-rolled cones of cannabis and ice-water hash.

Butler envisioned an equity program that would incorporate women entrepreneurs, as well as people of color and people arrested for selling cannabis. Other business owners asked that veterans be included.

Supervisors Safai and Jeff Sheehy added amendments of their own, requiring cannabis operators who didn’t fit the equity criteria to hire locals for at least 30 percent of their workforce. They also added provisions to protect cannabis workers’ rights to unionize.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@

sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan