“Transforming Spaces” is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.
Jam the towel under the door. Open the window. And hide the bong.
For a long time, college students have found ways to mask the pungent aroma of marijuana smoke on campuses. Wanda James, nonetheless, didn’t all the time feel a have to hide. A 1986 graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder, Ms. James would sit on the steps outside her dorm and roll joints along with her friends.
It could be a long time before Colorado became certainly one of the primary two states within the country to legalize recreational cannabis, but on campus, James never frightened.
“The worst that might occur is they might tell us to place it away, or they could take it from us, and that was the tip of it,” Ms. James recalled of the campus police.
Fast forward 40 years: Ms. James, a former Navy lieutenant, is a member of her alma mater’s Board of Regents — and a distinguished advocate of racial justice within the changing cannabis landscape.
It wasn’t until after college that Ms. James realized she had been living in something of an alternate reality along with her cannabis use. She learned how the United States’ marijuana laws have led to Black Americans’ being sentenced to prison at a better rate than white Americans despite near equal usage rates, setting her on the mission to which she has dedicated her life.
Ms. James, 60, has owned multiple cannabis businesses through the years, including a pair of dispensaries and an edible company, which has given her a platform to talk about what she believes to be racial injustices within the industry. She has been on the forefront of calling for cannabis legalization on the state and federal level. Federal scientists, in recent reports, have really helpful easing restrictions on marijuana, a so-called Schedule I drug like heroin, and having it reclassified to a Schedule III drug, together with the likes of ketamine and testosterone.
“Wanda is a force of nature!” said Senator John Hickenlooper, the previous Colorado governor who named Ms. James to a task force that got here up with recommendations on how one can regulate marijuana in Colorado. Those recommendations became a model for the 2 dozen states which have since legalized the sale of cannabis in recreational dispensaries.
But as more states have legalized the sale of recreational cannabis, prompting larger firms to become involved in an industry that’s increasingly mainstream, Ms. James is certainly one of the few Black women in a leadership role. Several smaller cannabis businesses, mostly run by people of color and ladies — a lot of whom were caregivers who saw the advantages of medical marijuana for those they cared for — have been pushed out of the space, Ms. James said.
In fact, ownership by women of cannabis firms fell to 16.4 percent in 2023 from 22.2 percent in 2022 with racial minorities accounting for just 18.7 percent of homeowners, in accordance with a report from MJBiz Daily, a publication that covers cannabis-related legal and financial news.
These days, Ms. James just isn’t only pushing for wider cannabis legalization — recreational use of the plant is legal in 24 states and the District of Columbia but illegal on the federal level — but in addition for reform within the industry to make sure more individuals who seem like her fill leadership roles.
She believes that by becoming a dispensary owner, and now a frontrunner in an industry with policies which have historically harmed Black and Latino Americans, she could reclaim some power for minorities targeted in communities that were hotbeds of marijuana arrests. In New York, as an illustration, state cannabis regulators documented a staggering 1.2 million marijuana arrests that disproportionately targeted Black and Latino Americans over 42 years.
“There is a lot happening within the industry to where it has not been a promising place that appears to diversity as a positivity immediately,” she said. “We are attempting to search out out ways to assist.”
Ms. James grew up in rural Colorado on a ranch full of dogs, rabbits, chickens and guinea pigs. Her father, a single parent and Air Force veteran, was a cowboy and so they often rode horses together.
The penchant for caring for animals has continued. Ms. James has housed greater than 30 dogs through the years, including some she found on the road. Like her father, she joined the military, becoming the primary Black woman to finish the University of Colorado’s ROTC program. She served 4 years within the Navy before moving to Los Angeles, where she worked for 2 Fortune 100 firms. She also met her husband, Scott Durrah, then a property manager in West Hollywood and a fellow pot smoker, with whom she opened several restaurants in Colorado and California. Ms. James’s Rottweiler, Onyx, was the maid of honor at their wedding.
While the couple were constructing their businesses, the country was feeling the long-term impact of President Ronald Reagan’s hard-line policies on cannabis. Mr. Reagan’s Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 and Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 — the yr Ms. James graduated from college — “flooded the federal system with people convicted of low-level and nonviolent drug offenses,” in accordance with the Brennan Center for Justice. In 2007, nearly 800,000 people were arrested for easy marijuana possession, the F.B.I. reported. About 80 percent of those arrested were Black. .
“It was the demographic least prone to have a family friend that was an attorney and the least prone to have parents or family money to give you the chance to get them out of the situation that night,” Ms. James said.
Those statistics remained front of mind for Ms. James as she pursued cannabis business ownership and worked behind the scenes in politics.
In 2008, Ms. James managed the successful congressional campaign of Jared Polis, a Democrat who was elected Colorado’s governor in 2018. The following yr she and Mr. Durrah opened the Apothecary of Colorado, a medical cannabis dispensary, becoming the first African Americans to own a legal dispensary within the United States. They later closed the medical dispensary to open an edibles company, Simply Pure, which in 2015 became Simply Pure Denver, a recreational dispensary.
“She’s a trailblazer,” said Tahir Johnson, a mentee of Ms. James. “When you concentrate on a robust Black woman, that’s what she embodies.”
As she became a businesswoman and a shaper of marijuana policy, she had a private point of reference that she has returned to often in her work: her half brother, who served time in prison for offenses including marijuana possession.
Ms. James has shared her journey briefly documentaries produced by The Atlantic and Yahoo, and in 2018, she was named certainly one of the 100 Most Influential People within the cannabis industry by High Times Magazine. She has used her platform to call for federal cannabis legalization, which might help dispensary owners inject a number of the money they’ve been paying in taxes back into their businesses, increasing the likelihood of making “generational wealth,” she said; because recreational cannabis remains to be illegal on the federal level, dispensary owners are unable to jot down off basic expenses, like staff salaries, unlike noncannabis businesses.
And she’s tapping into her network to create change. Beginning with Mr. Johnson, her mentee, Ms. James is licensing the Simply Pure name to young entrepreneurs within the industry who’re from communities harmed by racial disparities in marijuana arrests.
Mr. Johnson said he had been arrested thrice for marijuana possession, and he was “honored” Ms. James selected him to proceed her legacy. He plans to open Simply Pure Trenton soon.
“The indisputable fact that she’s trusted me to tackle this mantle to this next phase of the organization means lots to me,” he said.
