DETROIT — In February 2021, after four years of planning and saving, Kimberly Scott realized her dream of running a marijuana dispensary. She sunk her life savings into rehabbing a storefront in a scruffy neighborhood marked by shuttered warehouses and potholed streets. She didn’t know it, but the clock was ticking from the moment she first opened her doors.
“It was full of blight. It was an empty shell in here,” Scott recalled as we sat recently at a table inside Chronic City, her medical marijuana shop. “Everything I’ve spent is in this building.”
Scott saw the business as more than just a place to buy weed. She envisioned it as striking a blow against the decades-long War on Drugs that treated cannabis as a societal scourge and disproportionately targeted Black people like her. “I know that this plant, which has been demonized, is a powerful plant,” Scott, wearing a pair of giant cannabis leaf earrings, said. “A lot of families have been separated, and just traumatized, off of a plant that is now legal.”
At the time, Scott hoped to be able to quickly transition into the much larger and potentially more profitable recreational market, which Michigan voters had approved back in 2018. She was banking on rules Detroit had passed that would place native Detroiters like Scott at the front of the line for licenses to sell to anyone over 21. But weeks passed — and then months — and the license never came. Unable to sell to anyone who lacked a medical card, Scott told me she would routinely turn away customers — as many as 20 per day — directing them to the recreational shops just a few miles away in Hamtramck, a city of 28,000 where four recreational pot shops have opened in the past two years.
“There were days I didn’t make any money in this place,” Scott told me. “That’s unheard of for selling weed.”
