Applicants will get a second chance to qualify for a marijuana retail license in Illinois
Business owners hoping to open retail marijuana shops in Illinois will get a second chance at qualifying for a license, after Gov. J.B. Pritzker Monday announced a procedure to let applicants correct their applications or get rescored.
The move comes after applicants and lawmakers raised an uproar over the process, saying that it was shutting out the very minorities it was supposed to benefit.
Under the new procedure, any applicant who didn’t get a perfect score of 252 will receive a notice of deficiencies in their application, and a score sheet identifying the parts of the application where they lost points.
Applicants may then amend their applications, or ask the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation to rescore their original application if they believe there was an error in scoring.
Many applicants complained that they received different scores on identical parts of their applications in different regions, or that they never were given notice of any deficiencies in their applications, as required by the law that legalized marijuana in Illinois, effective this year.
The cannabis industry in Illinois is dominated by wealthy white males. The marijuana legislation was designed to give preference to people from poor areas harmed by the war on drugs, or those who’d had previous low-level marijuana convictions.
Of more than 700 applications, only 21 finalists this month received perfect scores on their applications to qualify for a lottery to win 75 licenses statewide. Many of the finalists were politically connected or wealthy white business owners.
Check back for updates.
———
©2020 the Chicago Tribune
Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
