Hope Wiseman, 31, feels gratitude watching her business bloom. She knows the odds weren’t in her favor as a Black woman seeking a foothold in an increasingly consolidated and overwhelmingly White industry. Six years in, she’s ready to maximize the output of her dispensary with the boost of legalized adult recreational use, partner with new licensees and offer consulting services for an industry she knows can be tough to navigate.
Wiseman said she learned a lot as she navigated the medical industry and Maryland’s transition to legalization July 1. She wants newcomers joining the market to be supported in an industry filled with hurdles, proud and visible.
That’s exactly what some leaders of this affluent, majority-Black suburb want to avoid.
County lawmakers here have for months clashed over whether new dispensaries should be able to set up shop in highly visible retail locations or be relegated to industrial zones, revealing a broader disagreement here over whether entrepreneurs like Wiseman represent the potential for cannabis legalization to empower communities or to damage them.
In public meetings, residents have argued they lack the amenities like grocery stores that they want, while certain neighborhoods are littered with liquor stores and smoke shops. Efforts to limit new store locations have been spearheaded by left-of-center Councilwomen Krystal Oriadha (D-District 7) and Wala Blegay (D-District 6), demonstrating the county’s complex embrace of what has largely been seen as a liberal policy initiative.
Nearly 3 in 5 county voters oppose allowing a marijuana dispensary in their community, according to a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll conducted last month. Statewide, half of voters are opposed. That opposition comes despite 72 percent of voters in the county backing a 2022 referendum that legalized the recreational use of cannabis in Maryland, exceeding the 67 percent support statewide.
It was a reckoning Wiseman never expected to have, as a native Prince Georgian, in a place that both prizes ambition and knows its story, as a county disproportionately impacted by the criminalization of marijuana.
“I understand the concerns of everyone,” Wiseman said. “We don’t need to be marginalizing these businesses. … The businesses and the state and the counties should work together to alleviate all concerns. I feel like we can all win if we work together.”
In a place home to 18 Zip codes where cannabis charges exceeded 150 percent of the state average between 2013 and 2022, Wiseman said the question of who will now profit from the industry matters.
Black excellence, pot princess of Prince George’s edition
Cannabis wasn’t always in the plan for Wiseman, who in so many ways embodies Prince George’s storied, Black upper middle-class dreams.
The daughter of a dentist and a hospital executive, she graduated from Bishop McNamara High School and earned an economics degree from Spelman College, a historically Black, all-women’s college in Atlanta.
There, she worked as an investment banker, cheered for the Atlanta Falcons and even secured a spot on reality TV show “WAGS: Atlanta.”
But she took note as states around the country — including Maryland — began shifting their views on cannabis. Two years after the state legalized medical use, Wiseman returned to Prince George’s, determined to use skills she had honed in Georgia to advance her dreams.
After all, Wiseman said, her liberal politics on the substance were home grown. She felt relaxed when she first tried cannabis with friends as a young adult.
“I had a lot of friends that did,” Wiseman said. “It was just very prevalent around my friends and peers, so I didn’t really think of it as bad.”
Her parents never shamed her.
“[My mom] always knew that I consumed cannabis. I never hid that from her,” Wiseman said. “She didn’t really have too much to say, except for, ‘Don’t let it hinder anything,’ which it never did.”
When it was time to launch Mary & Main in 2018, Wiseman’s meticulous business plan won over her family and its extended network, delivering financing that, she is the first to note, is often unavailable for young Black entrepreneurs.
Wiseman is grateful she could lean on her mother and co-founder, Octavia S. Wiseman, and Larry Bryant, a longtime family friend and co-founder of Mary & Main, for financial support.
Costs to enter the cannabis space vary widely, but some estimates show that just getting started can cost at least between $250,000 to $750,000.
The support helped her achieve a singular milestone: CBS news recognized Wiseman in 2021 as the youngest Black woman in the country to own a dispensary at a time when Black people comprise just two percent of all business owners in the sector despite accounting for 13 percent of the nation’s population.
This, despite all of the promises made by politicians looking to lift a group that was most arrested for marijuana possession. Research shows Black and White people consume the substance at similar rates.
Wiseman is Prince George’s Proud, regardless of any pushback.
“That’s not doing anything to be progressive in an industry that could genuinely create wealth for Black people,” she said, noting many applicants in a state lottery for social equity licenses are from the county. “Do you not want them to be the ones that are running businesses in your county? Because if not, I’ll tell you who it will be. It won’t be anyone that’s from here or anyone that looks like us.”
The stakes are also high to Oriadha and Blegay.
Long skeptical about the promise of pot for Prince Georgians, Oriadha in interviews said she is acting from her convictions and representing the will of constituents in moving to curtail store locations in the county.
Residents at council meetings have ticked off their concerns: more marijuana odor, the potential for impaired driving and normalizing cannabis use to children who see stores on their way to school.
Prince George’s County resident Klea Jackson, 66, who lives about four miles from Mary & Main, loathes that Maryland ever made recreational cannabis legal. The addictions counselor said she has seen firsthand how substances can break down people and destroy families. Jackson voted against legalization when it was on the ballot in November 2022.
“Why are we encouraging anybody to use drugs to begin with? In my opinion, it’s the gateway to use other harder drugs,” Jackson said. “For me, there is no place where [dispensaries] should be put.”
Jackson’s outlook differs from the majority of Americans, according to a recent report from the Pew Research Center, which found that only about 1 in 10 adults say marijuana should not be legal at all.
Blegay, the council member who represents the area where Mary & Main is located, said she supports limiting dispensaries to industrial zones because there are no guarantees about the quality of store each community would receive, especially if it’s near homes.
Blegay said state leaders, like Del. C.T. Wilson (D-Charles), who want dispensaries to be treated like alcohol businesses and support more racial minorities getting into the business, don’t have to deal with the backlash from constituents — who’ve told her they do not want dispensaries in certain areas.
“There has to be a balance,” she said. “Black businesses have the opportunity to do more than just cannabis. You can bring a restaurant. I’m not stopping you from that.”
Oriadha also pushes back on framing the issue as one of equity versus Black progress and empowerment.
“There’s this idea that the progressive movement around legalization has to do with the industry and that cannot be farthest from the truth,” Oriadha said. “Real advocates that are progressive around legalization cared about decriminalization of Black and Brown bodies.”
Wiseman said discussions about criminal justice reform and social equity should exist in tandem.
“Minorities deserve an opportunity to build wealth in this space as they’ve been the target of the marginalization of this plant and [cannabis has] created disenfranchised communities,” Wiseman said.
The winding fight has, at points, brought Oriadha and Blegay in opposition with council member Wanika Fisher (D-District 2) and state lawmakers who are pushing legislation that would essentially override local efforts. While they have worked on a compromise, the issue remains unresolved as lawmakers’ proposals appeared poised to clear the statehouse.
Fisher has been concerned about the direction the county is taking on cannabis.
“When I see a young Black woman creating Black wealth and creating jobs and creating a business, that is why I actually woke up,” Fisher said. “I ran for office to help women and to help my community at large, and Hope is an example of that.”
Another wave could be coming.
Prince George’s County currently has 10 dispensaries, the third highest in the state after Montgomery County and Baltimore, which have 18 and 17 dispensaries, respectively. Montgomery doesn’t have any special restrictions on the siting of new dispensaries and hasn’t had any council members pursue them, County council member Natali Fani-González (D-District 6), told The Post.
Through the state’s social equity program, which aims to improve representation in the industry, Prince George’s and its neighboring county Montgomery both stand to gain nine more dispensaries. Baltimore City is slated to get 11.
Politics and the policies around cannabis are a lot like dating, Fisher said: “We have to learn from our past and put it into good bills going forward. We just can’t project all the same fears and anxieties and just bad stuff and expect the result to be different.”
The city of Sacramento might hold answers to the county’s concerns.
A 2022 study prepared for the city of Sacramento’s Office of Cannabis Management found that cannabis businesses have not increased crime beyond levels generated by other businesses and that cannabis businesses did not have a negative impact on nearby home values.
The findings of that report were a huge victory for Maisha Bahati.
Bahati, 48, is one of 10 applicants in Sacramento to receive a license that allowed her business to open up a cannabis storefront, which she did in November with Crystal Nugs. She secured a prime location in downtown Sacramento, making her store the first Black woman-run dispensary and cannabis delivery service in the area.
Bahati said by the time she became an equity applicant for the program, she, her husband and their business partners were in the process of selling their homes and liquidating assets to open a storefront, she said.
Fighting for her location was crucial, and locating in an industrial zone would not have been an option for Bahati. Appealing to the nonstoner and people across demographics were important to her, and location was important for those aspirations.
“Industrial is not a consumer experience. Industrial doesn’t give me destigmatized. You feel like you’re still doing something illegal,” she said, nodding to previous legislation in Prince George’s. “As a 40-ish something woman, I don’t want to go to the cut. … If five years from now the industry changes, you’re stuck in this industrial place where the shops and people aren’t.”
Breaking through while Black
With recreational use allowed in Maryland, Wiseman is already seeking ways to make the path to cannabis easier for people who look like her.
She’s been working with lawmakers to advance opportunities for low-interest loans and grants. With aspiring cannabis entrepreneurs, she’s sharing her network of vendors and investors.
“The hard work is actually after they win the license,” she said.
Even with the financial backing of her co-founders — her mom and Bryant — Wiseman said it took Mary & Main about four years to become profitable.
Unexpected fees drove up financial stress in the beginning, she said, as it seemed nearly everything was more expensive than expected.
“We didn’t really realize going into it that we’d have higher bank fees and that we’d have these special bank accounts that’ll only allow us to do certain things,” Wiseman said, adding that business insurance was also more expensive.
Most people of color do not have access to networks with that kind of capital, research shows.
“I was just fortunate enough to have these people allowing me to stand on their shoulders and build, take my ideas and build a viable business and all of us work together,” Wiseman said. “A lot of people don’t have that.”
At the end of the day, Wiseman said, she’s fighting to be seen for what she is: a skilled entrepreneur who defied obstacles.
“You can walk an unconventional path and still be very successful and respected,” she said.
Scott Clement and Emily Guskin contributed to this report.
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