When Extasy James was three years old, her father was deported to his home country in Jamaica due to several charges related to cannabis.
“It impacted me greatly – my mother has four children, and I’m the oldest, so I stepped up,” James told The Story Exchange.
James’ family were among several victims of America’s war on drugs which negatively impacted people who were arrested and tried for drug-related charges as well as their families.
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In the Jamaica, Queens neighborhood where James lives and works, residents are primarily Black and Latino with racial disparities in marijuana arrests being present before recreational cannabis was legalized in 2021. Figures cited by NBC News show that in 2018, Blacks and Latinos constituted 71% and 80% of cannabis-related arrests in Flushing and Forest Hills respectively, even though Black and Latino residents account for only 20% of the population in those areas.
While growing up in the Bronx and visiting family in Queens, James realized that several families were torn apart because of marijuana-related arrests.
“There’s a lot of families, even grandmas and grandpas, where they didn’t make enough money,” she said to NBC News. “So they would sell cannabis on the side, and they would get in trouble. A lot of families would be deported, and it just broke up a lot of homes.”
This drawback made her dispensary opening on Jamaica Avenue “bittersweet”, James said. In 2023, she made history by launching the first woman-owned recreational cannabis dispensary in New York state.
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards was even at the launch of the dispensary, known as Good Grades, and made the very first purchase.
“It was very ideal, and I think it killed a lot of stereotypes,” James said at the time, adding that Richards bought gummies.
James and her cousin Michael, a cannabis attorney, are the owners of Good Grades, which they opened with the help of the New York State Social Equity Cannabis Investment Fund. The $200 million fund was launched in June 2022 to help families affected by cannabis over-policing or those who, historically, have been disproportionately targeted for cannabis infractions.
Licensing for James’ dispensary, however, came from New York’s Conditional Adult-Use Retail Dispensary program, which “similarly seeks to lift up would-be business owners most impacted by the war on drugs,” as reported by The Story Exchange.
Marijuana “goes from, you know, being literally a tool to overpolice our communities to now a tool of economic prosperity,” James’ cousin Michael said. “The window of opportunity for poor, Black and brown communities, minority communities, to now benefit from it is just substantial.”
James said after the launch of Good Grades that she hopes to soon turn it into a franchise to open doors for others who look like her in the industry.
