Chicago rapper Rell Cash has been making music for over a decade and recently has decided to treat it as more than a hobby after a few months spent in jail after an arrest in Alabama for possession of cannabis and paraphernalia spurred him to take his music career seriously. The legal situation also inspired him to create his own cannabis company as a way to promote minority voices in the legal cannabis industry.
“My biggest legal situation was when I was surrounded by cannabis charges and extradited to the state of Alabama,” said Rell Cash. “I was locked up there for six months, got out, and spent another six months fighting the case.”
His company, Garden of GIN (which stands for “Get It Now”), aims to become a vertically integrated company handling every step of the process in-house, from breeding cannabis seeds to creating packaging for distribution. The company currently has two other employees, both Black, and Rell Cash hopes to fill the company with jobs for Black and Brown community members.
“We got our own cannabis garden, our own strain—right now the bridge is growing,” he explains. “The direction in which we moving, we making the necessary connections to where it makes [legal] sense. Because you have to know what you’re doing before jumping into a social-equity situation. We want to make sure that we display vertical integration, because I understand that in certain markets, that’s damn near required for you to even obtain a certain license. And we want to make sure we highlight kicking the government in the ass for fucking with the real,” said Rell Cash.
The Maryland Cannabis Administration recently closed its initial business licensing round for cannabis growers, processors, and dispensaries as the first licensing round in the nation to be open exclusively to social equity applicants. The administration can award up to 179 licenses to more than 1,700 applicants, with qualifying applicants being entered into a lottery. Demographic data showed 1,441 applicants self-reported as a minority or woman-owned business. Of those, 870 applicants self-reported they were owners of black-owned businesses, 268 self-reported as Asian owners and 56 reported as Hispanic or Latino owners.
Since November 2022, over two dozen social equity dispensary licenses have been awarded but have been stalled due to administrative and legal issues. Tightened regulations on independent cannabis growers and truckers have led to issues getting local product on dispensary shelves. One year into legal cannabis in Illinois, Black and Latinx people were subject to disproportionately higher cannabis arrests which increased calls from activists to expand access to the legal cannabis to those who have been affected by prior cannabis regulations.
According to a state report, Black and Hispanic owners each made up only one percent of majority dispensary owners in the state of Illinois, compared to a whopping 88 percent of White majority owners. The remaining businesses are owned by people who identify as two, or more, other races.
Rell Cash said his goal as an artist and cannabis cultivator is to touch as many lives as possible. He hopes to open his own space for his clothing brand, Rell CVSH Worldwide, that could also as a community event space that could host events and provide a safe place for young people.
“I done lived out multiple lives already. Coming from the environments that our people come, it shapes us as human beings,” he said. “Spaces serve the community as well, and I want to be able to have a space that’s available for members of the creative community all across the city. Everything we produce for the community is geared towards positive energy.”
