MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. – You’d think running a profitable legal marijuana industry would be about the easiest thing in the world, but don’t tell that to Minnesota’s Democratic leadership, which allowed wokeness and apparent corruption to pulverize the legalization rollout into dust.
Wherever one discovers the benefits or the increasingly obvious downsides of marijuana legalization, once a state decides to do so, it has a responsibility to do so in a way that benefits all citizens. Of course, Governor Tim Walz and Minnesota Democrats have made it all about social equality.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has said, “Minnesota is a prosperous state, a well-run state.” (AP Photo/Meg Kinnard)
The 2023 legalization legislation mandated that only Indian reservations could obtain licenses for a year and a half, a form of reinstatement similar to when New York mind-numbingly mandated that only people with prior marijuana convictions could open stores.
The result is that several pharmacies in the state today are out of product and others have a declining supply. A pharmacy worker told me with a sigh, “Maybe we’ll get a new supply next week.”
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And that’s not all, because the state has not approved enough permits for the transportation of the product; much of it is on farms and cannot be brought to market.
But the worst of this, which is strongly linked to the current scandal of fraud perpetrated by Somali groups supposedly feeding children, is that the legislation provides millions of dollars in grants and loans to start pot shops based on wokeness and DEI.
For example, the CanStartUp program is “a loan program available to new cannabis microbusinesses,” where a nonprofit distributes taxpayer money “with priority given to social equity applicants.”
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“Social equity applicants” can be roughly read as “not white guys.”
Dr. Scott Jensen, one of several Republicans who want to prevent Walz from winning a third term next year, said this is part of a pattern among Walz and his cronies.
On a wooden desk are two large plastic bags filled with marijuana, next to a knife and paperwork. (SCDC)
“The Walz team has repeatedly been characterized by a willingness to play political hardball by picking winners and losers, focusing on maintaining voting blocs, rewarding loyalty over competence, ignoring employee input and suppressing transparency,” Jensen told me.
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John Nagel, a former state trooper who ran as a Republican against Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., had a harsher assessment.
“Minnesota Democrats are recreating the exact circumstances that led to the Feeding Our Future scandal, but this time they’re doing it within the state’s new marijuana industry,” he said. “If you look at the pattern, it’s unmistakable. The same political class that allowed Feeding Our Future to flourish is now designing the cannabis market using the same toolkit: DEI language as political cover, nonprofit intermediaries with insider ties, and almost no accountability.”
He has a point. Why does Minnesota have to hand out millions of dollars to nonprofits to teach people how to sell weed? It’s not hard, just put up a sign and call sales.
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This kind of corruption is nothing new. In the 1920s, Democratic Party machines created no-show patronage jobs at the Port. Today they are handing out unnecessary multi-million dollar DEI contracts. It’s the same game.
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The job of government is to make things run efficiently for all citizens, not to slap every project or policy with DEI initiatives that are little more than a reward for loyal voter groups. Nationwide, the amount of money spent on this nonsense is in the billions.
Representative Ilhan Omar speaks during a mark-up meeting with the House Budget Committee on Capitol Hill, May 16, 2025, in Washington, DC (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
In the wake of the Feeding our Future scandal, it is clear that the nonprofits involved in this DEI cannabis initiative need to be investigated. How can anyone trust that the money will not be misused?
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The cherry on top of this dire situation is that the inability of legal dispensaries to serve their customers is driving people back to the black market, which will result in more marijuana arrests, exactly what this legislation was supposed to prevent in the first place.
It’s honestly amazing.
Meanwhile, here in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, few people even know this is happening because the local news media, all of which simply calls this a “logistical problem,” are acting more like accomplices than arbiters of the truth.
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Walz and Minnesota Democrats no longer have the benefit of the doubt when it comes to murky laws moving money to DEI-driven nonprofits. It’s time to see where these millions of dollars spent training the next generation of cannabis workers have really gone.
Perhaps the state can show that spending these millions of dollars has had a positive outcome for Minnesota, but at this point it seems much more likely that the money simply went up in smoke.
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