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Home 🌿 Recreational Marijuana News 🌿 Ontario cannabis fellowship encourages people affected by prohibition to apply 🌿Ontario cannabis fellowship encourages people affected by prohibition to apply
"We have a responsibility to those who have been disproportionately impacted and commit to doing our part"
Drew Henson had Formula One dreams.
He completed a degree in engineering physics from the University of Saskatchewan and then moved to Indianapolis for a year, where he worked with Walker Racing as an engineering intern.
He later realized what he truly wanted to do was create things, not spend 16 hour days around a racetrack. He returned to school, completing a Master’s degree in Industrial Design from the Milan-based Polytechnic School of Design, and began working as a freelance designer.
His experience eventually led to roles in China, as the chief design officer for Foream Network Technologies, and in the U.K., as the director of products for Drift Innovation. At Drift, Henson worked directly with NASA on his Drift Ghost-S design for the International Space Station, where three Ghost-S cameras were deployed.
Henson returned to Canada in 2014 and founded three companies within a span of five years, including TOQi; which specializes in vaporizer technology, and product design studio Twenty2b, named after his favourite car, the Subaru Impreza 22b.
“I just like learning things,” he tells The GrowthOp on a recent video call, in between pulls of a vape pen.
“And making things and helping people. That’s the ethos.”
Henson is now looking to do that with the launch of the TOQi Fellowship for Cannabis Amnesty.
Partnered with Cannabis Amnesty, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to righting historical wrongs created by cannabis prohibition, the inaugural fellows will begin their paid internships at a rate of $25/hr and 35 hours a week this summer.
Running from May through August in Toronto, the fellows will gain experience in advocacy and communications, and receive mentorship from Henson as well as Cannabis Amnesty Board members.
The fellowships are also supported by industry partner Aurora Cannabis, where the fellows will receive factory tours and education sessions on the science of cannabis.
The fellows will help Cannabis Amnesty kickstart new campaigns while also benefiting from networking opportunities and insights into the cannabis industry and the legacy of prohibition.
Henson said the conversations with Cannabis Amnesty began about two years ago as he looked for ways to decrease barriers to entry in the cannabis industry for those with previous cannabis charges and people from communities that have been disproportionately criminalized.
A long-time cannabis consumer, Henson says he could have “very easily walked around the wrong corner into the wrong situation” at a previous point in his life and everything he’s accomplished would have been “wiped off the map.”
“Cannabis [prohibition] has so drastically ruined so many lives for Black people and for Indigenous people,” he says.
“And when there are that few people around to care about carrying the torch, well, you’ve got to carry that torch. So here we are. And I think that kind of sets the motion in terms of why I want to help.”
Cannabis Amnesty
Cannabis Amnesty was founded in 2018, in response to what the organization calls “the government’s failure to address the serious consequences of convictions for cannabis crimes that are widely accepted to be unjust.”
“There is an importance and need for programs like this in the industry because people from racialized and marginalized groups are underrepresented in the legal cannabis space, yet overrepresented in cannabis arrests,” Annamaria Enenajor, a partner at Ruby Shiller Enenajor DiGiuseppe, Barristers and the executive director of Cannabis Amnesty tells The GrowthOp in an email.
“Historically, cannabis laws were unequally enforced by law enforcement in Canada, disproportionately impacting Black, Indigenous and under-resourced communities. Now profit is being created from cannabis in a way that leaves them behind.”
A 2020 report from the Centre on Drug Policy Evaluation (CDPE) and the University of Toronto found that 84 per cent of Canadian cannabis industry leaders are white and 86 per cent are male. Two years later, there’s little evidence that much has changed.
Public education campaigns and influencing legislation are part of Cannabis Amnesty’s focus and the fellows will play a vital role in helping the organization further its mission of creating a more equitable industry.
Shortly after it was founded, Cannabis Amnesty started a petition asking the government to grant pardons to the estimated 500,000 Canadians who have criminal records for cannabis-related offences.
A year later, in 2019, the government announced new legislation, Bill C-93, that allows people with records for cannabis possession to be pardoned without any cost, eliminating the previous $631 application fee, and expediting a process that, in some cases, used to take up to a decade to complete.
However, since Bill C-93 was enacted, less than 500 pardons have actually been granted.
“Cannabis convictions limit economic opportunities for people from communities that have been historically overrepresented in cannabis arrest, thus further entrenching systemic racism through poverty,” Enenajor said.
“We have a responsibility to those who have been disproportionately impacted and commit to doing our part,” Miguel Martin, CEO of Aurora Cannabis, said in a statement. Edmonton-headquartered Aurora was the first licensed producer to publicly support the organization, aiding in its push for expedited pardons.
“We deeply admire the team at Cannabis Amnesty for their relentless pursuit of fairness and are honoured to be a part of affording others the opportunity to also be a part of this critical cause,” Martin added.
For Henson, he says being purposeful is one of the driving forces behind the work that he does and he wasn’t interested in just donating to a cause. He says a stigma still remains, not just around cannabis, but also for those trying to find a place in the industry.
“When the world looks at somebody like me loving [cannabis], they’re not going to see a world-class technology company. So even how you curate that has to be so carefully thought out. Otherwise, from their perspective, it’s ‘Oh, a stoner’s just getting into the cannabis sector, and they just want to burn some cash.’ And it’s so easy to write off a story like mine on the surface level without even having a conversation with me,” he says.
“So I guess with the internship, it’s about how do I help people that look like me deal with that problem? Because I hate it. And how do I raise people up to meet new people? Because you never know who somebody is going to meet that could change something.”
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