Here in Illinois, legislators talked big, like legalization was going to empower minorities to run small businesses, by giving dispensing licenses discriminately by race....

...but I don't think it panned out that way, and established corporate players steamrolled any thought of small businesses in big marijuana.

I've read stories of Californians being tricked into taking marijuana business courses for minorities, with similar failed promises, used for election campaigns and then discarded, as is liberal tradition.

This also highlights a hard lesson to liberals writing regulations...

We've even tried hard erase it from current economy books, but the regulatory cost of entry into a markets, create regulatory barriers that reduce competition; in-short, regulations cause (semi)monopolies. This is due to the basic cost of entry into the market and not just dependent on regulatory capture, which, somehow over the years, has been redefined to require corruption in the regulation making process to favor monopolies, rather than just regulation creation carelessness, and naively ignoring the negative impact any and all regulation eventually has on a market.