Amber Senter co-founded Supernova Women, the organization that helped shape America’s first cannabis social equity program. A decade later, she says the licenses meant to repair the War on Drugs sent Black founders into the industry’s most expensive, lowest-margin, hardest-to-survive corner. “You need $2 million to open a dispensary. If you have $50,000, you can make a THC beverage.”
OAKLAND, Calif. — In 2015, as California’s cannabis industry prepared for full legalization, Amber Senter was driving across the state, opening accounts for an edibles company. Over six months, she helped expand distribution from three dispensaries to 50. The job required her to walk into more than 100 storefronts, pitch buyers, meet managers, and speak with owners.
The cannabis industry in California was booming, and as she got a pretty good sample of their protagonist, patterns began to emerge.
“There would be a lot of Black and brown people as security,” she recalled. “You’d see some Black and brown budtenders. But when I got to the buyer, none. When I got to the managers and owners, none.”
Being a black woman herself, that experience clarified that legalization was becoming a formal market layered onto communities that had carried the risks of prohibition but were largely absent from ownership. That, as part of a broader change where commodification of commons was altering a longstanding caretaking economy into a more lucrative capitalist-hedonist one.
Nearly a decade later, Senter is one of the most visible architects of cannabis social equity policy, and her evaluation of what’s happened in the cannabis industry since is priceless.
From Patient to Policy Advocate
Senter grew up in Chicago and later lived in Atlanta, where she began using cannabis to manage a painful autoimmune condition. The relief she experienced deepened into advocacy. By the late 2000s, she was active with …
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Author: Rolando García / High Times
