Launching March 31, the new national coalition says Latino communities have spent years shaping cannabis reform while being sidelined in the rooms where policy, capital and power move. Its leaders say the mission is bigger than visibility: build organized influence at the intersection of cannabis, immigration and drug policy.
The Latino Cannabis Alliance is launching with a line that tells you pretty quickly what kind of organization it wants to be.
“We are not asking for a seat at the table,” treasurer Ruth Jazmin Aguiar told High Times. “We are building one, rooted in equity, economic power, and political influence.”
That is a stronger opening move than the usual nonprofit rollout language, and probably a more honest one too. Because what the alliance is arguing is not just that Latino communities deserve more visibility in cannabis. It is that they have already done the work, already helped carry reform, already shaped the culture and the politics of this movement, and are still too often treated as secondary when decisions about capital, policy and access get made. The organization officially launches March 31 as a national coalition of U.S.-based Latino cannabis advocacy leaders, with Jessica F. González as president, Jason Ortiz as vice president and Aguiar as treasurer, joined by JM Balbuena, Maritza Perez Medina, Ishaq Ali and Gaby Collantes on the founding leadership team.
But the more interesting part is not the org chart. It is the diagnosis.
In an interview with High Times, the alliance said it grew out of “a simple but powerful realization”: Latino voices have long been central to the lived reality of cannabis policy, but too often get folded into broader narratives that miss the cultural context, political realities and specific needs of Latino communities.
The alliance pointed to a specific moment that made waiting …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
