Can DAOs, oracles and smart contracts help achieve social equity in the cannabis industry?

I'm very excited to have just been voted on as a member of LexDAO - The Decentralized Legal Guild! Looking forward to furthering my exploration into whether DAOs, oracles, and smart contracts can be used to establish licensed, social equity-qualified cannabis distribution and retail companies *owned and operated collectively* by those communities that were most harmed by cannabis prohibition. I've been thinking about this alot lately (as we're currently working with the Minority Cannabis Business Association on updating their Model State Bill), and I've been bursting at the seems trying to hold back and avoid any comments that might show my lack of technical or coding prowess--but I can't hold back anymore, knowing the promise underlying the technology.

One of the challenges with existing state and local social equity programs is that they tend centralize the economic benefits and the policy aspirations of the programs to just a few talented and fortunate individuals from a disproportionately affected class of people, rather than entire classes of disproportionately affected people – e.g., like all non-violent cannabis offenders, universally. It also forces and centralizes much of the economic and personal burden of propping up social equity enterprises on these individuals, in many cases without adequate support on industry training and education. And it doesn’t allow for a more decentralized dispersion of the equity dividend from the legalization of the cannabis industry.

Imagine, as an alternative, a DAO (a decentralized autonomous organization) running on smart contracts programmed by a partnership of drug policy reform advocates, private industry and state agencies to achieve social equity goals. In exchange for agreeing to the restrictions embedded in the smart contracts, the state and local licensing authorities would award them cannabis business licenses, and the restrictions built into the smart contracts in turn would provide for trustless compliance with applicable laws and regulations. These smart contracts would be economically efficient too, with price feeds from specialized oracles scouring local, regional, state, and (post federal de-scheduling of cannabis) national and international markets. 

These smart contracts could assure both regulatory compliance and the forward and uncorrupted pursuit of public policy goals like opening up supply chains to minority and women-owned business enterprises (MWBEs) and providing a meaningful opportunity to individuals and communities who were disproportionately affected by the war on drugs to profit in the new cannabis industry—whether or not they want to operate a cannabis business.

A DAO (i) run without a board of directors or officers (thus streamlining the need for lengthy ownership disclosures and background checks) and (ii) largely through a series of related and interlinked smart contracts, (iii) for which the taxing authority provides seed capital with an initial token purchase, (iv) which airdrops free tokens to (and is thus entirely, or mostly owned by) disproportionately affected individuals and communities, (v) which favors transactions with other decentralized autonomous organizations owned by communities of women and minority token holders, (vi) which immediately remits payment of all applicable taxes to the wallet of the state licensing agency, (vii) which is limited to unambiguously compliant transactions (both within the supply chain and with the end consumer), (viii) which collects payments in stablecoin or ETH and deposits them into the organization's smart wallet without the need for a bank account (or Congressional action on banking reform, for that matter).

I believe this has the capacity to solve for multiple issues, such as access to capital, background checks and ownership rules, the training and expertise gap, access to banking, predatory lending and well capitalized, but exploitative, partners. This model could also be emulated by private industry, which could set up its own majority-minority-owned DAOs. This would also allow disproportionately affected individuals and communities to determine the general direction of the organization through periodic votes on protocol, but also allow those folks to cash out whenever they wanted to, or hold their stake over the long term and play a role in influencing the future direction of the organization through token holder votes.

If you're interested in helping to build this future, please reach out.