When Luis Vega was 30 years old, he was convicted of growing and selling marijuana, losing his white-collar job, his marriage and his full-time life with his two children.
He also lost his freedom: he was sentenced to one year in prison and eight years on probation.
“I’ve been growing marijuana since I was 16 years old,” the 39-year-old Bridgeport resident says proudly. “I can say that now.”
Vega is the owner of Nautilus Botanicals, which is partnering with a New York City investment firm to obtain permits for an outdoor cannabis growing operation on a vacant six-acre lot at 105 Stonington Road in Norwich, as well as two adult-use recreational cannabis retail dispensaries — one in New Haven and one at a yet-to-be-determined location.
The Norwich City Planning Commission is scheduled to hold a public hearing on the tiller plan on July 16.
The regulations governing Connecticut’s 2021 law legalizing adult-use cannabis significantly favor so-called social equity applicants when it comes to distributors for cultivation and retail sales licenses.
Educational and financial assistance provided through the newly established state Social Equity Council will allow disadvantaged residents to learn the ropes of new industries, start new careers, employ people from areas affected by the nation’s war on drugs and give back to communities in need, said Ginny Rae Clay, executive director of the Social Equity Council.
Social equity applicants had to prove they grew up in an area disproportionately affected by the War on Drugs or lived in a “DIA” for at least five of the past 10 years, and their income for the past three years must be 300% or less than the current state median household income.
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the median household income in Connecticut in 2023-24 was $69,255 for an individual and $133,184 for a family of four.
Vega, of Puerto Rican descent, grew up in New York City and moved to New Haven for college at age 18. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of New Haven and a Master of Science in Organizational Management from Albertus Magnus College.
He also had a side business growing and selling marijuana to ease the symptoms of Crohn’s disease. He was arrested, convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison. He served about a year and finished eight years of probation last year.
But he couldn’t find work, his wife divorced him, and their two children, a 13-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son, live with him in Hamden.
Previous experience with illegal cultivation has now become a positive
Looking for another way to make a living, he turned to his family traditions — his father was a mechanic and his grandfather was a farmer in Puerto Rico — when the 2018 Connecticut Farm Bill legalized growing industrial hemp.
Vega founded WEPA! Farms, a 10-acre hemp farm in Shelton that opened in 2019. The farm produces CBD products extracted from the hemp plant, industrial textile products, and hemp building blocks.
Vega said he was the only Latino of the 65 people who received state marijuana cultivation licenses at the time.
Now, Vega’s background and experience growing cannabis makes him a valuable business partner as states scramble to implement new marijuana laws. And he’s also a valuable source of funding.
Vega and dozens of other social equity applicants couldn’t afford to pay the state’s cannabis license fees for different license categories. Fees to enter the lottery ranged from $125 to $500. But if they won, their applications came with license fees of $25,000 to $75,000, half the price for non-social equity applicants.
Additionally, applicants would be required to pay a fee of $1 million for hybrid retail cannabis facilities, $3 million to convert a medical retail facility to a medical-recreational hybrid, and $3 million for cultivation facilities. All of these fees would be halved for applicants seeking social equity.
In New York City’s financial world, Merida Capital Holdings was preparing for the legalization of marijuana for adult recreational use in Connecticut. Merida formed a cannabis social equity program five years ago, said Connie DeBoever, a principal at the firm who works with Vega as a social equity applicant in Connecticut.
By partnering with social equity applicants, Merida and other large cannabis companies could improve their chances of receiving a limited number of licenses and potentially cut application and licensing fees in half.
Merida interviewed about 200 minorities interested in partnering with the company on a potential cannabis business in Connecticut, and DeBoever said Vega, in particular, stood out because of his experience as a cannabis farmer.
“We knew he met our criteria, and we knew his passion for cannabis,” DeBoever said.
Vega said Nautilus Botanicals just received planning permission for a retail store in New Haven, three blocks from his old home, which he hopes to open in September. He hopes to have his Norwich grow operation up and running by the fall and his first harvest next summer.
Vega plans to employ 40 people at each site, for a total of 120 workers. He has pledged to hire the majority of his cannabis grow workers from the Norwich area. The grower will be Preston resident Mike Farade, a longtime friend of Vega’s who worked with him at his Shelton cannabis farm.
But despite all his efforts, Vega has yet to receive a paycheck from his cannabis business.
“When I started this, I had $7.99 in my pocket. I still have $7.99 left,” Vega said, “But hopefully in a year or two, I’ll be able to put food on a lot of people’s tables. The goal is to help the community and uplift those around me.”
Norwich Zen Leaf’s social equity license still awaits dividends
Unlike Vega, Brittany Hart, 37, had no prior experience with marijuana. Hart, a Spanish and theater major in college who “never dabbled in marijuana,” stumbled into the marijuana business by accident. She is a social equity applicant for multistate cannabis conglomerate Verano Holdings’ Norwich Zen Leaf cannabis retail dispensary, located at 606 W. Main St.
But like Vega, Hart hasn’t taken a paycheck since the store opened, even though it will be a year since it opened next week. Hart, who lives in Wethersfield, now works full time as a recruiter for the Lego Group.
Connecticut law requires that social equality licensees own at least 50% of a Connecticut business, have hiring and firing authority and decision-making duties, and control 65%.
Hart said Norwich Zen Leaf still needs to pay off the cost of major renovations to its Norwich store and recoup other opening costs, and she checks in on operations regularly.
Hart called her foray into Connecticut’s cannabis industry a “wild experience.” When her college roommate’s mother, Laurie Zurenda, a medical marijuana pharmacist, began recruiting applicants who might qualify for social equity, she knew nothing about the industry or the state’s new process.
Zurenda got introduced to the industry when he opened one of the state’s first medical marijuana dispensaries in Uncasville in 2013.
Zurenda introduced Hart to Verano, a Chicago-based company that guided Hart through the complicated application process.
Hart relied on her own mother’s help to prove to the Social Equality Council that she grew up in New Britain, an area designated as disproportionately affected by the war on drugs.
“I sent everything I had – school records, report cards, anything that got me there,” Hart said. “It’s very hard to prove you were a kid somewhere. I sent papers to my parents’ house, weird, random stuff. It worked. I’m thankful my mom kept all that stuff.”
Zurenda currently works as an employee for Hart at the Zen Leaf store in Norwich, but she has her own cannabis business plans.
Zurenda sold her Uncasville store to The Botanist in 2019 and now plans to open a medical and recreational cannabis fusion dispensary in East Lyme. She will manage the store and own the building at 15 Colton Road in the East Lyme Industrial Park, just off Interstate 95, Exit 71.
Doing things a bit in reverse, Zurenda sought out investor partners, rather than the other way around: She met with company representatives and was impressed by Soulstar, a Massachusetts-based all-female cannabis company whose slogan is “Cannabis by the people, for the people.”
Zurenda would not say who the social equity licensee for the project is, except for a woman who she said is related by marriage and grew up in Groton, but she said the woman works for another business and doesn’t know about the cannabis operation yet.
The store sells medical and recreational marijuana, but Zurenda wants to refocus her efforts on serving medical marijuana patients. She said she misses the close relationships she formed with her former customers at her Montville dispensary and hopes they’ll find her again.
“Medical marijuana has been failing since recreational marijuana started,” Zurenda said. “They’re focusing on recreational marijuana and not providing the same services to[medical marijuana customers]. I really feel left out. I hope a lot of my old customers remember me.”
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