The voting meeting held on October 11 by the Boston Cannabis Board (BCB), newly created in 2019, was a special one for the Chinatown community in the Greater Boston area. They witnessed a victory over Sanctuary Medicinal – a cannabis dispensary based in the New England area and opened a store in Brookline, MA this year – after having been working towards this result for the past two years.
The BCB denied Sanctuary’s application for a retail recreational cannabis dispensary license on 253-255 Tremont Street, which means “they cannot reapply for one year, and the board stated that they should not look to locate at this location,” wrote Nancy Lo in her email notifying her comrades right after the meeting.
Having been informed about Sanctuary’s intention of opening a store in the Chinatown neighborhood at a community meeting in March 2018, opposition throughout the Chinatown community simmered. A working group within the community voluntarily formed against Sanctuary’s commercial interest. Lo was among them, referring to herself as a long-time Chinatown activist among the group. Her comrade Richard Chang, Head of Josiah Quincy Upper School, considers Lo the “head” of the group, who led “hands and feet” working towards the same goal.
“I feel like before Chinatown was like what Sun Yat-sen called, ‘a plate of sands,’ but now younger generations these years are getting united,” Chang stated in the interview with Sampan. “Regardless of political belief, we work together whenever someone wants to harm the community.”
Over the past two years, Lo other community activists with around 30 community organizations were doing research, collecting data, conducting community meetings and coordinating with related people. Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New England (CCBAA) organized a petition drive collecting thousands of signatures from concerned people in the Greater Boston Chinatown community. In the meantime, Lo was monitoring closely the proceedings from BCB and Sanctuary to be ready for the upcoming BCB hearing at any time.
“People that want to open these businesses, they’re just looking to make money, and they’re looking to attract customers from outside of Chinatown,” Lo said. “It’s kind of like, what is the community to get out of this? Nothing.”
Lo told people to make sure that they are offering legitimate reasons against the cannabis store. “You just can’t come out and say, we don’t like marijuana,” she told Sampan. “People voted in favor of legalizing marijuana. That’s not what they want to hear. They want to hear about how it is going to affect the quality of life for people in Chinatown.”
In those letters, opponents against the cannabis store listed specific numbers of elderly housing, daycare facilities and after-school programs surrounding the proposed location. They also talked about issues including pre-existing drug problems, air pollution, children’s asthma and potential traffic jams due to insufficient parking plans from the store.
As proposed by Ken Morin, a parent of two children who attended Josiah Quincy School, the premise needs to be at least 500 feet from a K-12 school facility. Lo and her collaborators personally measured the surroundings of the proposed dispensary location and testified that it would indeed violate this buffer zone requirement.
In Chang’s letter to BCB, he mentioned the history in the 1960s when the city government relocated the adult entertainment industry to Chinatown, bring it ill fame as a red-light district in Boston. “Only in the last ten years has Chinatown started to rehabilitate its public image as the former Combat Zone where all manner of social vices could be indulged,” the former history teacher wrote.
“Instead of the British imperial government enabling British merchants to sell opium in China, we now have the Boston city government enabling outside interests to sell marijuana in Chinatown. The irony of this historic parallel is not lost on Chinese minds,” he wrote.
Summarizing their success, Lo and Chang put emphasis on how unity within the community triumphed. They think it is the strong opposition aggregated by the whole Chinatown that pushed BCB to make the final decision.
Lo encourages the young to believe that everything is possible as long as you keep focused, and to not be afraid to reach out to others for support. “If it was just me going against it, it’s not as strong. When you work with other people, and you collaborate, you are stronger in numbers,” she said.
To read this article in Chinese (Traditional), please click here.
