In the three years since Maryland legalized recreational cannabis, Baltimore has received more than $35 million in tax revenue to reinvest in communities devastated by the War on Drugs. To date, not a single dollar has reached the people it was meant to help, and the first round of funding may still be a year away.
At the center of the delay is an escalating dispute over who controls the money: City Hall or the Baltimore Community Reinvestment and Reparations Commission, the 17-member body established in November 2024 to oversee how the funds are distributed. City Hall says the mayor has final say, while commissioners maintain the body was created to independently manage the funds.
That holdup means that while Maryland’s legalization of cannabis in 2023 led to over $1.1 billion in sales over the following year alone, even as Black communities continue to be targeted by the drug war, none of it has helped repair that damage.
While only a fraction of cannabis funds have been spent statewide, as of October 2025 at least seven other jurisdictions in the state have used the money for free dental care, small business training, summer camp and after-school programs, weather shelters, and early childhood health screenings.
In 2024, Black residents accounted for more than 92% of drug arrests in Baltimore, even though they make up 60% of the population and studies show there are similar rates of drug use across racial groups.
“No one should be making money off of marijuana while people are still incarcerated for crimes that are now legal,” said Ray Kelly, a longtime criminal justice advocate and executive director of the Citizens Policing Project.
“No one should be making money off of marijuana while people are still incarcerated for crimes that are now legal,” said Ray Kelly, a longtime criminal justice advocate and executive director of the Citizens Policing Project, a resident-led public safety and policing advocacy organization.
“Essentially, the War on Drugs never actually targeted narcotics,” Kelly said. “It targeted the entire community where narcotics were sold.”
After recreational cannabis legalization, Maryland sought to address some of the harm of decades of the drug war by directing 35% of the state’s cannabis tax revenue to communities most impacted by decades of cannabis prohibition and requiring every jurisdiction to establish a commission to oversee how those funds are distributed.
The state is allocating funding based on cannabis possession charges in the two decades before legalization, with Baltimore City receiving by far the largest share at 30%, a result of decades of aggressive drug-war policing in Black neighborhoods.
Jumel Howard, chief of external affairs in the Baltimore City Office of Equity and Civil Rights, said in a statement to Baltimore Beat that City Hall is “committed to delivering meaningful investments to impacted communities” and is working with the commission to create a plan and timeline for distribution with public input.
“Funds can only be distributed after a formal plan is released and a public hearing is conducted,” Howard said.
Commissioners allege City Hall has begun allocating millions of dollars from the fund without their approval.
But commissioners allege City Hall has begun allocating millions of dollars from the fund without their approval.
In a statement to the Beat on behalf of the commission, Commissioner Khalilah M. Harris (who briefly worked at The Real News Network with several people affiliated with the Beat) said the city has allocated over $5 million that “the Commission did not authorize.”
Howard disputed that characterization and said that the city designated the Office of Equity and Civil Rights to administer the $5 million in support of the commission’s work, including staffing and outreach.
In 2025, amid the slow rollout of the cannabis repatriation funds across the state, Maryland lawmakers passed Senate Bill 894 that mandates counties to develop a formal plan for distributing the money, limit administrative costs, and report annually to the state on how the funds are being used.
One provision in the law — requiring jurisdictions to submit a spending plan before releasing funds — has become a point of contention in Baltimore.
Harris said commission members are waiting for guidance from the state’s Office of Social Equity about whether the commission still has the “independence and autonomy” promised under the city ordinance that created it — guidance that was expected last year but has yet to be delivered.
Howard said final authority over the funds rests with Mayor Brandon Scott, while the commission is responsible for developing a community-centered distribution plan and making funding recommendations that would then be approved by the mayor and the Board of Estimates.
State Senator Mary Washington, who sponsored SB0894, told the Beat that the law was not intended to give local elected officials control over how the money is spent, and argued Baltimore City’s interpretation is out of step with how the law has been understood elsewhere in Maryland.
“The money was never intended to be a slush fund for a county executive or mayor,” she said. Instead, she said, it was meant to reinvest in communities impacted by the War on Drugs and mass incarceration, which continue to face disparities in homeownership, wealth-building, and life expectancy.
A growing number of Maryland counties — including Anne Arundel, Wicomico, Harford, Queen Anne’s, Allegany, and Baltimore County — have already spent or committed portions of their allocations to housing support, youth mentorship, employment and scholarship programs, homelessness prevention, and reentry services.
Harris stressed commission members do not want the fund reduced to one-time grants or short-term programs, but instead used for what she described as “reparative justice investments” that address root causes and have a broader impact on neighborhoods harmed by the War on Drugs.
“Such investments will target root causes and establish initiatives that will impact the lives of people and communities negatively impacted by the war on drugs on a much larger scale,” Harris said.
With state guidance still pending and the fight over who controls the fund unresolved, members conservatively estimate that the first funds will be released in early 2027.
Kelly, a longtime criminal justice reform advocate, said the communities most harmed by the drug war must have a say in how the reparations fund is spent.
“The commission has to assert its independence,” Kelly said. “You can’t repair communities through the same systems that helped create the harm without giving those communities real control.”
The Beat spoke with Kelly on April 2, just hours after he responded to a police shooting on the 1700 block of Pennsylvania Avenue — a neighborhood still shaped by the legacies of the war on drugs and redlining, and one of the most heavily incarcerated ZIP codes in the state. It was only feet from where they shot well-known arabber Bilal Abdullah last June.
That, Kelly said, is why the reparations fund should be used for legal services, expungement support, job placement, housing stability, and community-led investments in neighborhoods destabilized by decades of criminalization.
For example, when Gov. Wes Moore pardoned 175,000 Marylanders with misdemeanor cannabis convictions in 2024, that relief did not not reach the thousands of people like Kelly with more serious charges.
Kelly was arrested in 1988, his senior year of high school, on marijuana distribution. Because a gun was involved, some of the charges were treated as felonies, leaving him with a criminal record before he turned 18.
“There’s a saying that a felony is the debt you can never repay,” Kelly said.
After spending six months in the city jail in that case, Kelly spent more than seven years incarcerated over the next decade as a result of his felony conviction. Even after his release, he said, the conviction impacted nearly every opportunity that followed.
“It follows you everywhere,” Kelly said. “If you can’t get work, can’t get housing, can’t take care of your family, that keeps people stuck in the same cycle.”
He said the state’s response so far has failed to fully address that harm.
“You have a house raid, they lock up one person, but now his girlfriend’s out of her house, the kids are homeless,” Kelly said. “People don’t see that. That was the impact of the War on Drugs in our community.”
For Kelly, that is exactly the kind of harm the more than $30 million fund should address — and why the continued delay matters.