Kika Keith: Top equity advocate in California’s cannabis industry
LA TimesKika Keith, photographed at the Los Angeles Times in El Segundo on Sept. 7. Before curious customers can even ask Kika Keith how her bright and airy cannabis shop in the heart of Leimert Park came to be, she’ll tell them it’s the “house that people built.” She’ll tell them about how in 2020, L.A. politicians weren’t keeping their grandiose promise that California’s legal weed industry would help Black people who joined it as entrepreneurs build generational wealth, thereby righting the racist wrongs of the war on drugs. See the whole list Instead, Keith, 52, will tell them she was slowly going broke trying to open Gorilla Rx Wellness Co. And so she organized other cash-strapped, would-be entrepreneurs of color into the Social Equity Owners and Workers Assn., sued the city and won. In the small, but growing “cannabis equity” movement, Keith is arguably the leading advocate and consultant in California. “I wanted to be a person who actually effectuates change,” she said, “but I couldn’t envision this.” Her personal story of growing up in South L.A. during the drug war and spending time in a homeless shelter with her daughters before becoming the first Black woman to open a cannabis shop in L.A. has made her stand out in a troubled industry beset by corruption, violence and greed.
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