ABSTRACT
Alcohol and gambling community trusts have operated for many decades in New Zealand and distributed considerable funding to the “not-for-profit” community sector, including sports, arts, culture, health and emergency services. A similar approach has been proposed for legal cannabis, whereby community trusts are involved in the retail sale of cannabis and required to distribute a percentage of sales revenue to local community groups, including drug treatment and drug prevention services. However, the experience of gambling industry funding of the community sector raises important ethical concerns about these funding arrangements. In this chapter, we briefly summarise how community trusts could be adapted to a legal cannabis market, discuss the ethical risks associated with industry funding and explore regulatory design features to address these risks. We recommend four regulatory responses: (1) anonymous allocation of cannabis community grants via an independent national committee based on objective social need criteria; (2) no cannabis industry partnership in relation to the allocation of community grants, and no direct industry sponsorship of community groups; (3) central administration by the Ministry of Health; and (4) ongoing provision of training to those working in the community sector in relation to the risks of direct funding from the cannabis industry.
