She Paid $150,000 for a Florida Cannabis License and Got Nothing. Her Story Is the System Working as Designed.

I’m from Miami. And when I read about Jasmine Johnson — a Miami native, a Florida A&M and FIU graduate, a woman who launched her first business at 18 and built something real in South Florida hospitality before she ever touched cannabis — something in me just went quiet for a second.

Not surprised. Just quiet.

Because this is the story I hear over and over again from across this beat. In Florida, in Georgia, in Texas, in Tennessee. The same loop: Black entrepreneur, especially a Black woman entrepreneur, enters the cannabis licensing process with credentials, with capital, with a real business plan — and the system chews through years of their life before it gives them anything.

Jasmine Johnson is the CEO of GÜD Essence, one of the few Black woman-led companies positioned to operate as a licensed Medical Marijuana Treatment Center in Florida. She filed a 750-page application. She paid $150,000 in filing fees. She waited two years. And she got nothing. No award. Just a long, expensive silence from the state.

“The average entrepreneur cannot sustain a decade-long timeline based on uncertainty,” Johnson told High Times in a recent exclusive interview.

She said it plainly. No anger performing for the camera. Just the flat, hard fact of it.

Florida’s MMTC Model Isn’t Broken. It’s Working Exactly as Intended.

Here’s what you need to understand about Florida’s Medical Marijuana Treatment Center structure if you don’t live it: it requires full vertical integration from day one. You must have cultivation, processing and retail operations — all of it — before you open a single door to a single patient. Before you generate a single dollar.

That requirement doesn’t just raise the bar. It sets the bar at a height that functionally excludes anyone who doesn’t walk in with institutional capital or generational wealth. Johnson leveraged roughly $10.3 million in equity from her family’s real estate portfolio. Most people don’t have a family real estate portfolio. Even the ones who do often don’t have $10 million in equity to sacrifice to a system with no guaranteed timeline.

“You’re investing millions before you generate a single dollar,” Johnson said, “with no guarantee of when approvals will come.”

This is the quiet design feature of Florida cannabis licensing that nobody in Tallahassee will say out loud: the cost structure isn’t a bug. It’s a filter.

The state talks about equity. They have talking points about it. Opportunity, access, diversity. But as Johnson puts it, “equity is often marketed at the licensing stage, but the real challenge begins after.” The door gets labeled Open to All — and then the room behind it requires resources that systematically exclude the people equity was supposedly meant to reach.

“Without those [capital reserves, political relationships, existing infrastructure],” she said, “equity becomes more symbolic than functional.”

What Survival Actually Looks Like

To understand how Johnson eventually got her foothold — she now has one operational dispensary in Clearwater, with locations in development in Orlando, Jacksonville and Titusville, and a cultivation and processing campus actively under construction — you have to understand how much precision that required.

She described building with a discipline that operators with deep-pocketed backing never have to develop. “Where others can absorb inefficiencies, we’ve had to build with precision. Every dollar, every decision, every timeline matters.”

She structured retail leases to shift buildout costs to landlords. She didn’t test concepts or pivot; Florida doesn’t let you do that. She went all in, full vertical, under a system that kept moving the finish line through court rulings, extended timelines and a key partner who withdrew right before an ownership change submission was due.

There were moments when stopping made the most rational sense. She says what kept her going was purpose — not just building a company, but building access. “That purpose outweighs the short-term challenges,” she said.

I believe her. And I also want to be honest about what it costs that purpose is the thing carrying someone through a system that capital and connections should be doing.

What Florida Needs to Fix — And Who Benefits If It Doesn’t

Johnson laid out the reforms with the precision of someone who has spent a decade thinking about nothing else: reduce barriers to entry, create pathways for phased growth rather than demanding full vertical integration upfront, fix the timelines, improve regulatory efficiency.

Simple things, in concept. Politically complicated in a state where existing MMTC operators have every incentive to keep the barrier high and the competition limited.

That’s the part of this story the equity conversation tends to skip over: the incumbents benefit directly from the current structure. Every year of delay, every $150,000 application fee that produces nothing, every regulatory maze that filters out undercapitalized operators — that’s not inefficiency, that’s protection of market share for whoever already got in.

Johnson is also thinking past the current framework entirely. GÜD Essence is developing products targeting chronic pain, diabetes, and serious health conditions — a more clinical, more ambitious product line than what Florida’s current structure easily accommodates. “Florida has an opportunity to modernize its framework,” she said. “We are especially committed to developing products that support conditions like chronic pain, diabetes and other serious health challenges.”

Still Here. Still Building.

Nearly a decade in, Jasmine Johnson is still here. Operational in Clearwater. Growing. Building toward a version of the Florida cannabis market that actually looks like the state it claims to serve.

What Florida cannabis leadership has never fully grappled with is how much talent this system has filtered out — how many Jasmine Johnsons never made it back after the $150,000 filing fee returned empty-handed. We will never know those names. That’s the other cost.

What Johnson wants people outside the state to understand is simple: “This is not a market where you can move quickly or test concepts. It requires full commitment upfront, with significant risk and delayed return.”

That’s true. And it’s also a design choice. Florida built it that way.

The question — the one that Tallahassee never answers directly — is who exactly that design was meant to serve.

Leila Castillo covers the South for CannabisInquirer.com. Her beat includes Florida, Texas, Georgia, and eleven other Southern states.