The highest official overseeing Illinois’ hashish coverage is leaving the general public sector to affix the weed foyer. 

Toi Hutchinson, who has served as a senior adviser to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker for hashish management, introduced this week that she might be taking a job with the Marijuana Coverage Venture (MPP), billed because the “the primary group within the U.S. devoted to legalizing hashish,” because the group’s new president and CEO.

“I’m happy to be becoming a member of the workforce at MPP, the place I’ll proceed my years-long effort to develop and help hashish legalization laws that facilities on fairness and repairing the harms of the previous,” Hutchinson mentioned in a press launch on Wednesday. “We’re extremely pleased with the exhausting work and classes realized in Illinois, standing up packages to put money into fairness entrepreneurs, reinvesting in communities and clearing lots of of 1000’s of arrests and felony data.”

Pritzker, a Democrat, saluted Hutchinson on Twitter.

“For over two years, Toi Hutchinson has been my foremost advisor on hashish: making Illinois’ trade essentially the most equitable within the nation,” Pritzker said in a tweet on Monday. “Whereas I’m unhappy to see her go, it was an honor to have her lead this cost. Toi, Illinois is a greater state due to your public service.”

A former Democratic state senator in Illinois, Hutchinson, was appointed to the hashish advisory function in Pritzker’s administration again in 2019. The Chicago Tribune reported on the time that the governor’s administration had initially outlined Hutchinson’s function as “Illinois hashish regulation oversight officer,” which was sometimes called the state’s “pot czar.”

However Hutchinson’s title was ultimately modified to “senior adviser to the governor on hashish management.” As The Tribune reported then, it was “unclear when the choice was made to present Hutchinson the senior adviser title,” however that “appointing her to the job created in laws she voted on might have run afoul of the state structure.”

Regardless of the reasoning, Hutchinson’s has been an omnipresent determine within the state’s rollout of the leisure hashish program, which was created when Pritzker signed the historic laws into legislation in the summertime of 2019.

Illinois Focuses on Fairness

Together with clearing the way in which for hashish gross sales, Illinois’ new legislation has additionally resulted in 1000’s of pardons for people who had been beforehand busted and convicted on low-level pot expenses.

After signing the invoice, Pritzker mentioned that the brand new legislation would herald an finish to “the 50-year-long conflict on hashish,” and restore the “rights to tens of 1000’s of Illinoisans.”

“Illinois has completed extra to place justice and fairness on the forefront of this trade than some other state within the nation, and we’re making certain that communities which have been damage by the conflict on medicine have the chance to take part,” Pritzker mentioned final yr. 

Hutchinson echoed that.

“I’m proud to work with Governor Pritzker in creating fairness within the hashish trade in a means that no different state has completed,” Hutchinson mentioned on the time. “By expunging lots of of 1000’s of cannabis-related data, reinvesting the cash spent on adult-use hashish in Illinois into communities which can be struggling and making fairness a central focus of the hashish licensure course of, the administration is making certain that no neighborhood is unnoticed or left behind.” 

The brand new program has additionally introduced a windfall to Illinois, with the state reporting that it generated $582,226,511.45 in income from leisure pot gross sales in 2020, its first full yr for the reason that new legislation took impact. 

Hutchinson mentioned that the “profitable launch of the Illinois authorized hashish trade represents new alternatives for entrepreneurs and the very communities which have traditionally been harmed by the failed Conflict on Medication.”