Posted on 07/02/2018 8:04:14 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
For those of us living in cities, the memories of the 2007 economic crash are a distant memory. But for our neighbors in rural counties, the ghosts of the depression are still haunting vacant towns where farming and manufacturing used to thrive. According to the Economic Research Service arm of the USDA, rural and metro employment equalized in the early part of 2008 before bottoming out, but while metro employment has more than recovered, rural employment has yet to achieve parity with its pre-crash levels.
Farmers are suffering especially hard, and many are having to find supplemental work off the farm to make ends meet, and those that can’t find work are committing suicide in record numbers. Trump’s punishing farm bill is likely to make the situation for the rural poor much worse. At the same time, these towns are suffering from a leveling population growth, to the detriment of all strata of local industry, and depriving these towns of the tax income that fund social services, schools, and infrastructure improvements. But in some rural communities in states with a legal cannabis market, marijuana farming is offering a solution to the vicious cycle. Trinidad, Colorado is one of those small towns.
A report by High Country News gives credit for the town’s success to the towns slow-growth strategy within the market. The key to Trinidad’s success was to give out a handful of permits at a time, and by socking away the influx of new money until supply and demand become predictable over the next five years. In return, they’ve been able to pump more dollars into local infrastructure and social programs, making measurable improvements in the quality of life for all residents.
Utah border town De Beque, CO saw an addition of 35 new jobs in local growing facilities. It may not sound like a lot, but in a town of 500, it represents 7% of the town’s total population and a significant bite out of county unemployment rate. And it’s just a tiny fraction of the 18,000 Colorado jobs created by the legal cannabis industry.
But in agriculture-heavy flyover states like Indiana and Ohio, fear of marijuana’s social menace haunts the socially conservative state climate. Advocates of industrial hemp, a significantly higher-margin cash crop than corn or soy, have had to fight like hell to produce the entirely drug-free plant, despite the obvious boon to farming communities.
“The primary challenge all along has been a handful of leaders and legislators that refuse to acknowledge the difference between marijuana and hemp,” said Jamie Campbell Petty, Founder and President of the Indiana Hemp Industries Association, in an email. While many state legislators eventually came around on the topic, it wasn’t after a concerted PR campaign and multiple assurances that they weren’t trying to pave the way for legal marijuana in the state. Even though industrial hemp is profitable for young farmers with little equipment, and even with hemp’s versatility as “food, fuel, and fiber,” the IHIA narrowly won their battle, and are hoping to build a successful industrial hemp ecosystem like the one currently thriving in Kentucky.
But the private prison industry has quietly been dominating these economically depressed communities, all but ensuring a long, expensive battle for legalization. Of the new prisons constructed in the last 40 or so years, 70% of them have been built in rural communities. When manufacturers leave, the private prison industry offers work — soul-crushing, low-wage work — to desperate people trying to keep food on the table.
According to a 2017 study by New Frontier Data, the marijuana industry is on track to overtake the manufacturing in new job creation by 2020. With Trump’s administration signing bait-and-switch deals for huge manufacturers like his hollow PR stunt at Carrier in Indianapolis, the cannabis industry is hoping to spare itself from the Sessions DOJ by offering a viable market for low-skill labor. For states like Indiana, Ohio and Illinois, who are each facing major funding issues in their respective states on top of a farming crisis, a legal cannabis market should look like an appealing single-stone solution for a multi-bird problem.
States like Georgia have enacted laws to draw the entertainment industry, offering huge tax credits to movie and TV productions to shoot in the state. But that’s not doing much to help the state’s rural populations and only further depriving rural areas of growth opportunities. The economic potential of a legal marijuana market in Georgia could offer a sustainable source of funding for the 65% of Georgia kids on free or reduced lunch.
Over the next decade, the economic potential of the legal cannabis industry will become too enormous to ignore. Many states without any marijuana laws on the books, medical or otherwise, are now becoming surrounded by states where citizens have legal access, and both marijuana users and cannabis industry investors are funneling money into other states’ economies instead of their own.
It’s still not a panacea. Aside from small-town anxiety about marijuana, there’s a potential unseen side effect of a wide-open marijuana production floodgate in these economically depressed communities: overwhelmed local services. From schools to hospitals, all rural “boom towns” run the risk of increased violent crime when a population grows too fast for law enforcement and social services to keep pace, especially after decades of sluggish growth.
However, if lead by a coalition of farmers, and meted out judiciously by state legislators in favor of independent, local producers, it seems that a happy medium is possible. But first, many of these heavily conservative states will have to work around decades of Reefer Madness-style marijuana mythology and the small minds that tend to stick around these rural towns clinging to old ways, old power, and dusty dreams.
State legislators in the pocket of the private prison industry will likely have to be replaced by state legislators in the pocket of the recreational marijuana lobby. This is the reality of conservative state politics and the legislators stuck between corporate interests, obvious economic benefits, and an ultra-conservative rural voting base. The next decade will tell whether these cash-and talent-strapped rural economies will turn to the cannabis industry to patch the leaks — or maybe, whether they can afford not to.
According the Devotes of the Pot Religion, anything to do with weed is Heavenly, grass actually improves driving, and by golly Its just wonderful...Praise Potty
There is a good reason why it is called “weed”. People have been planting it next to my parent’s property for so long that it comes back as a nuisance every year. My parent’s cows tromp all over it. Fortunately they do not eat it very much of the time. It makes them sick when they do.
The police used to take an interest, but since it was legalized they do not seem to care very much. Of course it encourages a bunch of nasty trespassers who leave the gates open and then the cows get out and wander onto a very busy four lane road where the traffic is typically traveling at 50 mph or more.
“So the government has become the drug pusher, oblivious to the ramifications of such a policy?”
State governments are supposed to regulate intrastate commerce per the Tenth Amendment. By your definition, the states are alcohol pushers, tobacco pushers and pushers of anything else that the states tax and regulate.
How’s it doing for drug addiction and homelessness compared to 5 years ago? Because they are weeded out of the employment statistics. /pun
That's Soros' plan.
Yes you are probably correct. I have seen too many of my friends lose their lives to marijuana to support its decriminalization. It’s a different animal. What is next, cocaine, heroin? Wait, we have that in certain states with resultant body counts. Yes, the liberty bell says “spread liberty throughout the land,” but liberty does not mean licentious drug use encouraged by the state for their revenue cut. The state has become the whore, oblivious to the moral consequences.
The estimated cost to serve a single chronically homeless person in Colorado Springs is $57,760 per
year.2
That number includes medical treatment, incarceration, police intervention and emergency
response. Research suggests that costs drop significantly – by as much as $30,000 annually
according to one study – when a person is placed in permanent supportive housing
“That’s Soros’ plan.”
______
Candidate Trump speaking favorably about medical marijuana and leaving legalization to the states =>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWIQhDbs1g8
____________
President Trump supporting legislation letting states decide =>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M53XLBd54Y
______
President Trump has done more to facilitate marijuana in the states than all of FR combined. Is he a dupe of Soros?
Soros, who declined to comment for this story, writes that “the drug problem as primarily a criminal problem is a misconception” and that “eradicating the drug problem is a false idea.”
“A drug-free America is simply not possible. You can discourage the use of drugs, you can forbid the use of drugs, you can treat people who are addicted to drugs, but you cannot eradicate drugs.”
So what would he do?
“I would establish a strictly controlled distribution network through which I would make most drugs, excluding the most dangerous ones like crack, legally available,” he writes. “Initially, I would keep the prices low enough to destroy the drug trade. Once that objective was obtained, I would keep raising the prices, very much like an excise duty on cigarettes, but I would make an exception for registered addicts in order to discourage crime.”
source: www.phoenixnewtimes.com/issues/1996-12-12
Years ago, I bought investment property about an hour north of Trinidad. Had never been to the region.
So I went out and spent three days traveling around that area of Colorado. Trinidad is a fairly unusual place. It would be like walking around Mississippi, and suddenly walking into Portland, OR. I won’t even say that the locals are liberal or such...it’s just that it’s a crowd that seem to have different views on life. I didn’t stay long enough to ask questions or figure out where this started.
As you run from Denver...southward....each one of these communities on the interstate has a unique character. Some more than others.
So all the cash flow does not go to schools does it. Interesting that the actual homelessness by head count goes up while the statistics go down.
Seem someone in government does not like anything getting in the way of the gravy train.
Well that idea will get votes from the addicts, but in real life what is being done is to imprison the affected involuntarily because it saves 30 grand a year.
The first 8 of the 9 states that legalized did so by ballot measures. That’s true for most medical mj programs, as well.
Fed and State governments are way out of step with the people on this issue. President Trump has wisely recognized this and taken the issue away from dems in the mid-terms. (See post #29)
As for body counts, I refer you to the following CDC graphic showing death rates from OD for each state between 2010 and 2016. The legalized states did better. OR, for example, was one of the few states that actually saw a decline, while WV and OH skyrocketed =>
https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/images/data/2010_2016DrugOverdose-Deaths-Graphic.JPG
Since you avoided my question, I can only infer that you do think President Trump is a dupe of Soros. You certainly didn’t deny it.
Sad.
Oh by the way I am very familiar with the lifestyle of an addict. I suspect I have smoked a quarter of a life away daydreaming with a buzz before I broke free from the pot vampire.
I never mentioned Trump. What are you talking about?
CO has lower welfare spending per capita than the national average, $556 vs $649.
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/compare_state_spending_2018d40a
Which do you blame, pot or your own weakness?
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