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.
“I never mentioned Trump.”
I know. You dodged the question I asked about him in #29
President Trump has done more to facilitate marijuana in the states than all of FR combined. Is he a dupe of Soros, yes or no? Simple question.
Sure, just like the vast majority of Americans buy their pricey and taxed liquor from moonshiners.
Sorry, I’m not interested in pot and thus have no knowledge of what the President thinks about it.
But it doesn’t take much of a guess to think that people will be required to register, pay high prices, and have distribution controlled just like cigarettes.
“It is a Class 1 drug for a reason.”
Yes, because Nixon ignored his own commission’s recommendation to decriminalize it and made it so.
Apparently the cartels are doing quite well in states where it has been legalized.
The important thing to take away is that the accusation of being a Soros dupe or accomplice has been rendered impotent for the reason I stated earlier.
President Trump has already done more to facilitate marijuana in America than all of FR combined, and arguably, any President before him, including the last one.
See the 2 short You Tube videos in post #29 if you don’t believe me.
Since I never said, you did, you can render it any way you want for yourself.
Fair enough.
Here in NJ, where we’ve taxed many businesses out of the state, the new Dem administration insists legalized weed coupled with sports gambling will save us.
To think Europeans view us as “puritanical”; we’ve become a complete sh!thole.
Wow that is ignorant. With the tidalbwave of ruined lives let’s just call them weak, that will solve it. That and a few bullets.
Yet has drastically increased homeless spending at 40,000 bucks a pop annually. The true cost of pot taxes run very deep. The more you look into it and drill down past the layers of pro pot propaganda the more you realize you are drilling a water well in a cesspool.
Sorry if that was too harsh, but it was not ignorant. Addiction is a weakness. You succumbed to it.
Selling to states where it hasn't.
That and they undercut the prices. No taxes. No rigamorol. Apparently CA is their biggest market.
Yup.
“Why Colorado’s black market for marijuana is booming 4 years after legalization
“Marijuana grown in Colorado, the land of legal weed, is being smuggled out to states where it is still illegal”
And yet legal sales are substantial (at least in CO) - with every legal sale marking money out of the cartels' pockets. It certainly should be taxed even lower.
Marijuana is already wholesaling about 80 percent less than just three years ago due mainly to California coming in line legal for recreation
The amount of weed grown in California is astounding
I’ve seen downtown LA warehouse grows with 2500 lights
And orchid farms in Carpenteria with nearly 80 acres of marijuana greenhouses next to the old standard Orchids all managed by a tulip conglomerate from Holland
If Archer Daniels or Bunge or Cargill enter the business in. Big way if the Feds go legal which they will one day I can see them growing 25 percent THCA or better strains at no more than a few bucks a pound cost
The glory days of windfall weed money are coming to a close
Having a dispensary license is the key now
Or making oils and edibles
Even in tennessee we now have CBD shops selling leaf and eerls
Marijuana will within five years be completely a state to state issue
Man when I think about how many folks did so much time for it....in some cases thirty years
Folks here can hate pot all they want and even rarionLize it to some degree
But the sentences we have handed out for smuggling were just nuts after that 1984 sentencing guidelines which took effect in 1987
I had associates from Georgia ...just country boys ....a shrimp boat load of 15,000 pounds of Colombian weed
They all did 18 years federal time with no parole
They thought it was old law which woulda been maybe 24 months at s camp
The Black Tuna gang ....so called ...preppie Jewish boys from Philly got 30 years for two freighters and their snitch embellished and got off scot free and got paid too
Where do they get their lives back while Amsterdam Tulip grows 100 million a year in weed for California dispensaries and they got 30 years for the same thing...and far less money
I don’t think it’s a cure all and I think the strength is a mite high
It’s good for pain, nausea, glaucoma, and seizures so far.....and of course getting high
I miss it...I enjoyed weed once upon a time....but I also like women and that like brought responsibility in new lives I created plus wifeys
Thus ended my hedonism
But I do miss it
Now I got drug tests for insurance and pain management etc
Life’s a bitch ain’t it
Btw Cargill already has a facility outside Pueblo Colorado...it’s a turn key faciltiy they lease out to growers....you just bring your veg
There is one caveat to industrial grows....quality control is an issue on big operations and things can go south. And kill the whole crop....mildew and mites etc and you can’t just use normal gear to purge problems since folks smoke it or eat it
Especially if you advertise pure organic
As a kid I worked at Pipersky Nurseries in Chino and Ontario. Wonder if they’ve switched?
I was just out there...the hobo jungle flats between Alameda and the 101 just east of downtown at night just smothered in tents on sidewalks
A great restaurant Factory Kitchen is there
Anyhow all those old warehouses that are not yet hipster lofts are pot grows
2-5 acres indoor grows
If you see a lookout at the service doors night and day that’s it
Look at the skylights you can see the glow of the SHP lights
It’s incredible
Ditto greenhouses in the right micro climate
The old days of Humboldt and Arcata and Yreka and Trinity still exist but NorCal was about long outdoor seasons which still exists but it’s neen eclipsed
What was 3200 a pound in 2012 in quantity is now 800-1200 same quality
Their success will be their undoing
And hippies from Mendocino to Willlams and Cave Junction Oregon and all in between are going to go broke soon
And that all there is there since timber is so restricted
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