Pubdate: Sun, 21 Aug 2016
Source: Sunday Star-Times (New Zealand)
Copyright: 2016 Sunday Star-Times
Contact:  http://www.sundaystartimes.co.nz
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1064

DIZZYING HIGHS AND LOWS OF LIFE IN THE METROPOLIS OF MARIJUANA

The 'Green Rush' Has Proven to Be a Mixed Blessing for Colorado and 
Its State Capital.

At Bruce Randolph School in a tough inner-city part of Denver, the 
staff and pupils used to breathe fumes from a nearby dog food 
factory. Now they get a regular whiff of something much more controversial.

"I smell weed, oh, all day long," says Darlicia Campbell, the school 
campus safety officer.

At first, teachers who kept smelling marijuana in their classrooms 
summoned her to sniff out the pupil who had brought it. "I was going 
crazy for a couple of weeks," she recalls. Eventually, the children 
explained to her that fumes from a nearby marijuana growing centre 
had entered the school ventilation system.

Campbell, 50, shakes her head at the strangeness of life on the front 
line of America's pioneering experiment with legalised pot.

Two and a half years ago, the state of Colorado became the first 
jurisdiction in the world to permit legal sales of recreational 
marijuana to adults over 21. The decision started a scramble to 
develop the market for pre-rolled joints, cannabis cookies, spiked 
soft drinks and a vast range of more exotic products, all fully 
regulated from seed to point of sale.

Washington, Oregon and Alaska followed suit, and a similar law has 
been passed but not yet implemented in Washington, DC. Five more 
states  California, Arizona, Nevada, Maine and Massachusetts  have 
recreational marijuana legalisation on the ballot for a public vote 
in November, with California seen as a possible tipping point for 
some kind of national relaxation of laws.

Medical marijuana is already legal across half the United States, and 
the leaders of Canada and Mexico are also exploring legalisation measures.

Observers from governments around the world are coming to Denver, the 
centre of the fledgling industry, where they are finding that the 
economy of the Mile High City is booming.

Although it is hard to quantify how much the legalisation has 
contributed to the feelgood factor, unemployment is lower than for 
any other major urban area in America, university applications across 
the state are up, and a recent prominent survey that polled thousands 
of Americans across the US and crunched crime, labour, education, 
health and census data ranked Denver as the best place to live in the country.

There has been no accompanying crime wave and no eruption of 
marijuana-related health crises. Consumption rates among teenagers 
actually fell slightly between 2009 and last year, dispelling fears 
that the spread of legal marijuana among adults would filter down to 
children. In 2009, 25 per cent of teenagers in the state had consumed 
marijuana in the previous 30 days. Last year it dropped to 21 per cent.

For many residents, such as Britt Konrad, 26, a medical laboratory 
scientist, legalisation has been an unqualified triumph.

"It's the green rush  Colorado's boomed!" she says, sitting in the 
backyard of her boyfriend's house in High St, not far from Bruce 
Randolph School. "My father is very conservative, never touched 
anything, not even tobacco, but after seeing this, he said, 'Why 
don't we legalise everything?'."

Her friend Amaya Bayne, 24, has just returned from studying social 
anthropology at Oxford. Moving to Britain after acclimatising to 
Colorado's liberal marijuana laws was "kind of a culture shock", she 
says. Arranging clandestine handovers with illegal dealers in the 
streets suddenly seemed "weird".

However, for others the ramifications have been more complicated.

 From the start, the new industry and its many enthusiastic patrons 
had to cope with a confusing regulatory environment. Marijuana use 
remains illegal under federal law, and even within Colorado, 
decisions on legalisation are left to individual towns and cities, 
creating a patchwork effect with very liberalised clusters of shops 
and factories in some parts of the state and rigid prohibition elsewhere.

In cities like Denver that have embraced full legalisation, zoning 
laws and rent costs mean that the shops  and in particular the 
factories where the product is grown  are concentrated in poorer 
semiindustrial neighbourhoods, where some residents complain that 
they create too few jobs for locals, take up commercial space, drive 
up house prices and pollute the atmosphere.

Bruce Randolph School was singled out for praise by US President 
Barack Obama in his 2011 State of the Union address after turning its 
academic standards around, but parents of pupils now complain that 
school life is blighted by the pungent odour of marijuana cultivation.

"The kids say it gives them headaches and makes their eyes water," 
says Nola Miguel, a community health campaigner. "People don't want 
to sit outside on their porches. They don't even want to open their windows."

Miguel voted for decriminalisation and is "not anti-marijuana in any 
way". She wants other states to legalise "because it would take the 
pressure off us". But she worries about the long-term effects on 
children "growing up in a place that's saturated with marijuana".

Last month residents in ElyriaSwansea won a rare victory against the 
industry when Starbuds, a chain that grows plants on the second floor 
of its marijuana shop, was refused permission to renew its 
cultivation licence because of the nuisance effect of the odours.

Leo Branstetter, a retired ambulance and hearse dealer who lives 
across the street, was one of the campaigners. He thinks that 
legalisation has been "a wreck" and that states have been blinded by 
the "rush to follow the money".

"They don't want to accept the potential for problems."

On High St, Reuben Gregory, 39, a father of four who works at a 
hunger relief centre, says he voted for legalisation "but I've since 
wished I hadn't" because of the industry's rapid growth and the 
scarce resources it hogs: notably space and water.

On the other hand, "I like that we are progressive enough to say, 
hey, we are tired of the drug war and locking kids up for smoking a joint".

The Times
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom