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
[Colorado residents] don’t want to accept the potential for problems. Leo Branstetter, campaigner
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’’.