Colorado Springs is Captain Ahab’s white whale for the state’s pot sellers, that elusive thing they cannot leave alone.
That might not last forever, however, as the county gets younger and marijuana seeps into the culture. From all points, Colorado and the folks in El Paso County face stiff financial challenges ahead.
What must Gen. William Jackson Palmer think of his town today. The abolitionist, railroad man and all-around great guy who founded Colorado Springs believed like religion in progress for the Pikes Peak region.
Like Herman Melville's fictional captain in “Moby Dick,” Palmer was a Quaker who believed in diligence and temperance.
“Saloons and gambling houses were not welcome in Colorado Springs, and if one wanted alcohol, they had to travel to the more unruly Colorado City, or nearby Manitou Springs, to get it,” historians note.
Palmer was just 27 when he rejoined his demoralized unit after months in a notorious Castle Thunder war prison. He was picked up as a spy and freed in a prisoner exchange after giving the Confederates a fake name. In the Battle of Chickamauga in northwest Georgia near Chattanooga in 1863, the Springs’ founding father led a saber charge under cannon fire to defend the Union’s artillery.
You know of Palmer’s exploits for Stoneman's Calvary in the last days of the war if you’ve heard, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” The Band’s ode to those most directly in the line of fire who usually know the least about who or what they're fighting.
This is the context I see for the future of pot in Colorado Springs.
The progressive political action group Together for Colorado Springs is driving the discussion around legalizing recreational weed in God’s country.
On May 27, the group presented a report that said a $17 million pot of gold waits at the end of the recreational marijuana rainbow. And it’s not like there’s not plenty of pot in El Paso County already, though predominantly the medical kind, which is the same as the recreational kind.
The El Paso-wide ban means there are only two recreational shops, both allowed within hippie, dippy Manitou Springs.
Dr. Neal Rappaport, a retired Air Force Academy and Colorado College economics professor, led the study for Together for Colorado Springs.
“People in the city can already buy locally,” he said in a statement. “Colorado Springs simply does not receive the tax benefits. Instead it goes to other municipalities.”
The city has 128 medical marijuana dispensaries, which is not proportionally dissimilar to the 167 recreational shops in the city limits of Denver.
The city's mayor, John Suthers, is Colorado’s former attorney general, the state’s top cop. He said it doesn't add up.
The city makes about $3 million a year off medical marijuana, the mayor said, and he expects to get maybe an additional $7 million from recreational, before deducting any costs. The biggest price he's not willing to pay is the cost to the city's image.
“We’re billing ourselves as Olympic City, USA, and doing a pretty good job of it,” he told me on the phone. “We’re saying this is a place to come and pursue a very healthy lifestyle. Sports has become a huge part of our economy, about a half a billion dollars a year between the Olympics governing bodies and all kinds of sports.
“We’re attracting millennials here to take our high-tech jobs, and they’re here because they get to go mountain bike and do all these healthy sorts of things. We’re also a great home to the military. We hold ourselves out as a very military-friendly town, we love having five military bases here, and we love having federal military contractors who, by matter of law, have to guarantee they are drug-free workplaces.”
If the Springs is going to get high, Suthers much prefers to do it with the U.S. Space Command.
“Guys like me with a long memory are the folks the marijuana proponents have the most to worry about,” he said, recalling the 2012 campaign for statewide legalization.
Promises made about pot were not promises kept, he said.
Legalization didn’t solve the state's budget problems, fix the education system, eliminate the black market or limit kids’ access to marijuana.
It’s a fact, he said, “Those who take in the revenue don’t pay the societal costs.” Families and communities pay that, Suthers said.
Those who want legal weed have asked the City Council to refer the question to the ballot. Suthers promises a veto.
It doesn't matter to him if everybody else is doing it, no more than it mattered to Palmer how liquored up the rest of Colorado became. You couldn't get a drink in his town until after Prohibition ended in 1933, nearly a quarter century after the general's death.
Of the 33 states that have legalized retail and/or medical marijuana, Colorado trails only Oregon, Oklahoma and Montana for the highest number of dispensaries per capita, 14.1 for every 100,000 residents. The Marijuana Enforcement Division says Colorado started the year with 572 retail stores and 438 licensed medical marijuana stores.
As Ahab said, "Accursed thing is not always what least allures."
The captain’s white whale versus the general’s dream, that’s the real question angling for the ballot in the Springs.
"choice" - Google News
June 08, 2020 at 06:00PM
https://ift.tt/3cLlf23
INSIGHTS | Colorado Springs faces choice about going to pot - coloradopolitics.com
"choice" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2WiOHpU
https://ift.tt/3c9nRHD
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "INSIGHTS | Colorado Springs faces choice about going to pot - coloradopolitics.com"
Post a Comment