Saturday, August 12, 2017

Marijuana in West Virginia

According to NORML, the biggest cash crop in West Virginia agriculture is marijuana, and has been for twenty years.

Now a group of young legislators is pushing for full legalization in the state, hoping that it would help with several of the state's pressing problems: the budget crunch, the lack of jobs, and especially the opiate epidemic. I'm not generally a fan of drugs, but if people on disability are determined to ease their woes with something, better cannabis than Oxycontin or whiskey. And there is evidence that it can work that way.

Last year the state passed a medical marijuana law, but it is so restrictive that it may not lead to much legal use.

I think full legalization is certainly worth trying, but then I've never thought marijuana should have been banned in the first place. Whether West Virginia's increasingly conservative legislature will ever see things that way is another question.

1 comment:

G. Verloren said...

"According to NORML, the biggest cash crop in West Virginia agriculture is marijuana, and has been for twenty years."

Out of curiosity, what other cash crops even grow in West Virginia? And how do they measure "biggest"? Acreage used by the crop? Annual yield by tonnage? Total market value of that yield?

Each possibility paints an entirely different picture of the marijuana industry in the state. We need the whole picture for that statement to tell us anything of real value.