Source: thefreshtoast.com
Cannabis prohibition is one of the more detrimental public policies in United States history. Not as harmful as, say, separating toddlers from their parents and placing them in internment camps, but harmful nonetheless.
Like the escalating cost of detainment, in addition to negatively impacting the trajectory of people’s lives and wasting a ridiculous amount of tax dollars, cannabis prohibition also hurts the environment.
One of the most overlooked arguments in favor of legalizing cannabis is that legalization would help address environmental issues. This seems lost on the current U.S. administration, as they pulled out of the Paris Accord; protecting the environment doesn’t even seem to be on the federal government’s agenda. However, according to Green Flower, reducing the harmful human impact on the environment is a very important issue and legalizing cannabis can help contribute to fixing the problem.
Below are five ways that cannabis prohibition hurts the environment, which cannabis legalization and regulation would directly address:
Illegal Grow Operations Destroy Public Lands
As long as cannabis is illegal in the United States, illegal gardens are planted on public lands and in national forests.
“Cartel gardens” tend to cover a wide swath of territory and tend to decimate the surrounding ecosystem; animals are driven away from their natural habitat, deforestation occurs, refuse piles up, and water is diverted from streams and riverbeds, harming aquatic wildlife.
Prohibition Prevents Hemp From Being Used For Soil Remediation
Hemp is one of the most versatile plants on the planet. It can be made into many things from paper (saving timber), rope, and clothing.
Hemp is also really helpful for removing toxins from soil through a process known as environmental remediation. According to Green Flower, hemp plants are being used to help decontaminate Europe’s largest steel plant site.
As hemp grows, it draws contaminants out of the soil. After it is harvested, it can further be utilized in more helpful ways. Unfortunately, due to prohibition, hemp is often mistaken for marijuana and uprooted.
Approximately 480 “marijuana” plants that were actually hemp plants were uprooted and removed from a plot of land in Henry County, Iowa, according to a Facebook post from the local Henry County Sheriff’s Office.
Critics of the operation agreed that the officers merely succeeded in spreading the seeds of the “ditch weed” hemp plants that they were trying to eradicate by keeping them exposed during transport.
Outdoor Cultivators Are Pushed Indoors
Outdoor cannabis cultivation has a much smaller carbon footprint compared to its indoor counterpart.
This is obviously due to the fact that indoor cannabis cultivation requires an exorbitant amount of gas fossil fuel and electricity to operate halogen or LED lights.
Prohibition causes cannabis growers that would otherwise cultivate outdoors to keep their operations inside in order to reduce their chances of detection. Oddly enough, even in legal cannabis states, outdoor cannabis cultivation is prohibited in some areas.
Prohibition Halts Small Business Loans And Energy Efficiency Grants
In an effort to help the environment, many states have energy efficiency programs that award grants to businesses that want to “go green” in more ways than one.
Grants are often awarded for solar panel installations and the use of other energy-saving technologies, such as wind turbines.
Because of federal prohibition, cannabis entities are prevented from receiving such grants, as was recently the case in Maine.
Maine legalized cannabis for adult-use in 2016, but it will be awhile before cannabis businesses can receive grants from the state energy efficiency programs due to federal prohibition. Keeping growers’ operating costs high impacts the entire industry.
Even ancillary canna-businesses, such as organic soil, lighting and other industry-related vendors, do not qualify for small business loans. Therefore, ancillary business are bereft of low interest rate borrowing options, which push them towards private equity loans. This raises cultivators’ operating costs, which, in turn, follows the supply chain and evidently raises the cost of consumers purchasing cannabis legally.
Proper Disposal Is Not Followed
Ideally, cannabis should be grown outdoors in the sunshine, and in a way that is 100% organic and sustainable.
Unfortunately, many growers use harmful chemicals, including herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides, which, when not properly disposed of, have a horrendous impact on Mother Nature.
In a perfect world, in a legalized and regulated market, growers that decide to still use non-organic methods can dispose of these products in a way that reduces the impact on the environment.
But when cannabis is prohibited, a lot of these products get flushed down drains or poured out improperly for fear that they might be discovered and prosecuted by law enforcement.
However, in some ways, legalization has also hurt the environment. As the situation evolves in areas like California, one aspect of non-sustainability in cannabis cultivation is that cultivators produce waste. But there are evolving mandates for dealing with cannabis waste and the licensed cultivation industry has some strict rules in place. Regulations dictate that cultivators have to add additional waste to their pre-existing waste, to be able to dispose of it correctly under the new guidelines, to ensure that it is genuinely waste and isn’t reusable, which is counter-intuitive to recycling.
“Cultivators have to take their plant waste and mix it with 50 percent non-plant waste such as dirt, soil, leaves and other compost. Then it gets put into trash bags and it goes in a dumpster, to be compliant,” said Wil Ralston, President of SinglePoint.
“We are looking into why these regulations are in place, and if they are even necessary,” said John Trujillo of Circonomy Solutions, which is focusing on making the industry more sustainable. “We are trying to come up with different solutions for the cannabis industry, to minimize the impact that some of these regulations have on their companies and the environment, he said. “Recycling is a good place to start.”
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