Right next door, in Linn County near Mound City, Sheriff Barry Walker and helpers destroyed more than $100,000 worth of marijuana Monday. It was being grown in a wooded area in 10 separate garden plots, they said.
They didn’t catch the gardeners. But undercover agents who know about such things say the operation is typical. Workers camp out in unplowed fields where owners obviously spend little time and go to work. They plant, cultivate and harvest the plants under contract with higher ups who market the crop in big cities — such as Iola and Chanute.
The profit is high enough to let the bosses pay the peons $200 a day with maybe a bonus at the end of the year. That’s $25 an hour, more than a fair wage for gardening — even in a Kansas summer.
Marijuana has been grown in this not-so-secret way in Allen County — and everywhere else in the temperate zone — for decades. Can’t the law be enforced?
Could be, but won’t be. It would be possible to find all the marijuana patches and make peddling so hazardous a profession that those now selling weed would go to meth, or crack, or some designer drug. But we — society, that is — aren’t willing to spend what an all-out effort would cost to accomplish so little for so short a time.
Drugs will be part of our culture for as long as users are willing to pay an arm and a leg for their hits. These yard-sized plots of marijuana were worth $100,000 because users are willing to pay absolutely ridiculous prices for the dried leaves. And when that much money can be made so easily with so little risk, the stuff will be grown and sold.
The solution is to get a handle on the demand side of the equation. Take the customer out of the picture and the fields go back to soybeans or just plain hay. Easier said … as the saying goes.
Legalization is a compromise solution. Putting marijuana on the shelf beside tobacco — one appears to be about as harmful to health as the other — would reduce the price drastically, provide income to honest merchants, be a tax source for tax-hungry government and could result in much better treatment for addicts because use could be tracked and treatments experimented with much larger, better defined groups.
Mound City then might seek recognition as the marijuana capital of Kansas.
Legalization hasn’t proved to be a cure-all in Switzerland and other nations where it has been tried. They still keep trying, but making drugs available to addicts doesn’t eliminate addiction.
Extreme punishments have worked, however. In nations that execute dealers, the drug traffic disappears. Long prison sentences for users work, too. But these cures are worse than the disease.
Perhaps America’s fairly successful approach to tobacco offers acceptable instruction. The continuous anti-smoking public relations campaign — bolstered by the publicized example of lung cancer, heart disease and upper respiratory disease outcomes — has pulled the adult smoking rate down to 20 percent over the past half century or so. Not only are far fewer people smoking, but the habit itself has fallen into such disfavor with non-smokers, and not a few smokers, as well, that it is no longer something that cool people do in public. A successful culture change has been wrought.
Marijuana and more harmful drugs should be the next target.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
