Bud Farming Backlash: Rural America's Uneasy Embrace of Cannabis Farming
“Someone should have flown to Colorado”
There’s more to it than just warring ideologies. Rural governments are small. They have modest budgets and overworked staffs. A big city like Seattle can pull in experts from half a dozen departments to deal with recreational marijuana. A rural municipality, by contrast, might have a single employee charged with regulating a crop that was, until recently, criminalized. “Keep in mind that no one had a line for marijuana [in their zoning code]”, says Perry Houston, head planner in Okanogan County. When it came to legalization, many rural counties and cities were more or less winging it. That made mistakes all but inevitable.
Take the case of Douglas County, which sits across the Columbia River from Wenatchee. Although the county narrowly rejected Initiative 502, the measure had support in the county’s more urban areas, and county officials moved swiftly to add cannabis cultivation to...
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