Guest column: Essex County’s marijuana gold rush won’t last forever

By Lloyd Brown-John

Just a tad northwest of beautiful downtown Kingsville is the more or less vanished village of Klondyke. Klondyke is just a few hops and skips away from Barretville, another vanished village and one slowly being absorbed by a county landfill.

All that remains of Klondyke today is the original school (now a private residence) and the church (now part of a local farm’s storage building).

Klondyke, it seems, was named by persons who had ventured into the Yukon Klondyke in the late 1890s in search of gold and instant wealth. Most of those who ventured north to the Klondyke arrived far too late and ended up either impoverished or working for somebody else as the rich gold claims were quickly taken.

I am reminded of Klondyke tales and the dream of wealth when I see more and more local Essex County green houses either converting or being constructed to grow now legalized marijuana.

I am largely indifferent to legalized marijuana. Indeed, my one experience with the stuff — a marijuana-laced  brownie I once snatched and swallowed from a lady who was using medical marijuana and had just made a batch of her favorite medicinal goodies.

Kingsville in particular seems almost overwhelmed by applications and, to some extent, faced with opposition from residents distraught at the prospect of an often smelly pot greenhouse in their neighbourhood.

A small greenhouse not terribly far from our residence was surrounded by a fence and is now our neighbourhood local smelly pot greenhouse. A northeast wind brings us either the stench of manure spread on a field or the skunky odour of our local marijuana production facility.

And added to the prospect of stench is the enormous amount of wasted light cast into cloud-laden skies from some greenhouses.

On many early morning rescues of my Windsor Star I could with great ease read the newspaper at the end of our driveway from the immense amount of reflected light emanating from an assortment of greenhouses in Kingsville and Leamington.

I suppose it is wrong to fault an industry which actually provides plentiful jobs and significant incomes to those who invest in greenhouses.

Indeed, I recently discovered whilst completing my income tax forms that I live in a statistically defined rural area and not in the Windsor census metropolitan area (CMA). This was all in connection with my “rebate” under the federal government’s carbon tax pricing scheme.

So if you live in a rural area you must learn to expect rural consequences ranging from manure stench to marijuana greenhouse stench and, often, with an override of night light that would put most major cities to shame.

It seems that almost everybody and their mother-in-law are rushing into the green gold of marijuana growing and processing. One really must wonder how long the boom will last. How many small investors will join the green gold rush only to discover that somewhere their investments have gone to pot.

History is replete with examples of booms and busts. The 1929 crash of the stock market took thousands of ordinary small investors into bankruptcy and, in a few cases, suicide.

Klondyke gold, Lambton County’s “black gold” oil (now diminished) and now Essex County’s rural green gold marijuana rush all suggest boom and bust economics.

How many greenhouses will it eventually take to override market demand? There is a modest monument to marijuana growing deception on Manning Road just south of Highway 401. The promoter who failed to receive a federal licence left a stark prison-like reminder that all that might glisten in green could turn to another shade of grey.

Neighbors and residents of communities such as Kingsville and Leamington have a right to have their sanity protected against “get rich quick” marijuana producers. Something really does smell with the rapid burgeoning of marijuana grow operations.

Like the wind turbines, who will bear the cost of land rehabilitation and structural dismantlement once the bloom is off marijuana?

Lloyd Brown-John is a University of Windsor professor emeritus of political science.