The good harvest

I've meaning to post a link to this by my friend Ann Harrison. In a piece at Alternet, she takes us inside a medical marijuana grow in California. She reminds us how easy it is to forget the trials of those who risk much to bring medicine to the afflicted. Read it all, it's a fascinating look at the trim camps, but here's a couple of choice quotes to get you started.

While San Francisco city supervisors haggle over cultivation limits and zoning restrictions for medical cannabis dispensaries there's another reality taking place a couple hundred miles to the north. Whatever the supervisors decide, someone has to grow all the pot that gets smoked by patients in the city -- and no matter how friendly city officials are to the end product, the growers are still hounded by law enforcement.

...The farmers who tend these plants are also creating environmentally and socially responsible cannabis farms very different from the armed, old-school, commercial marijuana plantations that feed an insatiable market but often damage the land.

These farms provide a model for what a legalized system would look like. These are gentle, respectful operations. There's no violence surrounding these grows, nor is there drug abuse and greed. Sounds like a better plan than prohibition to me.