Author: Skip@RR

The RS ran this article about yesterday’s rally to save Kilarc. Below is a re-run of our thoughts on the Kilarc facility.

We stopped in over at Kilarc Reservoir in eastern Shasta County for a look and took a few shots. It’s nice to get up out of the valley heat. It has a lovely picnic area and lake, maintained by PG&E, who run the electrical generation facility there. PG&E wants to abandon the project, which is one of the oldest in the county. They would demolish the reservoir, power house, and the dam on Cow Creek that feeds it.

The plan strikes us as shortsighted, and a bit sad. This has to be one of the cleanest possible ways to make electricity. It’s been here for years, and seems to have had proportionally small impact. No hydropower comes without cost, but some projects seem to have reasonable cost/benefits, especially when already in place. Imagine the electrical power replaced with a coal fired plant, and it offers some stark perspective.

On the way home, we stopped at a high country ranch we know. The owner let us pick some fruit. These apples are from trees more than 100 years old. Still productive. The people who planted that orchard 100 years ago are the same people who thought electricity made from falling water would be a good idea.

100 years later, they are still right about both ideas.

With a little care, you can grow just about any crop you want in temperate Redding. Outside. Using no electricity. Yet our town boasts enough retail establishments selling hydroponic gardening gear to serve a colony on the moon. You can even see them advertising on billboards in town. Why is that?

Of course the question is rhetorical. The hydroponic shops cater to marijuana growers who prefer to grow their weeds indoors. Making sure you have the right temperature for your marijuana is adamant for many people who sell their weed on. Once these grows have finished, the flowers and many other byproducts of the grows will be used to stock up a dispensary in many legal states and countries. These dispensaries need to make sure that their weed is grown to the highest quality possible, in order to continue to grow their successful business. However, when growing marijuana, it’s important that the growers consider how they’re going to produce their marijuana. The most popular methods of growing marijuana are resin, live resin, and rosin (Read more about the differences here). It’s important for marijuana businesses to understand these as deciding which one to use can impact the success of the business. However, those businesses that aren’t performing as well as they could be might be interested in dispensary application consulting to improve the amount of business they have. When you’ve put all this work into finding the perfect temperature to grow your weed, you’ll want to be selling it on to make a profit! That being said, it is also interesting to note that although setting up a dispensary is one of the most popular marijuana business ideas out there at the moment, there are other ways to enter this exciting industry such as through social media marketing or even party planning. Ultimately, any industry that generates jobs and revenue can support the economy and therefore a lot of people think we should be doing more to support cannabis businesses.

I’m not here to pick on this particular establishment, about which I know nothing except that they have the wherewithal to advertise on a billboard in south Redding. I’m all for small and local business. But this growing industry is a lesson in unintended consequences that we ignore at our peril. At the roadside where I stopped to take a picture of the sign, I picked up this empty box.

The litter was a disposed box for earphones. The corporation that marketed and sold this product chose to play on words about an illegal drug for advertising purposes. Another company making money on marijuana. Can you identify the ethical contradiction involved when legal business organizations capitalize on illegality to thrive? Perhaps you cannot, or don’t care. But I submit that impressionable youth is being harmed by the hypocrisy. We are conditioning generations of young people to accept that laws are simply meant to be ‘winked’ at. It’s another unintended consequence of an ill-considered prohibition. We are complicit. We teach our young people that hypocrisy is acceptable, and laws are to be circumvented. In the long term, I expect it’s a cultural lesson we will come to regret having taught.

We have learned this lesson before. Prohibition of alcohol offered a huge boost to organized crime, and yet alcohol remained available. Alcohol abuse has negative effects on our society, but our elders ultimately decided those impacts were dwarfed in comparison to the terrible effects of the prohibition experiment. It seems like we must relearn things the hard way. The costs outweigh the benefits.

I saw a shirtless young man staggering on a Redding street yesterday in the afternoon sun. I wish he had chosen to avoid whatever intoxicant influence he’d used. Drug laws didn’t keep him from using. In any event, those are the same drug laws he’s been conditioned to disrespect. Wink. I arrived home to read that Mexican druglords had murdered 51 people and dumped them in a landfill yesterday. Are these two observances connected? I believe so. I’m just a blogger, and nobody needs my opinion. But please take a moment to read the informed opinion from today’s SF Chronicle of former San Jose CA Police Chief Joseph McNamara as he reasons that the time has come to end this prohibition experiment.

Stop winking.