Cannabis

Smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer, but a friend of ours was captured and they gave him thirty years.

That’s the old Phil Ochs lyrics from Outside a Small Circle of Friends.

I’ve never gotten the War on Marijuana. I think that the old adage that pot smokers are loosers is kind of silly. Most people I know who smoke pot are actually quite successful. They use the drug in moderation, it chills them out and if anything makes them better at dealing with every day stresses in the a calm and collected way. Sure I know stoners who are loosers but also folks who make a ton more money then I do at my job.

To be clear, smoking marijuana is pungent and it lingers. While odor is closely associated with people’s views on the topic, there is no doubt that it’s pungent. It lingers in the air and on your clothes like mucking a hog or dairy barn. Unlike farmers though, pot smokers don’t usually shower and change out of their barn clothes before heading back to town. I guess you can grow to like the smell and associate it with good things – just like farmers like to joke that manure smells like money.

I don’t worry that much about people driving intoxicated because I think people will find ways to be foolish with motoring however they want to be, and while there may be more deadly crashes, that’s more of an issue of motoring then the drug itself. Marijuana also adjusts perception different that alcohol and its impacts are different. So there’s that.

I do think it would be an excellent agricultural crop especially once it becomes federally legal, which is only a matter of time. If the democrats win the White House that could happen in two years. It’s apparently quite easy to grow and process, it could not only help the agriculture industry but also inspire the younger generation to learn more about agriculture and do some gardening and home cultivation.

Municipal Population Density – New York State

I've added a new feature to my blog mapping software that allows me to link a CSV to an ArcMap Feature server such as the Census Bureau. This will be very helpful when full-count Census Bureau is available and I want to make maps of block-level population data or other things that would benefit from the speed of only loading the features currently on the screen.

Map Key: Purple, 100 pop/sq mi, Blue 200 pop/sq mi, Green 300 pop/sq mi, Yellow 400 pop/sq mi, Orange 500 pop/sq mi, Red 600 pop/sq mi.