The Highest Good of All Concerned - No Pun Intended.

I wonder if the cannabis activists thought of the highest good of all concerned when they were lobbying to get weed legalized in Colorado? I hate laws, but when I look back on how things were, I think it might have been easier when weed was illegal. 

 I live here in Denver and I am quite unhappy with how it's all going. It started out well, to be sure, with the new availability of cannabinoid salves and other amazing remedies.  I even heard the other day that a friend, diagnosed with cancer, started smoking weed, and the tumors became benign! Likely this would not have happened had weed not been legal. 

It does seem that it is eventually going to be taken out of the hands of the people and given to Big Pharma. In the end -  mom and pop shops will get moved out in favor of big business, as usual, and most likely and people will start going to prison for weed again.

And 1000 people a day are moving to Colorado.

I live on the edge of a pretty wealthy and old Denver neighborhood. It is very beautiful - or it was - before every other house began to be flipped into an fugly boxy post post post modern duplexes to be rented or sold for several zillion dollars.

Bottom line - maybe we can learn from this. Maybe next time we set out to make a change in our community, we can think of all the things that might happen as a result of our efforts - including thinking of the highest good of ALL concerned, not just our needs. 

I was in the Bay Area a few years ago visiting for 8 months. I grew up there - in the 70s. When I arrived in 2014 it was the most horrid place - my cousin renting a studio apartment above her garage to students for $3000 a month was seen as fine - normal, while my sister has since become homeless and has been living in her car for almost a year now. My other cousin also has an apartment in her house - my sister can afford $900 a month but that's not enough for them.

It's a greedFest.

And now it is so, here in Denver. Last I checked with https://denverhomelessoutloud.org/ there are about 6000 people living on the street in Denver. The city is doing nothing to help these people. The average Social Security disability check is $802. They were given a $12 increase for cost of living several years ago - isn't that insulting?

A room in Denver is now about $800 a month. I could not afford that. I have a unique situation. I am an artist. I work as little as possible so that I can do art and other creative things. I could easily be on the street right along with them.

Thinking of the highest good of all, and about how our desires might effect others is tough and might not have been predictable in this situation, but I highly doubt it was considered. Denver, which used to be a medium-sized city is now something so entirely different.

The cops have gone completely wild in their enforcement of ridiculous ordinances against the homeless population - homeless people are not allowed to sit on the street or in parks or even on benches at bus stops. Shelters are overcrowded and we have real winter here and no where for people to go. The city is doing sweeps of the homeless camps randomly and violating their constitutional rights by disposing of their belongings, clearly just trying to drive them out of town.

The people who have moved here are largely psychopathic it seems from what I have experienced. I work at a big chain hardware store and I have to deal with them and talk to them frequently and they tell me things like how they enjoy the grittiness of downtown, "watching people shoot up right outside their front door" - as if the humans in need provide a certain reality show experience for them.

In other words, the people who are moving to Denver are hedonists. They seem to be quite satisfied with the ideology that what is good for them is good, and what is bad for them is bad. A homeless guy outside their door is annoying - so they support the "sweeps". 

I am quite sure the marijuana lobby had no idea that this vacuum would suck in an overpopulation of psychopathic satanists to our little cowtown.