Robert Celt
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Mike O'Connor and his wife, Kate O'Connor-Masse, were skeptical. Their teen-age daughter was watching a documentary on marijuana use and tried to convince them that the plant wasn't as bad as its reputation.
Did she know who she was talking to?
"Most people who know me know that I am not very tolerant of drugs of any kind and I can't stand cigarette smoke," O'Connor said.
"Our kid was trying to say, 'You're missing the boat on this mom and dad,' O'Connor-Masse said.
So they decided to educate themselves so they could in turn educate their daughter and warn her of the dangers.
"The first [documentary] I watched, I was expecting to be able to bang her over the head with how dangerous it is," O'Connor said. "Doggone it, it didn't say that. What am I sup posed to tell the kid?"
O'Connor and his wife have become leading voices for Chino Valley embracing the medical marijuana cultivation industry. They are not growers themselves, but own the land one of the three active grow sites is located on. Chino Valley's Town Council is considering changes to its zoning laws that would make it unlikely any future marijuana businesses could set up shop inside town limits. They could vote on those changes at their next meeting, Tuesday, Jan. 12.
Because the O'Connors have already established their business, any council action on zoning laws would have little effect on them personally. If their grower wanted to expand, then they might have to petition the council to allow them to do so, but there is nothing that the council is considering that will alter the current operation. Knowing that, why did they step forward?
"Who was it that said ... for evil to flourish, good people just need to do nothing,'" O'Connor said of the famous Edmund Burke quote. "You're right, whatever direction the council goes, it doesn't really matter to us. I just thought they were really good jobs, I mean I'm seeing lots of people working. It's a labor-dense kind of industry. Chino keeps shooting themselves in the foot whenever an industry comes in, and then you get these old cranks that come out in mass and say, 'We don't want this.'"
But that's not what made him step forward.
"The cannabis isn't what drove me, or fired me up," O'Connor said. "It was the almost dogged ignorance of the residents that really got my goat."
O'Connor is an unlikely advocate for marijuana. He grew up in Iowa and graduated from Arizona State University. He worked with computers for 10 years while living in Phoenix. He and his wife married 27 years ago and moved to Chino Valley 20 years ago where they have been growing tomatoes. They plan to retire here, he said.
He said he's been against drugs all of his life. He's only tried medical marijuana twice, once when he threw his back out and another time to deal with migraines. He decided it wasn't for him.
"I personally didn't care for it, but I could see how others might like it or prefer it to alcohol," O'Connor said.
They had been approached by people in the marijuana industry, but turned them down. O'Connor said at that point they didn't want to get involved with the drug. But once they started to educate themselves, he said they started to see a whole lot of what they believed wasn't true.
"I started with what I thought was common knowledge: cannabis is highly toxic; it is highly addictive; it has little to no medicinal value; it is a gateway to hard drugs, etc.," O'Connor said. "I dove into the peer-reviewed science only to discover that none of those things were true."
Then he watched a documentary by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Weed, from August 2013.
"I saw the little girl with the seizures, I saw marijuana dispensed in Israeli hospitals and I heard Gupta admit that he was wrong about cannabis. If a neurosurgeon was wrong, maybe I was too."
Soon after the United States government announced it would not be targeting marijuana facilities in states that had legalized it, so there was no risk of having his land seized by the government.
That's when O'Connor said they decided to rent some of the farmland they own to a medical marijuana grower.
"For more and more people, the medicinal properties are life changing," O'Connor said. "For others, it is just a drug used to unwind from the day. Can it be abused? Sure. Do I really have to list all those things legal or otherwise that individuals abuse daily? Your chances of becoming dependent on cannabis are about 9 percent, for alcohol it is 15 percent, tobacco, 32 percent. I think it is better to legalize it and manage it, just like alcohol and take away the criminal element."
Now, he's hoping that the Town of Chino Valley doesn't turn away a growing industry that he said is providing good-paying jobs and spending money at other businesses, improving the local economy.
"The takeaway from my turnaround was that it didn't happen overnight," O'Connor said. "I was pretty hardcore anti-marijuana, my wife and daughter can vouch for that, but that was when I knew the least about it. I started to figure out that the dangers were more trumped up by politicians than backed up by legitimate research."
News Moderator: Robert Celt 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: Chino Valley's Marijuana Debate: Unlikely Advocates Take The Lead
Author: Ken Sain
Photo Credit: Chris Van Hook
Website: The Daily Courier
Did she know who she was talking to?
"Most people who know me know that I am not very tolerant of drugs of any kind and I can't stand cigarette smoke," O'Connor said.
"Our kid was trying to say, 'You're missing the boat on this mom and dad,' O'Connor-Masse said.
So they decided to educate themselves so they could in turn educate their daughter and warn her of the dangers.
"The first [documentary] I watched, I was expecting to be able to bang her over the head with how dangerous it is," O'Connor said. "Doggone it, it didn't say that. What am I sup posed to tell the kid?"
O'Connor and his wife have become leading voices for Chino Valley embracing the medical marijuana cultivation industry. They are not growers themselves, but own the land one of the three active grow sites is located on. Chino Valley's Town Council is considering changes to its zoning laws that would make it unlikely any future marijuana businesses could set up shop inside town limits. They could vote on those changes at their next meeting, Tuesday, Jan. 12.
Because the O'Connors have already established their business, any council action on zoning laws would have little effect on them personally. If their grower wanted to expand, then they might have to petition the council to allow them to do so, but there is nothing that the council is considering that will alter the current operation. Knowing that, why did they step forward?
"Who was it that said ... for evil to flourish, good people just need to do nothing,'" O'Connor said of the famous Edmund Burke quote. "You're right, whatever direction the council goes, it doesn't really matter to us. I just thought they were really good jobs, I mean I'm seeing lots of people working. It's a labor-dense kind of industry. Chino keeps shooting themselves in the foot whenever an industry comes in, and then you get these old cranks that come out in mass and say, 'We don't want this.'"
But that's not what made him step forward.
"The cannabis isn't what drove me, or fired me up," O'Connor said. "It was the almost dogged ignorance of the residents that really got my goat."
O'Connor is an unlikely advocate for marijuana. He grew up in Iowa and graduated from Arizona State University. He worked with computers for 10 years while living in Phoenix. He and his wife married 27 years ago and moved to Chino Valley 20 years ago where they have been growing tomatoes. They plan to retire here, he said.
He said he's been against drugs all of his life. He's only tried medical marijuana twice, once when he threw his back out and another time to deal with migraines. He decided it wasn't for him.
"I personally didn't care for it, but I could see how others might like it or prefer it to alcohol," O'Connor said.
They had been approached by people in the marijuana industry, but turned them down. O'Connor said at that point they didn't want to get involved with the drug. But once they started to educate themselves, he said they started to see a whole lot of what they believed wasn't true.
"I started with what I thought was common knowledge: cannabis is highly toxic; it is highly addictive; it has little to no medicinal value; it is a gateway to hard drugs, etc.," O'Connor said. "I dove into the peer-reviewed science only to discover that none of those things were true."
Then he watched a documentary by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Weed, from August 2013.
"I saw the little girl with the seizures, I saw marijuana dispensed in Israeli hospitals and I heard Gupta admit that he was wrong about cannabis. If a neurosurgeon was wrong, maybe I was too."
Soon after the United States government announced it would not be targeting marijuana facilities in states that had legalized it, so there was no risk of having his land seized by the government.
That's when O'Connor said they decided to rent some of the farmland they own to a medical marijuana grower.
"For more and more people, the medicinal properties are life changing," O'Connor said. "For others, it is just a drug used to unwind from the day. Can it be abused? Sure. Do I really have to list all those things legal or otherwise that individuals abuse daily? Your chances of becoming dependent on cannabis are about 9 percent, for alcohol it is 15 percent, tobacco, 32 percent. I think it is better to legalize it and manage it, just like alcohol and take away the criminal element."
Now, he's hoping that the Town of Chino Valley doesn't turn away a growing industry that he said is providing good-paying jobs and spending money at other businesses, improving the local economy.
"The takeaway from my turnaround was that it didn't happen overnight," O'Connor said. "I was pretty hardcore anti-marijuana, my wife and daughter can vouch for that, but that was when I knew the least about it. I started to figure out that the dangers were more trumped up by politicians than backed up by legitimate research."
News Moderator: Robert Celt 420 MAGAZINE ®
Full Article: Chino Valley's Marijuana Debate: Unlikely Advocates Take The Lead
Author: Ken Sain
Photo Credit: Chris Van Hook
Website: The Daily Courier
