Nebraska Complains About Colorado Weed While Enabling South Dakota Alcoholism
Nebraska has licensed four businesses in this town of 10 to sell beer to be taken off site. Those businesses have repeatedly been found to be selling to minors and bootleggers and allowing onsite consumption
This town of 10 has four licensed off-sale beer stores that sold 3.6 million cans of beer in 2013, or almost 10,000 cans of beer per day.
How is that possible? Well, Whiteclay, you see, lies on the northern Nebraska border with South Dakota, where it directly abuts the Oglala Sioux (Lakota) Indian Nation on the Pine Ridge Reservation. And Pine Ridge has maintained absolute alcohol prohibition — sale and possession — since its creation in 1889
A news station in Omaha, Nebraska, ran a story entitled “Colorado’s marijuana sales draining Nebraska budget.” It seems that since neighboring Colorado legalized marijuana for adults 21 and over, the cops in Nebraska have been busting so many adults coming across the border with Colorado weed they can’t afford to bust, jail and try them all.
“We have had a significant increase in the amount of cases and incidences with marijuana coming across from Colorado,” said Deuel County, Nebraska, Sheriff Adam Hayward. “One in every five cars, we are now finding something in there.”
So many adults are crossing the border with weed the sheriff explains they’ve caught a year’s worth of misdemeanor violators in just four months. “We are paying for them to be housed. We are paying for them to be fed. We are paying for their medical expenses, which a lot of them do have,” Hayward said. “And then a lot of them, even though they have money to buy drugs, they don’t have money to pay for an attorney. Therefore, the county has to pay for the public defender.”
Seeing as a Nebraskan adult by law could only buy a quarter ounce at a Colorado pot shop and that might cost 50 or 60 bucks with tax
Filed under: General Problems
Unfortunately, Native Americans equate alcohol and marijuana with the same social problems, when cannabis could actually help with alcohol abuse. I was really hoping that Native Americans could cash in on the marijuana industry — before Big Pharma — but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.