E<\/span>ven if you have never heard of the Western Electric factory in North Andover, Massachusetts, you know the story.<\/p>\n At one point, more than 12,000 people built transmission equipment for telecom giant AT&T at the 2 million-square foot Merrimack Valley Works \u2014 one of those jobs where fathers and sons could expect to work the same job <\/a>from one generation to the next, sometimes side-by-side.<\/p>\n But then, in 2007, the jobs moved overseas to cut costs. The whole region took a hit<\/a>, and in the ensuing decade, no industry has offered itself up as a replacement.<\/p>\n Until now. Massachusetts voters legalized recreational marijuana on Election Night 2016<\/a>, the same night Donald Trump was elected president on the promise of bringing bygone blue-collar jobs back<\/a> to coal mines and factories like Western Electric.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t Trump but an oncologist who presented North Andover with a plan for the factory, and for putting the grandchildren of Western Electric back to work at the old factory. Jeff Goldstein, who used to work at a local hospital before heading overseas to Israel<\/a> \u2014 the current global leader in cannabis research \u2014 bought the old factory site in 2003.<\/p>\n He planned to convert the old Merrimack Valley Works into an $100 million, 1.1 million-square-foot cannabis cultivation, testing and research complex, which would have made it one of the largest marijuana companies on earth.<\/p>\n Goldstein promised he could create 1,500 jobs now, and more later.\u00a0Not\u00a0quite<\/i>\u00a0Western Electric, but not bad \u2014 and better than anything else coming down the pike, which was nothing at all, town selectmen reminded their citizens.<\/p>\n And the town said no.<\/p>\n At a Jan. 30 town meeting, by a vote of 1,430 to 1,155, the people of North Andover voted to ban recreational marijuana facilities,\u00a0as the Boston Globe reported<\/a>. The ban kills off Goldstein\u2019s plan for a marijuana facility at the old Western Electric site.<\/p>\n What happened? How did a blue-collar town\u00a0without<\/i>\u00a0blue-collar jobs justify turning up its nose at the only offer on the table? The usual: Decades-old stigma and negative attitudes towards marijuana.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cPeople said, \u2018Where did this come from? What are you doing to my town?\u2019\u201d said Charles Salisbury, a former town official who led opposition to Goldstein\u2019s pot factory dreams, in comment to The Globe.<\/p>\n A local real-estate agent warned that the new economic activity would depress property values. Other worriers felt that approval of the marijuana complex, which earned majority voter approval last year but not a two-thirds supermajority, was moving too fast.<\/p>\n The real-estate argument is a demonstrated fallacy. In Denver,\u00a0demand for cannabis production space led to an affordability crisis,<\/a> meaning that property values actually rose at an exceptionally high rate.<\/p>\n \u201cI know it\u2019s not what we all want, but it\u2019s what we have before us,\u201d Selectman Richard Vaillancourt, a former worker at the factory in Western Electric days, told the meeting, according to the Globe.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019re going to see any manufacturing coming back here,\u201d he added. \u201cI\u2019d really like to see that building brought back to life.\u201d<\/p>\n North Andover\u2019s act brings a metaphor to mind: The town\u2019s nose fell off a decade ago, and would rather have a skeletal hole in its face than accept a prosthesis connected to cannabis. But you know this story, too. Cannabis is not perfect, but it offers promise. Decades of successful programming, designed to make a relatively benign plant with medical value appear as a deadly scourge, is breaking that promise before it can be tested.<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/b> would you want a marijuana mega-grow in your town?<\/p>\n The post Massachusetts Town Rejects 1.1 Million Sq Ft Pot Farm<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
North Andover, Massachusetts lost a massive factory, which provided thousands of jobs to the town, more than a decade ago. When an also-massive marijuana operation came along to replace them, the townsfolk turned it down \u2014 in fear of what pot could do to their community. Even if you haveContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3176,50,80,25,81],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23432"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23432"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23433,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23432\/revisions\/23433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: Massachusetts Town Rejects 1.1 Million Sq Ft Pot Farm<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"