When cannabis (what the people buying it call “weed”) became legal in Massachusetts, it was like the Summer of Love all over again, dude.
Happy stoners twined flowers in each other’s hair. Happy politicians twined wreaths of new tax income in each other’s remaining hair. Like the liquor business, the lottery business and the casino business, the cannabis business was a brilliant combination of three great government goals.
No. 1: Get more money from what government coyly calls “revenue sources.”
No. 2: Get as much of that money as possible from the poor.
No. 3: Encourage addiction. I know, I know. Weed isn’t addictive. That’s why your cousin Dougie is stoned every hour of every day. He’s not addicted. He just feels like being high all the time. That is NOT addiction.
The state of Massachusetts needs new “revenue sources” like a junky needs an unlocked car with a purse left unattended on the front seat. Heroin will probably be legal within five years, especially if our legislators need another raise.
For a while there, if only out of nostalgia, there was some hope that the new “cannabis industry” might be, well, “cool.”
You know. Weed would be sold in little mom-and-pop stores, like the old-time head shops, and the people running the place would be gray-haired hippies and pop would have a ponytail and his “old lady” would wear tie-dye and smell like patchouli and armpit funk.
You’d go in the store and you wouldn’t have any money, and the guy behind the counter would say, “It’s cool, man. Pay me manana when you get some bread. Keep on truckin’.”
No. Nothing state-sanctioned runs on that kind of groovy system. Once the state legalized it, weed became an “industry,” and those of us who have worked in an industry know what that means.
There’s a security guard and cameras and an employee handbook and a yearly employee review, and if you get written up three times in a year, they can fire you.
Not cool, man.
And to prove that the high times are gone, Massachusetts just experienced its first work-related death in the cannabis industry. It’s also the first national work-related death in the cannabis industry.
That makes it a job. Nothing is really a “job” unless it can kill you, blind you, ruin your lungs, screw up your back, destroy your joints, drive you crazy with monotony, wear you out with rotating shifts, starve you to death with low wages or make you handle unsafe chemicals.
The woman that died in Massachusetts had asthma. If you have asthma and you work around cannabis, you can die. The weed companies don’t do much about that, because businesses don’t “self-regulate.” They regulate when the government makes them regulate, and then they weep about “crippling regulations.”
The motto of American business has always been, “We can’t afford to keep our workers alive and healthy. It would kill the business.”
The woman who died was 27-year-old Lorna McMurrey, and I hope she wasn’t just part-time, because who wants to die for a part-time job? She had at least another 35 years of helping American industry not be crippled by regulations. She had asthma and the cannabis dust aggravated it, and she collapsed, and after three days on life support in grim little Holyoke, Massachusetts, she died. She’d had another asthma attack on the job before the one that killed her. The company was unimpressed. They used to have cotton mills in Holyoke, and the lint would clog the workers’ lungs and they’d die.
That was in 2022, and her story came and went from the news pretty fast because there is no glitter on the story of a production worker dying on the job. Taylor Swift has glitter. People picking and packing orders do not.
Her family filed a lawsuit, so she’s back in the news and will be again if the company gets whacked for a $2 million judgement. The lawsuit says the company didn’t do enough to ventilate the facility so the dust from the weed wouldn’t kill people with breathing problems.
You have to ask for the job, and you show up even if the job makes it hard for you to breathe, and sometimes, the job kills you. Cotton or cannabis. It’s a job, and you need one.
Marc Munroe Dion is an award-winning veteran reporter and Pulitzer Prize-nominated newspaper columnist.
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