Pubdate: Sun, 6 Mar 2011
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2011 The New York Times Company
Page: A17
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/lettertoeditor.html
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Kirk Johnson
ALERT: Will Montana Repeal Its Medical Marijuana Law? 
http://www.mapinc.org/alert/0464.html
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/states/MT/ (Montana)
Bookmark: http://www.drugsense.org/cms/geoview/n-us-mt (Montana)

IN MONTANA, AN ECONOMIC BOON FACES REPEAL EFFORT

BOZEMAN, Mont. -- With his electrician's tool belt and company logo 
cap, Rick Schmidt looks every bit the small-business owner he in fact 
is. That he often reeks of marijuana these days ... well, it is just 
part of the job, he said.

"I went on a service call the other day -- walked in and a guy said 
to me, 'What have you been smoking?' " said Mr. Schmidt, 39.

For Gallatin Electric, a six-employee company founded by Mr. 
Schmidt's father, Richard, as for other businesses in this corner of 
south-central Montana, medical marijuana has been central to 
surviving hard times as the construction industry and the second-home 
market collapsed. Not the smoking of it, the growing of it or even 
the selling of it, but the fully legal, taxable revenues being 
collected from the industry's new, emerging class of entrepreneurs. 
Three of the four electricians on staff at Gallatin, Mr. Schmidt 
said, are there only because of the work building indoor marijuana factories.

Questions about who really benefits from medical marijuana are now 
gripping Montana. In the Legislature, a resurgent Republican majority 
elected last fall is leading a drive to repeal the six-year-old 
voter-approved statute permitting the use of marijuana for medical 
purposes, which opponents argue is promoting recreational use and crime.

If repeal forces succeed -- the House last month voted strongly for 
repeal, and the Senate is now considering it -- Montana would be the 
first to recant among the 15 states and the District of Columbia that 
have such laws.

In Bozeman, a college and tourism town north of Yellowstone National 
Park, construction jobs and tax collections dried up just as the 
marijuana business was blossoming; residents and politicians here say 
the interconnection of economics and legal drugs would be much more 
complicated to undo.

Economic ripples or entanglements extend in every direction, business 
people like the Schmidts say -- gardening supply companies where 
marijuana growers are buying equipment, mainstream bakeries that are 
contracting for pot-laced pastries, and even the state's biggest 
utility, NorthWestern Energy, which is seeing a surge in electricity 
use by the new factories. Medical marijuana, measured by numbers of 
patients, has roughly quadrupled in Montana in the last year.

"It's new territory we're treading in here," said Brad Van Wert, a 
sales associate at Independent Power Systems, a Bozeman company that 
completed its first solar installation last month -- a six-kilowatt 
rooftop solar array, costing about $40,000 -- for a medical marijuana 
provider called Sensible Alternatives.

Mr. Van Wert said that his company was assertively going after this 
new market, and that marijuana entrepreneurs, facing big tax bills, 
were responding to the appeal of a 30 percent tax credit offered by 
the state for expansion of renewable energy.

The Bozeman City Council passed regulations last year sharply 
restricting the numbers of storefront suppliers downtown. But growers 
and providers say that even though the regulations restricted their 
numbers, they also created a climate of legitimacy that has made 
other businesses more comfortable in dealing with them for equipment 
and supplies.

And unlike the situation in sunny California or Colorado, where 
medical marijuana has similarly surged, growing marijuana indoors is 
all but mandatory here, a fact that has compounded the capital 
expenditures for start-ups and spread the economic benefits around 
further still. An industry group formed by marijuana growers 
estimates that they spend $12 million annually around the state, and 
that 1,400 jobs were created mostly in the last year in a state of 
only 975,000 people.

"Twenty-five thousand dollars a month," one new grower and medical 
marijuana provider, Rob Dobrowski, said of his outlay for electricity 
alone, mainly for his light-intensive grow operation that supplies 
four stores around the state.

Mr. Dobrowski was a construction contractor until the recession hit, 
as were two of his brothers who have joined him in the business. He 
said he now employs 33 people, from a standing start of zero a year ago.

Bozeman's mayor, Jeff Krauss, a Republican, said he thought there was 
an element of economic fairness to be considered in the debate about 
medical marijuana's future. "I don't think anybody passed it thinking 
we were creating an industry," he said, referring to the 2004 voter 
referendum. But like it or not, he said, it has become one, and legal 
investments in the millions of dollars have been made.

"Somewhere around 25 people have made anywhere from a $60,000 to a 
$100,000 bet on this industry," Mr. Krauss said, referring to the 
local startups and their capital costs.

"Now the Legislature has got us saying, 'Ha, too bad, you lose,' " 
Mr. Krauss added. "Boy is that a bad message to send when we're in 
the doldrums."

One owner of a gardening supply company in the Bozeman area estimated 
that a person could essentially buy a job for $15,000, beginning a 
small growing operation with 100 plants. Especially for construction 
trade workers who were used to being self-employed before the 
recession, the owner said, the rhythms of the new industry feel familiar.

"Forty to 50 percent of customers come from construction," said the 
owner, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because her national 
suppliers threatened to stop doing business with her if their 
products were openly associated with marijuana. "Plumbers, 
electricians, the whole genre of working-class, blue-collar Montana."

There are shadowy corners in the supposedly compassionate world of 
medical marijuana. The owner of one downtown pastry shop, where the 
sale of marijuana cookies and brownies accounts for about 15 percent 
of revenue, said he broke off a relationship with his first marijuana 
provider, who wanted the baker to use less marijuana in the products 
and falsify the ingredients to save the grower production costs.

And it is easy to find workers in this new economy who were in the 
illegal pot world before. But it is also easy to find people like 
Josh Werle, 29, who took a job as a grower at a company called A 
Kinder Caregiver after work as a commercial painter dried up.

Mr. Werle, a fourth-generation Montanan, said his family had seen 
many industries fade and fail over the decades -- from railroads to 
agriculture, and now, in his case, construction. He said he had also 
worried about his health as a painter, breathing fumes all day. But 
the economy is what finally pushed him out.

"I never envisioned myself working in this," said Tara Gregorich, 29, 
who graduated last May from Montana State University with a degree in 
environmental horticultural science. She sat under the lights in an 
industrial grow room, legs splayed around a plant that she was 
trimming lower shoots from to encourage growth. "But this is one of 
the few industries in Montana that is year-round."

At Gallatin Electric, Rick Schmidt said he still made a sharp 
distinction between medical marijuana and street drugs. Illegal drug 
dealers, he said, "should have the book thrown at them."

But he thinks medical use probably does have benefits.

Mr. Schmidt said his father-in-law, who suffers from post-polio 
syndrome, was considering applying for a medical marijuana card.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake