To the editor:
The recent lawsuits and commentary arguing that there are no economic community impacts associated with the widespread commercial availability of marijuana in Great Barrington miss an essential point.
The town of Great Barrington helps fund our schools where health programs are delivered to children who drive by dispensaries every day, including one that directly links cannabis with wellness.
Prevention work is not an impact. As the name implies, it is designed to prevent impacts.
Anyone with the vaguest understanding of the community’s history knows those impacts have bled money (as well as actual blood) from the budget to pay for police to respond to substance-related deaths, EMTs to administer life-saving procedures, and firefighters to utilize the Jaws of Life to extract young bodies out of vehicles that had been driven by people under the influence of substances.
As my teenage daughter likes to say, “Facts.”
Parsing the law to yield the claim that there are no municipal costs associated with the normalization of substance use as a wellness product for children is ridiculous and unbecoming.
Erik Bruun
Great Barrington
