How hateful rhetoric connects to real-world violence |
- Under Biden, Pakistan and the US face a dilemma about the breadth of their relationship
- Now is the time to diversify the nation’s medical workforce. Here’s how.
- Designing a universal child allowance: Who can claim which kids?
- Pot, water theft, and environmental harms in the US and Mexico
| Under Biden, Pakistan and the US face a dilemma about the breadth of their relationship Posted: 12 Apr 2021 11:54 AM PDT By Madiha Afzal After the unpredictability of the Trump years, Pakistan approached Joe Biden's win and the new administration with both expectation and apprehension. It hoped that the administration would buy its pitch for a reset and for broadening relations beyond Afghanistan, but it worried about "baggage" that the Biden team could bring from its experience during the Obama years — the second half of which was a relative low point in the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. Nearly 100 days into the new administration, it appears that redefining U.S.-Pakistan relations isn't going to be quite as easy as Islamabad had hoped, even as Pakistan concertedly pushes a new geo-economic vision. President Biden has not yet spoken to Prime Minister Imran Khan. Nor did Biden invite Pakistan to a planned leaders summit on climate change later this month, though the leaders of India and Bangladesh will be there, and Pakistan was the only country among the world's 10 most populous to not receive an invitation. Its absence is all the more pointed given Pakistan's efforts to mitigate climate change, including its commitment to plant a billion trees. Khan claims he's not bothered. Biden's Special Envoy for Climate Change John Kerry, meanwhile, is currently in the region — visiting India and Bangladesh, but not Pakistan. Separately, Pakistan continues to play a key role in the Afghan peace process. Trump took a transactional approach to Pakistan, which worked well in some ways. What Pakistan wants now is a relationship with the U.S. that is broader in scope, and includes trade and investment. Will Biden deliver? What Pakistan wantsIn recent months, Pakistan's civilian and military leadership have together been promoting a new focus on "geo-economics" — an approach that emphasizes regional trade and connectivity, and stresses that Pakistan is open for business. The new focus recognizes that a geostrategic approach only goes so far, and if Pakistan is to rise on the world stage (as its neighbor India has done), that position will have to be predicated on economic growth. In tandem, Pakistan says it wants to co-exist with its neighbors and wants a peaceful outcome in Afghanistan. It seeks a potential détente with India: In February, the two agreed to honor a 2003 ceasefire agreement along the Line of Control in Kashmir, and there might be more in the offing on a rapprochement. In a recent speech in Islamabad, Pakistan's chief of army staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, notably said: "We feel that it is time to bury the past and move forward." Pakistan also wants a more broad-based relationship with the U.S., one that goes beyond strategic concerns and the war in Afghanistan. It is conveying openness to the West, with its leadership stating that the country's economic fortunes are not wedded to China — and the $62 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a flagship project of China's Belt and Road Initiative — alone. In his speech last month, Bajwa said: "While CPEC remains central to our vision, only seeing Pakistan through CPEC prism is also misleading. Our immensely vital geostrategic location and a transformed vision make us a country of immense and diverse potential." Pakistan's foreign minister has also said as much: "[Americans] have to understand that our relationship with China is not a zero-sum game for them. They should come, compete and invest." The problem with this pitch is that Pakistan's regulatory climate is less than ideal for investors. The foreign minister and other officials have also suggested that Pakistan can serve as an interlocutor in the U.S. relationship with China, harkening back to an approach that worked well half a century ago. But in 2021, the U.S. likely won't take Pakistan up on this. A tough startPakistan's relationship with the Biden administration got off to a bumpy start. On January 28, Pakistan's supreme court upheld a lower court's judgment acquitting Omar Saeed Sheikh, the man convicted of masterminding the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 — a kidnapping that led to his murder. The Biden administration swiftly denounced the court's decision, calling it an "affront to terrorism victims everywhere, including in Pakistan," adding that the U.S. expected "the Pakistani government to expeditiously review its legal options to ensure justice is served." The decision came the day before Secretary of State Antony Blinken's first calls with the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan. The juxtaposition of the two readouts presented a sharp, unavoidable contrast. In his conversation with Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, Blinken focused on America's concern with the Sheikh judgment; in his conversation with Indian Minister of External Affairs S. Jaishankar, he emphasized the importance of the U.S.-India relationship moving forward. The Afghanistan factorThe Biden administration looks at Pakistan through the lens of Afghanistan, much like the Trump administration did. Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad continues his regular visits to Islamabad and the army headquarters in Rawalpindi for discussions on the peace process. But while the Trump administration privileged Pakistan over all other third parties on Afghanistan, the Biden administration hasn't done so. In a leaked letter to Ghani, Blinken notably mentioned India and Iran as well as Russia, China, and Pakistan as countries that could help in the peace process. The mention of India, in particular, worries Pakistan. Ultimately, at the troika-plus-one (China, Russia, and the United States, plus Pakistan) talks on the Afghan peace process that were held in Moscow last month, Pakistan was the "plus one," but it seems likely that India will play a greater role going forward than it has in the past few years. The dilemma is that the U.S. wants more from Pakistan on Afghanistan, including to try to get the Taliban to agree to a ceasefire. Pakistan insists that it is doing all that it can, that it has already done a lot by bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table, and that there are real limits to its leverage over the group. There is truth to those limits, given that the Taliban has evolved away from Pakistani control since the 1990s, and Pakistan's influence over Taliban field commanders, in particular, may be a lot less than we imagine. While Pakistan wants to retain its key position in the Afghan peace process, one it attained precisely because of the leverage it has over the Taliban, Pakistanis tend to begrudge the demand to "do more" to rein in the Taliban, particularly after the U.S. negotiated a peace deal with the group. Across recent U.S. administrations, of course, the thinking has been that Pakistan's support for the Taliban (including sanctuaries for the group in Pakistan) caused the United States to lose the war in Afghanistan. The two countries continue to see past each other, bedeviling the relationship. Through it all, the U.S. ends up privileging Pakistan's military — its usual partner and the one institution in Pakistan it perceives as effective — over its civilian officials. The Biden administrationBiden knows Pakistan well through his years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as vice president. Pakistanis had hoped that that would be enough for a reset and for widening the scope of the relationship, but the reality is that Biden is too busy elsewhere — with more pressing concerns both domestically and abroad — to focus on Pakistan beyond the Afghanistan issue, at least for now. Pakistani officials have acknowledged privately that the Biden administration "was not giving encouraging signals.” Washington will likely continue to see Pakistan through the prism of countries in its neighborhood: Afghanistan, India, and China in particular. Paradoxically, Trump's unorthodoxy had soothed some of Pakistan's fears; its leaders felt for a time as if America's relationship with Pakistan was decoupled from its relationship with India. That feeling is unlikely to last. In Pakistan, the old perceptions that Republican administrations are better for it than Democratic administrations and that the U.S. favors India at Pakistan's expense are never far from the surface. The legacy of the Obama years likely weighs heavily, and not just on the issue of Afghanistan and safe havens for the Haqqani network in Pakistan, which became a sticking point in the relationship during Biden's time as vice president. The Navy Seal raid on Abbottabad in May 2011 that killed Osama bin Laden marked a low point during those years. For Pakistan, this raised the issue of sovereignty. For America, the episode laid bare a greater issue: that it could not trust Pakistan, and the Obama administration's relationship with the country never recovered from this. (Pakistanis have their own grievances from that year, when a CIA contractor, Raymond Davis, shot and killed two Pakistani men in Lahore, and a NATO attack in November accidentally killed 24 Pakistani soldiers.) Looking aheadPakistan has made it clear that it wants a different relationship with the U.S. But what's equally clear is that the United States isn't buying its new geo-economic pitch quite so easily. Part of this is because it is unrealistic: Pakistan doesn't yet have the economic depth needed for this new approach. But it would still be useful for the Biden administration to look beyond its singular Afghanistan lens at Pakistan. The country has changed since 2016; it knows it needs a new paradigm, and business as usual is not enough. This presents a good time to rethink U.S. engagement with Pakistan. Climate change would have been an obvious new issue on which to cooperate, and not engaging with Pakistan in that arena could be a missed opportunity. For a new approach for getting the relationship to work, both countries will have to do more to meet each other somewhere in the middle. The Biden team needs to keep an open mind and look at Pakistan with a broader lens. And if Pakistan doesn't want strategic concerns to dominate its relationship with the U.S., it needs to offer up something more than words: real economic incentives.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Now is the time to diversify the nation’s medical workforce. Here’s how. Posted: 12 Apr 2021 09:27 AM PDT By Ngozi F. Anachebe In hindsight, 2020 is appearing to be a pivotal time in medical education. 2020 saw the emergence of the SARS-2 Covid-19 pandemic, social upheavals, the decision by the National Board for Medical Examiners (NBME) to make the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE) Step 1 examination pass/fail, increased numbers of applications to medical schools especially from racial and ethnic groups underrepresented in medicine (URM) and the increasing recognition by so many well-meaning people in medicine and healthcare of the importance of diversifying our medical school classes. All these developments make now the best time to make our admissions actions match the rhetoric. There are many documented benefits of diversity in medicine. Black patients and Black babies have better health outcomes when their physicians are Black. URM students add important benefits to medical school classes and these have been widely published. URM students are more likely to return to medically underserved communities to practice. They have a better understanding of and compassion for the issues their future patients face for they come from the communities they will serve. URM students bring their unique perspectives, life stories, and grit to the medical school classes they join and, thus, enhance the academic experience of their medical school classes. These URM students help their classmates learn about their diverse cultures and help their classmates become comfortable and familiar with cultural mores different from theirs. In so doing, URM students help improve the cultural competency of the entire class. The importance of diversity extends to patient care outcomes. Minority patients have a higher acceptance of and trust in their physicians who are of the same race and ethnicity leading to positive health outcomes for them. With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, these URM physicians are, indeed, the lifeline for their under-resourced minority patients. The proliferation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) officers recently appointed at most organizations is evidence that academic medical centers recognize the importance of diversifying the physician workforce. Many medical specialties have followed suit and established DEI committees to help recruit URM students to their programs. For many years now, many schools and organizations seem to agree to diversify their medical school classes and residency programs, but the outcomes vary and have not shown a significant increase in the numbers of URM candidates selected. For example, for the 2020 allopathic medical school entering classes, only 1,767 of the 22,197 matriculants identified as Black or African American. In 2018, only 5.0% of active physicians identified as Black or African American compared to 13.4% of the 2019 United States population who identify as Black or African American. The role of pipeline programs: To increase the number of competitive URM applicants to medical school, medical schools must establish effective pipeline programs:
Diversity is an accreditation requirement: Diversity of medical school classes is such an important outcome that the Liaison Committee on Medical Education which accredits all allopathic medical schools in the United States and Canada included this as an accreditation requirement, standard 3.3. Many schools work to increase the numbers of URM students in their classes as a result. Some schools have made some significant strides. However, the pace of diversification is slow, and many schools go after the same small cohort of URM applicants who possess competitive Medical College Admissions Tests (MCAT) and science grade point averages (GPA). Unfortunately, many medical schools use both the MCAT and GPA, in large part, to select their entering classes. These two metrics are therefore seen as the "gate keepers", limiting URM applicants' chances of matriculating at medical schools. MCAT scores do not predict the quality of medical care an applicant will end up providing to their patients following their training. MCAT scores do not predict one's ability to work effectively in teams or predict the level of advocacy a medical student, resident, or practicing physician will have for their patients or their service to vulnerable communities. Lastly, MCAT scores do not predict empathy. Yet, some schools base their selection mainly on applicants with stellar scores. MCAT scores predict performance on standardized exams. MCAT scores are a range and seem to have a "threshold effect". Many medical schools have been able to recruit students with "modest" MCAT scores (middle range scores) and have posted excellent student outcomes. Schools need to move away from this heavy reliance on the MCAT score. Holistic review: Medical schools should utilize the holistic review framework in their applicant selection:
Inclusive and affirming learner environment: Recruiting diverse students is only part of the goal. Schools must intentionally create inclusive learner-focused and empowering environments to assist URM students feel at home and to thrive. Recruiting and retaining URM staff, faculty, and administration are equally important in helping URM students develop this sense of belonging which will increase their chance of flourishing. Morehouse School of Medicine has been able to achieve these outcomes. Morehouse School of Medicine embodies diversity at all levels, uses holism in its medical school applicant selection, creates a nurturing and welcoming learning environment and has demonstrated successful outcomes for her students regardless of their socio-demographic descriptors and entering academic metrics.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Designing a universal child allowance: Who can claim which kids? Posted: 12 Apr 2021 06:57 AM PDT By Jacob Goldin, Ariel Jurow Kleiman The recently enacted American Rescue Plan is a sea change in the federal government's approach to the social safety net. For the first time since the Clinton welfare reforms, a major cash benefit – the Child Tax Credit (CTC) – will support children growing up in the lowest-income families, including those without ties to the formal labor market. Although the current expansion only lasts through 2021, a permanent version of the reform could drastically reduce childhood poverty for years to come. This policy brief considers an important but frequently over-looked element of the CTC's design: the "child-claiming" rules. These rules determine which taxpayers may claim which children for purposes of the credit. The current rules arbitrarily exclude certain children from the credit and create headaches for taxpayers and the IRS alike. They are also poorly suited to a benefit disbursed periodically throughout the year rather than in one lump sum. In their place, we propose a simplified set of child-claiming rules that would make an expanded CTC more inclusive and easier to claim and administer. Under current law, a taxpayer claiming a child for the CTC must satisfy several tests with respect to the child. For one, the taxpayer must be the child's parent (including legal foster/adoptive parents), grandparent, sibling, aunt, or uncle—a "relationship test." Additionally, in general, the taxpayer must live with the child for at least half of the year—a "residency test." For non-parent claimants, the taxpayer must also be older than the child and must have income at least as high as any other potential claimant. By imposing these tests, the current rules prevent certain children from being claimed by anyone, effectively excluding them from the CTC's benefits. In particular, the relationship test excludes children being raised by more distant relatives (like cousins) or by close family friends – over 300,000 children each year. Similarly, the residency test excludes children experiencing housing instability who do not spend a majority of the year with any one qualifying taxpayer. Children in these groups are likely the most vulnerable and thus particularly likely to benefit from a child allowance, but are currently excluded because of the child-claiming rules. Moreover, the current rules can be difficult for taxpayers to evaluate. For instance, those who satisfy both the residency and relationship tests may still be ineligible to claim a child if a different potential claimant turns out to have higher income. Mistakes related to the child-claiming rules are the most common source of refundable credit disallowances and contribute to high rates of taxpayer errors. Paying the credit sub-annually will only magnify compliance challenges, since children moving between households can cause a taxpayer to unexpectedly lose eligibility and therefore face a large balance due at tax filing. In turn, the IRS lacks reliable information to validate taxpayers' claims of eligibility, causing it to instead rely on slow-moving correspondence audits that delay refunds and disproportionately burden low-income communities of color. To address these problems, we propose replacing the current child-claiming rules with a more flexible household connection test, evaluated quarterly. To satisfy this test for a given quarter, the claimant must simply live in the same household as the child for a sufficient period of time – say, 30 days. Unlike current law, non-relatives in the household would also be eligible to claim a child. Each child could only be claimed by one taxpayer per quarter; conflict resolution rules would govern the rare cases in which multiple taxpayers claim the same child. These rules would turn on factors such as the duration of shared residence and the taxpayers' relationships with the child (for example, all else equal, claims by parents would receive priority).
Evaluating the child-claiming rules on a quarterly basis would ensure that payments follow children who move between different households during the course of the year. A monthly evaluation could be viable as well—if a bit more burdensome to apply. In either case, a simple safe-harbor would ease the compliance burden of frequent evaluation: anyone who lives with a child for more than half of the year could claim the child for the entire year. Our proposed approach would help ensure that the expanded CTC reaches as many children as possible, especially those most in need. It would bring in currently excluded children being raised by non-relatives as well as those who move frequently between households. It also gives households the flexibility to decide who is best-positioned to claim a child. Such flexibility makes compliance easier for taxpayers and accommodates the diverse range of child-care arrangements that families may adopt. At the same time, limiting flexibility by requiring some degree of shared residence between a claimant and a child is important for channeling benefits to someone whose spending is likely to benefit the child. Our proposal aims to strike this balance in an administrable way. Additionally, assessing eligibility on a quarterly basis would reduce the risk of accidental over-claims by households and make reconciliation of quarterly (or monthly) payments less burdensome. With an annual eligibility determination, if a child unexpectedly moves out of a household mid-year, the household would be required to pay back any credits already received during the year. Under our proposed rules, although such a household would no longer be eligible for future payments, it would not be required to pay back credits already received for previous quarters in which the child was present. If the expanded CTC phases-out by income, additional child-claiming rules are needed to prevent gaming. For instance, the rules must prevent a child living in a very high-income family from being claimed by a lower-earning older sibling. To do so, we propose restricting non-parents' ability to claim a child unless (1) their income exceeds the income of any parent living in the household, or (2) the parent's income is below the start of the income phase-out. As long as one of these conditions is met, gaming to avoid the phase-out cannot explain a household's decision to have a non-parent claim the credit. Note that while the first prong of this test is already present under current law, the second prong can dramatically simplify potential claimants' eligibility determinations; that is, a non-parent might not know the parent's precise income but still be quite confident that it does not exceed $200,000 (the current start to the CTC phase-out). Other details would need to be worked out, including the precise contours of the conflict-resolution rules, whether to unify these rules across other child-related benefits (most notably the EITC), whether the payment is subject to offset by creditors (which would increase gaming incentives), and implications for bankruptcy law. These considerations and others also depend heavily on which agency ultimately administers the benefit. In particular, the question of how the agency would establish claimants' eligibility is an important one. Regardless of how such matters are resolved, our proposed approach—adopting a quarterly household-connection test—would improve the functioning of the credit for children and families. The authors did not receive financial support from any firm or person for this article or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article. The authors are not currently an officer, director, or board member of any organization with a financial or political interest in this article.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Pot, water theft, and environmental harms in the US and Mexico Posted: 12 Apr 2021 06:55 AM PDT By Vanda Felbab-Brown The government of Mexico is on the verge of legalizing cannabis for industrial, medical, and recreational purposes, legislation that would make Mexico only the third country to legalize all aspects of cannabis production and all types of the plant's use. In a recent piece, I explored whether the legalization was likely to deliver the promised advancement in civil liberties in Mexico, reduce the size of its prison population, reduce abuse by its military and police forces and facilitate law enforcement focus on serious crimes, also whether it would generate high tax revenues for the government and legal incomes and social mobility for farmers of illicit crops. Here, I focus on the widely unacknowledged negative environmental impacts of cannabis cultivation, such as the massive use and depletion of water. In my column in two weeks, I will explore the likelihood that legalization will eliminate the black market and reduce violent crime and deprive violent criminal groups of money. Cannabis is a very water-intensive plant, and its legal and illegal cultivation on a large scale easily results in water depletion. From environmental protection and public policy perspectives, large-scale illegal cultivation of any crop, especially water thirsty crops like marijuana, often has correlative bad environmental impacts. Since illegal cultivators don't pay for water use, they tend to deplete water at even more wasteful rates with little regard for sustainability. The problem in Mexico is that much of the country's legal agricultural businesses equally steal water for the production of other legal crops. In a country where both water scarcity and water theft are pervasive, the odds are very high that many large cannabis businesses as well as small farmers who will eventually receive cannabis cultivation licenses will behave just as perniciously. Water theft in California is alleged to be frequently associated with legal and illegal cultivation of cannabis. It equally pervades legal and illegal cannabis cultivation in Oregon and Colorado. To cultivate a single cannabis plant to harvest indoors requires about 450 gallons (1,710 liters), and about twice that much outdoors — several times greater than the daily water consumption of an individual in the U.S. If similar water use is maintained in Mexico's dry hot lands, that number may be even higher. Already Mexico along with the United States has a very high water footprint per person: In the United States, the footprint is 2,842 cubic meters per capita per year, of which agriculture consumes 85 percent. In Mexico, it is 1,978 cubic meters per capita per year, with agriculture taking up 92 percent. In both countries, these numbers are much higher than the global average. To avoid water costs, legal and illegal cultivators of cannabis in the United States thus often seek to use water from sources other than metered taps. In California's Siskiyou County alone, illegal marijuana cultivators were estimated to expend about 1.5 to 2 million gallons (5.7 to 7.6 million liters) of unpaid water a day in 2014. In the Emerald Triangle of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity counties, ecologically-important water streams, on which threatened steelhead and salmon depend, were diverted to supply the cultivation of marijuana, with some 24 streams going dry due to the marijuana-cultivation-driven diversion and drought. But the 2016 legalization of recreational cannabis in California did not radically reduce water theft. First, only some licensed cultivators of cannabis complied with water regulations. Many continued to use water without paying for it or siphoned it illegally. Many illegal cannabis cultivators did not apply for legal cultivation permits. Some cultivators are deterred because a legal permit would require them to pay taxes, comply with costly regulations (such as that all indoor cultivation has to use 100 percent renewable energy), and obtain water permits. Getting cannabis cultivation consistent with California's code is thus a costly and complex proposition involving getting permits from California's waterboard, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the county. Many cultivators find it cheap and easier to fly under the radar. Like all agricultural producers, cannabis cultivators in California also massively overuse and deplete inadequately regulated groundwater. In many ways, the cannabis industry behaves as poorly toward California's water as do other types of agricultural production in the state. Second, large-scale illegal cultivation of cannabis persists in California five years after legalization and despite intensive law enforcement eradication of the illegal grows. The scale of the problem is staggering: Even at the end of 2020, illegal cannabis grows sucked up between 11.4 million and 36.3 million liters of water daily! The widespread illegal cultivation contributes to water depletion and conflict over water and has other bad environmental consequences. Illegal cultivators pipe water from threatened wetlands and rivers, endangering entire ecosystems, and use dangerous pesticides and chemicals. Illegal cultivation in national and state forests also undermines local biodiversity, including for highly vulnerable species already threatened by habitat destruction and pushed into ever smaller corners of land. The legality-illegality issues surrounding cannabis cultivation and water use can be complex. For example, in the severe-drought-afflicted California Siskiyou County, local ranchers were legally selling their water (often pumped ground water) to unknown users, widely believed to be growers of vast illegal cannabis grows. In a place that has already depleted much of its surface water, the water level of the entire aquifer has receded substantially, so much so that household showers and water taps have gone dry. Public protests against such water sales resulted in a resolution to make it a public nuisance to pump water solely to irrigate illegal cannabis grows. Yet the ordinance lacks teeth: it does not allow government employees to enter private property and turn off water. Determining pumping "solely" for illegal cannabis grows is close to impossible. Thus, the undesirable water sales for likely illegal pot have persisted even after the ordinance was passed. And fundamentally and critically, California lacks comprehensive groundwater monitoring and regulation. Such regulation is also desperately lacking in Mexico, where even surface water regulations is mostly ignored. Other disputes over water rights between marijuana growers and other state residents and farmers have flared up in other ways too: The influx of growers from Eastern U.S. states and the move of urban California residents into rural areas has caused many residents to believe that marijuana growers do not understand the laws of prior appropriation and senior rights, and assume that if a stream goes through their property, they can draw water from it, and hence steal water. Many Californians thus allege water theft. Clearly, these practices are immensely undesirable from a water conservation and broader environmental conservation perspective. But whether they constitute water theft — i.e., a violation of existing laws and ordinances, depends on local surface water regulations — an enormously complex field in California — combining riparian laws and appropriation laws. Sometimes taking water from rivers and even public hydrants does constitute a violation, other times it does not. If marijuana growers are taking water from rivers on public lands to which no one has been accorded a prior water right, they are not engaging in theft. If they are siphoning off water from someone who has a water right in a specific area, they engage in theft. Ascertaining whether water use complies with regulations thus often requires "forensic hydrology," such as wading in cold water streams for weeks to measure flows, testing multiple hypotheses for why creeks are drying, and trolling remote places for identification of potential illegal hookups. These highly labor-intensive undertakings often vastly surpass the personnel resources of local water boards and limit the effectiveness of public regulation. Some clear violations of regulation, i.e., water theft, occur. The Klamath County Sheriff's office, for example, has identified cases of cannabis growers directly diverting water from water canals, stealing from neighbor's irrigators, filling up portable tanks from rivers in violation of regulations, purchasing water illegally sold from community wells, and placing illegal water pipes. Legal and sustainable water use for cannabis cultivation is possible: Using recycled water systems and metering water delivery to each plant can reduce water use from six gallons of water a day to under two gallons a day. However, installing a recycled water system (legally mandated in some counties, such as Sonoma County) can cost $50,000, a hefty fee for a small cultivator. In many of Mexico's prime agricultural areas, such as the state of Guanajuato, the unpaid overuse of water by agricultural businesses and small farmers alike has produced such water scarcity that deep underground water polluted with arsenic and fluoride is now regularly used by the poor for drinking, and is likely also used by businesses for agriculture. Yet it is the agricultural farms that are the big users; they consume some 80-90 percent of all water in the region and do not pay for it. The odds are poor that cannabis cultivators in Mexico will behave any better with legal cannabis. Cannabis cultivation can also have a large carbon footprint. In Colorado, for example, researchers from Colorado State University found that electricity production and natural gas consumption of indoor cannabis cultivation (centering on heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), supplies of carbon dioxide for accelerated plant growth, and high-intensity growth lights have pushed the crop's carbon footprint sky-high. In Colorado, the carbon emissions from indoor cannabis cultivation are a staggering 30 percent higher than coal mining emissions! How does your joint sit with your environmental consciousness? To a considerable extent, the huge emissions are a function of the fact that cannabis must be grown close to retail stores in Colorado, privileging indoor cultivation. Utility companies compound the problem by giving rebates to indoor farms, putting outdoor growers at a competitive disadvantage. Mexico, where much of the forthcoming cannabis cultivation will presumably take place outdoors, is likely to have a much smaller carbon footprint. But its water footprint may be higher than in the United States, with even a higher percentage supplied out of stolen water. Thus, before you light up your Mexico joint a year or so down the road, you should consider what kind of environmental impact you're having and demand only pot with water-smart and environmentally-benign certification. Yet the poor security and rule of law in Mexico will undermine the credibility of most such environmentally-sustainable certification. As in many other aspects of the legal cannabis industry, large-scale foreign growers will be far better positioned to acquire such certification than small-scale indigenous or poor farmers who will neither be able to afford such certification, nor likely comply with any environmentally-sensitive growth methods. And many marginalized farmers are likely to operate in territories controlled by criminal groups where certifiers may not dare venture. Indeed, the chances are slim that cannabis legalization will eliminate Mexico's black market cannabis production, let alone other aspects of violent criminality, and that it will push criminal groups out of Mexico's pot business – the subjects of my column in two weeks.  This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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