Letter: Smoky in Muskogee

We drive through Oklahoma a few times a year.

Eastern Oklahoma is beautiful, immortalized by Woody Guthrie’s “Oklahoma Hills.” It’s also a place of crushing rural poverty, as bad as “The Grapes of Wrath,” where the casinos, lotteries and dope shops hoover up the loose change of the working poor.

Oklahoma has become the largest producer of marijuana in America — surpassing Mexico as the low cost supplier of weed. More dope farms than all other Western states combined. More dope farms than corn or cotton. A gram of dope can be had for a small fraction of what it sells for in Colorado or California. Weed has become a commodity product — like milk.

So now New York farmers think they’re going to cash in on the weed boom. Maybe so. Only if they can produce a commodity for less than a hard-working Okie operating with little or no regulations. And basically zero regulation of interstate shipments. Good luck.

Chip Northrup
Cooperstown