Most of the customers of the town’s marijuana business are reportedly older people with money.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
By David Kelly
When the oil and gas industry tanked and plans for gambling crapped out, this conservative town of ranchers and roughnecks found salvation in an unlikely place.
Weed.
“We are going to survive by it,” said Darrel Kuhn, who owns the local liquor store, “because we sure as hell can’t survive without it.”
He may be right.
Colorado’s billion-dollar marijuana industry has boosted the economies of many struggling towns. Empire, Trinidad and Parachute have all benefited from infusions of pot money. But DeBeque, on Colorado’s Western Slope, owes its very existence to the cannabis trade.
For generations, oil and gas money paved the roads, built the schools and beautified the parks in this town of 500 along the Colorado River. But over the last few years, plummeting fuel prices have reduced those revenues from a high of $260,000 annually to around $17,000.
“We needed to supplant that loss with something else,” said Lance Stewart, the town administrator. “Otherwise we would have dissolved as a town into Mesa County.”
