The population in my state is quickly growing.
When I lived out in the plains, I was used to being in a small town that saw many of its young people leave upon graduating high school.
That’s what I did when I wanted to attend college—I went to a school over 1,000 miles away from my home to experience life somewhere else for a change. But now that my new state is swelling beyond capacity, I don’t know how I feel about living here. The roads are always congested and the lines in stores and pharmacies are unreal during our tourist season. It’s really intimidating when I’m on the interstate highway and all of the lanes around me are full of cars driving uncomfortably close to one another. When my state first legalized medical marijuana in 2016, it took over a year for the number of patients to crawl close to 100,000. As of last spring, the number of patients shot up over 700,000. Soon there will be over one million people in my state who have obtained a medical marijuana card. That makes us the third largest marijuana industry in the country despite only being six years old. While we only have medical cannabis at the current moment, there are initiatives being proposed to put recreational marijuana on the ballot in the next general election. Things seem like they’re only going to continue growing and increasing at a rapid rate, regardless of how people like myself feel who have lived here for years and are unhappy with the way things progressed. A lot has certainly changed in a short period of time.