Latest from Mormon Land: A Latter-day Saint community gets richer, thanks to marijuana
By David Noyce, | June 6, 2024, 60 a.m. | Updated: 93 a.m.
Grass grows greener in Snowflake
A tiny Latter-day Saint community has gone to pot.
Yes, Arizona’s Snowflake has discovered a new cash crop: marijuana.
Home to one of the faith’s temples, the town of 6,600 residents “boasts the largest cannabis greenhouse in the state, which is employing some 200 people, all of them busy as bees cultivating weed for the heathens,” The Arizona Republic reports. “... It creates a particular conundrum for the faithful, because many of those employees are Latter-day Saints.”
To be clear, toking recreational reefer is certainly against the faith’s Word of Wisdom, but partaking of properly prescribed and legally obtained medical marijuana isn’t.
As for helping to grow grass — legally, of course — well that’s kosher for members, too.
And Copperstate Farms’ 40-acre operation has been a blessing for the bottom line of Snowflake, a heavily Latter-day Saint town founded by Mormon pioneers about 150 miles northeast of Phoenix.
“Our revenues have increased, our population increased, our building has increased, and Copperstate has been a part of that,” Town Manager Brian Richards told The Republic. Snowflake’s sales tax receipts have shot up by nearly 287% between 2016 and 2023.
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