Honduras Vice President Wants To Create 85,000 Cannabis Jobs
One of the biggest selling points for reforming cannabis laws, for better or worse, is the industry component. Studies and polls have consistently found that more people support legalizing a taxed and regulated industry than just simply removing prohibition for personal use.
An example of this can be found in the results of a recent poll conducted in Australia. When asked if cannabis should be legal 50% of poll respondents expressed support for such a public policy shift. However, more people (55%) supported regulating the cannabis industry like tobacco and alcohol.
In a perfect world, people would support cannabis reform because it’s the right thing to do. In a less perfect world, some amount of voters need a societal financial incentive in order to support cannabis reform.
Job Creation
Recent history has clearly demonstrated that when the legal cannabis industry is allowed to operate, the industry can create a significant number of jobs.
For instance, the legal cannabis industry is responsible for creating over 151,000 jobs in Canada, and at least another 428,000 in the United States. You can compare those numbers to the number of jobs in other large industries and you will quickly see the job creation potential of the emerging cannabis industry.
Consider the fact that the United States Bureau of Labor and Statistics estimates that there are 285,980 hairdressers, hairstylists, and cosmetologists in the U.S.
The legal cannabis industry clearly exceeds that number. The cannabis industry’s job creation potential is even more impressive when considering that cannabis is still prohibited at the federal level in the United States.
Once the legal cannabis industry is permitted to exist in as many places as salons, the number of jobs in the legal cannabis industry will be exponentially greater than it is currently.
Honduras
The Vice President of Honduras has expressed a very strong desire to legalize medical cannabis in his country, seeming to be largely motivated by the industry’s ability to create jobs.
“First, what I propose is a project to generate employment and to generate foreign exchange for the country. I’m not thinking of legalizing marijuana, nor the medicinal part. There are simply two objectives: to generate employment, because -for example- 5,000 hectares generate 85,000 jobs and we have a deficit of half a million unemployed. Apart from that, it is a millionaire business, because the countries that are close to the equator have sun all year round, we have excellent lighting. So, the cost of production is low, it is so low that producing a gram costs 15 cents of a dollar and producing the same gram in Europe or the United States costs above 1 dollar.” Honduras’ Vice President Salvador Nasralla stated in a recent interview with El Planteo.
Honduras has a population of roughly 10 million people, with roughly 6.4 million of them being 18 years old or older. The unemployment rate among Honduras’ labor force is about 10%, so the creation of 85,000 jobs would provide a tremendous boost to the struggling country.
Cannabis reform is not imminent in Honduras, however, the country is definitely trending in the right direction. It will be a while before the country generates the number of jobs that Vice President Nasralla is hoping for, but any number of legal cannabis jobs is better than the current situation.