Another avalanche victim can be added to the growing list of fatalities amongst the citizens of Nelsonia, in the unfortunate form of a young woman who had everything going for her; until she decided to snowmobile into overly risky avalanche territory and test the experienced knowledge she had in regards to backcountry touring and then paid the ultimate price, leaving behind more grieving family and friends and those who knew her lovely soul.

Part of the problem with these avoidable disasters is how much privileged Nelsonia fetishizes recreational snow sports in harmful areas that aren’t monitored and managed like the local ski hills are, especially when dealing with conditions described by Avalanche Canada as involving “historically unforgiving risks”. At the same time, Igor the stooge of the oligarchic Nelsonia Chamber of Commercialism is publicizing how the regional cannabis industry is still trying to gain a foothold into the legalized cannabis industry, by noting how weed tourists support “outdoor sports, food and culture”, while their much-coveted 20-40 years old demographic “spends more than average tourists”.

As those who lived here before legalization occurred know all too well, fruity Nelsonia was famous for its pot cultivation, culture & economic spinoffs, making it one of the world’s leading areas for marijuana success, so how did a global leader become an also-ran in the very industry it helped promote to the nation and beyond? A large reason was because the misguided political and business leaders of the time, such as ignorant ex-Mayor Ghoulie and his right-wing conservative mob of backroom boys in Wormtongue’s Crypt of Commerce, decided to persecute the scene’s influencers of the day like the Holy Smoke crew using the heavy hand of the white male power law to shut down any hope of future profit and collective community benefit, in favour of idolizing the tech industry which includes the elitist mountain adventure scene that will kill more locals than cannabis ever has.

Every fall during harvest season, kooky Nelsonia would be flooded with so-called illegal money that spilled over into all the service industries and cultural crowds while supporting so many workers, businesses & restaurants, etc., while never being a threat to anyone’s livelihoods, let alone their lives. The racist cops and the bigoted civic staff tried to hype up the supposed dangers of organized crime along the lines of the Disunited States’ discriminatory War on Drugs, but anyone who’s been here long enough knows that the greatest danger to folks in this neck of the woods is all the avalanches on the wild slopes that take out far too many positive contributors to our beleaguered society. Instead of highlighting the benefits of the relatively harmless ganja economy and making sure that exclusive Nelsonia was ready and primed for the inevitable end of the prohibition era, greedy Ghoulie and his misogynistic Manmoron good old boy enablers decided to prioritize the fossil-fuel burning aristocratic inequality of the snow-sliding tourism racket without emphasizing the inherent lethal dangers involved with snowmobiling into deadly avalanche zones just for a few kicks.

Now, instead of a thriving town riding high on the offshoots from all the legal cannabis tourist trade and its wide-scale egalitarian production, we’re left with a doom-and-gloom bad headline rich man’s hellscape in which the mother of our latest casualty says that she “doesn’t think touring the backcountry is worth the danger (and that) she wishes now that she would have told her daughter that”, adding “if I could talk to her again, I would have said don’t go… just hike in the summer, not in the winter”. Unfortunately, such words of wisdom should have been expressed by the leaders of our devastated village, who even now eulogize how amazing the backcountry recreational opportunities are in our mountains when they’re mourning the lives of their deceased policemen and search & rescue volunteers while giving touristic propaganda quotes to the big-city papers that are focusing on our hamlet in the boonies for all the wrong reasons.

When our white supremacist authorities who should know better are still talking about how experienced, trained & well-equipped their late employees and voters were in the precipitous peaks, they’re completely missing the point that they privileged a hazardous enterprise over a peaceful one that fed and fueled the bank accounts and mouths of our economically challenged burg without risking anyone’s lives in the process. If cannabis had killed as many people as the backcountry biz has, imagine how demonizing these same authoritarian figures would be towards a benign green plant.