Why Reward Bad Behavior, Littleton?
If you plan to go to Special Town Meeting on Tuesday night, you’re going to hear from the Planning Board on Article Five, which, I predict, will be pitched as an administrative update to the current bylaw—a no-big-deal change.
This is not true.
If Littleton town meeting voters approve Article Five, Sanctuary Medicinals will be handed a monopoly.
In our capitalistic framework, monopolies are illegal because they remove any and all meaningful competition in the marketplace, which is the cornerstone of capitalism itself.
So, how does Article Five create this monopoly for Jason Sidman and his business, Sanctuary Medicinals?
Article Five seeks to limit the number of licenses for a cannabis grow facility like his to one license, a license he already holds.
As the holder of this license, Jason Sidman has made millions and millions of dollars by his capacity to produce cannabis far cheaper than ANY other cannabis grower in the Commonwealth because Littleton’s electricity is far cheaper than any other town’s where growing cannabis is allowed.
I suspect that, years ago, when Jason Sidman began looking for a place to site his grow facility, his first question was “Where’s the least expensive place to do this in Massachusetts?” because, as any thoughtful capitalist knows, the cheaper the costs to produce the commodity, the greater the profits.
That sort of forward planning makes sense within the framework of capitalism, but capitalism itself depends upon—and through our anti-monopoly laws requires—a free and open marketplace.
If Littleton voters pass Article Five, no other cannabis grower of Sanctuary’s size will be allowed to compete against Sanctuary in town. And moreover, no other grower in the entire the Commonwealth will ever be able to compete against Sanctuary Medicinals because no other grower gets its electricity from Littleton Electric as Jason Sidman does.
Monopolies are illegal and unAmerican.
Additionally, Sanctuary Medicinals has had a serious impact on the residents whose homes are near to Jason Sidman’s highly profitable grow facility. Littleton residents in and around Taylor Street have been living with the scent (stink, stench) of cannabis day in and day out for years. Some days are better than others, but it’s there, disrupting their lives, keeping them indoors.
Last year, when the time came for the renewal of Sanctuary’s license and residents asked the leadership in town—specifically the Planning Board and the Select Board— to address the ongoing and pervasive stench, Jason Sidman presented a plan to remediate the issue. I don’t know if the plan has been executed, but former employees at Sanctuary have told me that Jason Sidman is the sort of businessman who doesn’t act until he’s forced to, that he only cares about profits, that he simply doesn’t care about the impact of his business on people.
A year ago and for an extended length of time, I wrote extensively about the cannabis industry in Littleton. I wrote about backdoor deals, about the self-serving behavior of our elected public officials, about the taking of bribes.
No one has denied these allegations, all of which were based on first-person observations, documentation of the shifty behavior that pervades the cannabis players in town, and basic common sense.
On Tuesday night, when the Planning Board asks the voters at Special Town Meeting to vote for Article Five and makes it sound like “no big deal” I hope that these voters realize the nuance of Article Five, which is nothing more than the very best deal for Jason Sidman by forever codifying his monopolistic grip on the cannabis market both in town and within the Commonwealth.