When residents of the Australian town Mildura looked up on the night of Wednesday, July 20th, they thought the world was ending due to an alien invasion or some sort of explosion of the sun.
An eerie, pink glow had covered the town like a thin blanket, alarming local resident Tammy Szumowski and her family. “I was just like ‘What the hell is that?’ It is very bizarre, this huge pink light in the sky,” she said, according to The Washington Post. “I’m trying not to freak out because I’ve got my girls in the car.”
Some tried to find an explanation for the shocking phenomenon.
“I was driving home and it was dark, and I noticed a very unusual, quite large pink glow,” said Anne Webster, a lawmaker who represents the area in Australia’s Parliament. “I thought that is very strange. My first thought was there has to be a logical reason for this.”
Luckily, the world wasn’t ending and there is a logical explanation for the supernatural scene. The lights were coming from a medical cannabis (marijuana) facility, located on the outskirts of Mildura, around 34 miles northwest of Melbourne in the state of Victoria. The facility unintentionally gave out its secret location while testing LED lights, creating the mysterious glow that attracted all eyes among the 56,000 residents.
While the security guard of the facility was hunting down the source of the light, he realized it was attracting unwanted attention around Mildura.
Usually, blackout curtains are used to hide the LED lights as they encourage plant growth. But on Wednesday, the curtains weren’t closed, revealing a spooky sight visible to anyone within miles of the facility.
“‘In 2016, Australia legalized the cultivation, research and manufacturing of medical marijuana. Today, some 70,000 Australians turn to medical marijuana for relief, bringing in estimated revenue of $160 million in 2021,’ according to Fresh Leaf Analytics, a cannabis market-research company. ‘Australians use medical marijuana primarily for pain, anxiety and sleep problems,’ according to a 2022 study published in the journal Frontiers of Pharmacology.”
Due to the strict Covid lockdown procedures Australians were forced to follow, numbers of prescriptions for marijuana have risen in the last two years, especially with the “‘mental health burden,’” according to The Washington Post.
The first company licensed by Australia to operate cannabis research, Cann Group, received a total grant of $1.4 million from the Victoria state government (located in southeastern Australia). Part of the money was used to fund a commercial medical cannabis facility in the accidently-revealed location of Wednesday’s bizarre incident. Built on the site of an old juice factory, the Mildura medical-cannabis facility had its first harvest this year.
Mildura is known for producing grapes, “supplying wineries across the region,” said the article in The Washington Post. But cannabis production is new territory for Mildura farmers.
“It is providing jobs, and this is only the tip of the iceberg because it has quite a future for growth,” said Webster, the Parliamentary lawmaker, who has toured the Cann facility.
“We’ve resumed normal transmission but it definitely caught everyone’s attention in the meantime,” Peter Crock, the Cann chief executive, said of Wednesday’s incident. “Any publicity is good publicity.”
Sources: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/23/australia-mildura-medical-marijuana-pink-sky/
An eerie, pink glow had covered the town like a thin blanket, alarming local resident Tammy Szumowski and her family. “I was just like ‘What the hell is that?’ It is very bizarre, this huge pink light in the sky,” she said, according to The Washington Post. “I’m trying not to freak out because I’ve got my girls in the car.”
Some tried to find an explanation for the shocking phenomenon.
“I was driving home and it was dark, and I noticed a very unusual, quite large pink glow,” said Anne Webster, a lawmaker who represents the area in Australia’s Parliament. “I thought that is very strange. My first thought was there has to be a logical reason for this.”
Luckily, the world wasn’t ending and there is a logical explanation for the supernatural scene. The lights were coming from a medical cannabis (marijuana) facility, located on the outskirts of Mildura, around 34 miles northwest of Melbourne in the state of Victoria. The facility unintentionally gave out its secret location while testing LED lights, creating the mysterious glow that attracted all eyes among the 56,000 residents.
While the security guard of the facility was hunting down the source of the light, he realized it was attracting unwanted attention around Mildura.
Usually, blackout curtains are used to hide the LED lights as they encourage plant growth. But on Wednesday, the curtains weren’t closed, revealing a spooky sight visible to anyone within miles of the facility.
“‘In 2016, Australia legalized the cultivation, research and manufacturing of medical marijuana. Today, some 70,000 Australians turn to medical marijuana for relief, bringing in estimated revenue of $160 million in 2021,’ according to Fresh Leaf Analytics, a cannabis market-research company. ‘Australians use medical marijuana primarily for pain, anxiety and sleep problems,’ according to a 2022 study published in the journal Frontiers of Pharmacology.”
Due to the strict Covid lockdown procedures Australians were forced to follow, numbers of prescriptions for marijuana have risen in the last two years, especially with the “‘mental health burden,’” according to The Washington Post.
The first company licensed by Australia to operate cannabis research, Cann Group, received a total grant of $1.4 million from the Victoria state government (located in southeastern Australia). Part of the money was used to fund a commercial medical cannabis facility in the accidently-revealed location of Wednesday’s bizarre incident. Built on the site of an old juice factory, the Mildura medical-cannabis facility had its first harvest this year.
Mildura is known for producing grapes, “supplying wineries across the region,” said the article in The Washington Post. But cannabis production is new territory for Mildura farmers.
“It is providing jobs, and this is only the tip of the iceberg because it has quite a future for growth,” said Webster, the Parliamentary lawmaker, who has toured the Cann facility.
“We’ve resumed normal transmission but it definitely caught everyone’s attention in the meantime,” Peter Crock, the Cann chief executive, said of Wednesday’s incident. “Any publicity is good publicity.”
Sources: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/07/23/australia-mildura-medical-marijuana-pink-sky/
