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Between ten o’clock this morning and around one o’clock in the afternoon today, I spoke with five marijuana sellers.
Here in early 2020, speaking with sellers of reefer, devil’s cabbage or pot was not under the same circumstances for me as when I approached one at my high school for the first time back in the eighties or a guy who lived down the hall of my dorm at the UW back in ’89.
Nor was it comparable to those several thousand days when I spoke with five or more drug dealers on a daily basis. Those were years that I toiled in vain as a P.O. in the basement depths of one of the most hellish workplace environments that one could conjure, the Criminal Courts administration building at 26th & California in the crime-infested City of Chicago.
No, my calls today were of more a professional nature and ones that I never envisioned making when I began my career as an economic development professional back in the fall of 2000.
For those of you unfamiliar with what an economic developer employed by a local unit of government does, the elevator speech version of it is that an economic developer is responsible for planning, designing, and implementing economic development strategies, as well as acting as a key liaison between public and private sectors and the community. While that extremely…
