When the evening sky over the sleepy Australian town of Mildura lit up with a pink glow, local resident Tammy Shumovsky wondered if the apocalypse had begun. But the solution to the unusual phenomenon turned out to be more prosaic. “I watched it and tried to be a calm, sensible mother and tell the children – there’s nothing to worry about,” she told the BBC. “But there was one question in my head – what the hell is this?”
Mildura is a regional city in the state of Victoria, located between Melbourne, which is 550 km away, and Adelaide, which is 400 km away. It is not often that anything out of the ordinary happens here. But this week was an exception. Local social media accounts filled with photos of the night sky mysteriously glowing with a pink light of unknown origin. Some thought the city had been visited by aliens, or that an asteroid was headed for Australia. Others thought it was a bright red moon. However, all commentators agreed on one thing – it seems the end of the world is near.
The explanation turned out to be much more prosaic – the source of the eerie glow was a local pharmaceutical marijuana production facility. It is equipped with red lamps whose light increases the yield of cannabis. Normally, the red light is not visible because the blinds on the plant are tightly closed when it gets dark. But on the day of the “apocalypse” they did not work. “Normally the blackout blinds close automatically at sunset, but this time the lights were on and the blinds had not closed, so there was some light for a while,” explained Peter Crock, CEO of Cann Group Ltd, which owns the facility, in an interview with Australian television station ABC. And because the night was cloudy, the red lamps created an “enhanced sunset” effect that could be seen almost an hour’s drive from the factory.
Medical cannabis was legalized in Australia in 2016, but recreational use is still prohibited. Since then, Australian regulators have approved approximately 260,000 cannabis prescriptions. According to the Department of Health, the most common reasons for cannabis prescriptions were chronic pain, followed by anxiety and sleep disorders. The number of approved prescriptions has doubled since 2019, with the majority of applications coming from the state of Queensland. However, the storage and distribution of marijuana remains illegal in Australia, with more than 71,000 people held accountable for cannabis-related offences in 2018-2019.
Since the early 2000s, there has been a steady increase in the number of countries that have legalized the use of marijuana in one form or another. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, about 38 states in the U.S. have already legalized the use of medical marijuana, and about 48 million people consumed cannabis in 2019. Marijuana-based medicines are also available to people with certain medical conditions in several EU countries, including France, Belgium and Ireland, as well as New Zealand. In some countries, such as Canada, the possession and use of cannabis for recreational purposes is also legal.
The location of marijuana farms in Australia is kept secret for security reasons, but the Mildura farm is now completely unclassified. “We all had a good laugh,” said Temmi Shumovski. Despite the initial panic, she admitted to being amazed by the beauty of the light show: “I think it was fantastic – they should do it more often.”