Five years after Oregon legalized recreational marijuana, its lawmakers now are trying to rein in production.
StatelineFive years after Oregon legalized recreational marijuana, its lawmakers now are trying to rein in production, fearing the state’s big weed surplus will tempt some licensed businesses to sell their products out of state or on the illegal market.
Like California, Oregon has a long history of illegal grows. And while some states, such as Colorado and Washington, limit the production licenses people can hold and the number of plants businesses can grow, Oregon has made it easy for people to harvest a lot of weed. His group helps states create an initial estimate of marijuana demand by looking at federal drug use surveys and conducting new surveys of state residents. Once legal sales are up and running, he said, plant tracking systems can help regulators follow market dynamics.
If cultivators can’t transfer enough product, officials may knock their license down to a lower tier, according to Shannon Gray, marijuana communications specialist for the Revenue Department.In 2017, licensed growers in Colorado produced about 13% more marijuana than was sold that year, according to a report prepared for the Revenue Department by the Marijuana Policy Group and the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
“When the system was getting set up in Oregon — it wasn’t really launching a brand new market, it was transitioning an underground, unregulated market into an above-ground, regulated one,” said TJ Sheehy, a data analyst for the Oregon Liquor Control Commission’s marijuana program. Prices for marijuana flower crashed in late 2017, sending many growers out of business. “At pretty much the drop of a hat, prices dropped by 50%,” said Michael Johnson, chief operating officer of Siskiyou Sungrown, an 80,000-square-foot outdoor grow in Southern Oregon. “We ended up extracting a lot of that inventory, rather than selling it as smokable flower.”
Oregon state Sen. Floyd Prozanski, a Democrat who sponsored the interstate commerce bill, floated similar legislation two years ago but it didn’t pass the Senate. This time around, he said concern about overproduction helped propel his bill to the governor’s desk.
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