The state’s glut of marijuana – over 1m lb of unsold pot – is in many ways the result of an industry still finding its feet

Growing pains: how Oregon wound up with way more pot than it can smoke

Trey Willison, a cannabis farmer in Eugene, first started worrying last May about there being too much marijuana in Oregon. He had sold all his “clone” plants to other growers, who were using them to cultivate yet more marijuana.

“You start doing the math on that and it just didn’t make sense how people could be growing that many plants,” Willison said.

Fast-forward nearly a year and Oregon does indeed have a glut of marijuana; there are over 1m lb of usable but unsold marijuana, according to the state tracking system.

That’s more than 128m “eighths” of weed, and almost three times the amount of cannabis sold in Oregon in all of last year.

Flooded with supply, prices are dropping so much that some dispensaries in the Portland area are selling the drug for $4 a gram. That’s less than half the cost of a bargain-basement batch in other US cities where marijuana is legal, like Denver and Seattle.

When the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC), the agency in charge of cannabis regulation, issued the first licenses to businesses in 2016, projections were for 800 to 1,200 businesses to obtain cannabis licenses in the first couple of years, according to Mark Pettinger, a spokesman for the OLCC.

Every agricultural crop has its highs and its lows. No pun intended

But 1,824 marijuana-related business licenses have already been issued, including 981 production operations. Another 967 production licenses are in various stages of approval by the state and could come online later this year.

Molly Conroy, the program director for the Oregon Cannabis Association, cautioned that this is a brand new market that needs time to adjust.

“Every agricultural crop has its highs and its lows,” she said. “No pun intended.”

Unlike Colorado, which also legalized marijuana, many of the cannabis farms in Oregon are outdoors because the plants thrive in the state’s warm, sunny summers. But the first year that recreational cannabis farms were licensed, a rainstorm hammered the crop just before the prime flower harvest in October.

“A lot of crop got destroyed,” said Pettinger. “It wasn’t salvageable because it had mildew or mold on it. So there was a not a real accurate gauge of what the market looked like.”

Demand remained high – so, by last fall, hundreds more farms had obtained licenses. And a long, favorable growing season made for a bumper crop. Suddenly, the state had more marijuana than it knew what to do with.

Cannabis flowers have a shelf life of several months but after a while, the product gets stale. Andrew Lessar owns Oregon CO2, a company that extracts oils from cannabis flowers, then sells the oils to producers of edibles. Lessar said he gets between five and 10 calls a week from growers who are desperate to generate some income from their flowers.

“If I see an unknown number on my phone, I know it’s going to be someone saying, ‘We’ve got 500 lb,’ ‘We’ve got 2,000 lb … Can you help us?’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Buds at a marijuana dispensary in Portland, Oregon. Photograph: Steve Dipaola/Reuters

But Lessar said that because of the way cannabis is regulated, he can’t sell the oils back to the producer. They need to already have a buyer lined up or obtain a $5,000 license that covers a different part of the farm-to-consumer process.

And because US federal law still prohibits cannabis, Oregon growers cannot legally sell outside the state’s borders.

Tristan Reisfar works part-time for a company, High Desert Pure, that produces vapor cartridges and said he fields phone calls from desperate growers offering to sell their marijuana for as little as $100 per lb. When Oregon launched its recreational marijuana program, it was common for growers to count on bringing in $2,400 per lb.

“We’re coming into another growing season here, what are they going to do then?” Reisfar asked.

Reisfar also co-hosts a weekly marijuana-themed talk radio show called The High Desert Co-op. He said he gets calls every week from growers who are looking to sell their cannabis farms and want his promotional help.

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Willison, the co-owner of Eugenius LLC, said he still has “a couple hundred lb of product in our vault”.

He has pared down his operation from 16 employees to seven. Three-quarters of the farm has been switched from cannabis to hemp seed. Hemp is a related plant that doesn’t offer the same high as cannabis, but has a variety of uses including fabric and medicine. He plans to keep growing marijuana to maintain his brand until the market rebounds. In the meantime, he estimates that the marijuana portion of his business is losing between $5,000 and $10,000 a month.

“This glut’s going to take a few years. There is really no short-term answer,” Willison said.

So what’s to come of that 1m lb of weed? Reisfar said that as cannabis flowers age, some of the chemical components that cause a narcotic high break down into slightly different components which instead cause drowsiness.

“That’s another factor in their desperation,” he said of the growers. “That weed is turning into something that they didn’t start out trying to make: sleepy time weed.”