Oregon farmers are growing far more weed than residents can smoke
After three years of legal weed, Oregon has grown 1.1 million pounds, approximately three times what residents buy in a year. From The Guardian:
The result? Prices are dropping to unprecedented lows in auction houses and on dispensary counters across the state.
Wholesale sun-grown weed fell from $1,500 a pound last summer to as low as $700 by mid-October. On store shelves, that means the price of sun-grown flower has been sliced in half to those four-buck grams.
For Oregon customers, this is a bonanza. A gram of the beloved Girl Scout Cookies strain now sells for little more than two boxes of actual Girl Scout cookies.
But it has left growers and sellers with a high-cost product that's a financial loser. And a new feeling has descended on the once-confident Oregon cannabis industry: panic.
"The business has been up and down and up and down," says Don Morse, who closed his Human Collective II dispensary in south-west Portland four months ago. "But in a lot of ways it has just been down and down for dispensaries."
"How do you move mountains of unwanted weed?" (The Guardian via Next Draft)