Daily Beast – by Natalie O’Neill
Last spring, Forrest Griffin*, an Oregon cannabis farmer, was forced to throw away hundreds of pounds of high-end weed. His small grow-op had folded, in part due to a pesticide test, and the state demanded he destroy piles of his skunky-sweet leftovers.
Heartbroken over his failed business, he stuffed more than 200 pounds of pot into paper lawn bags, hauled them to a compost site and dumped every last nug. “It felt horrible, like a massive, massive failure,” said Griffin, who is in his 30s, lives near Portland and has a background in horticulture. “It was a sad day.”
For months, he had nurtured his plants like a protective dad. After harvest, he was proud of the calm, euphoric high they yielded. In other states, the load of sun-grown indica could have sold for more than $100,000. And it just seemed wrong to throw it away.
“It felt f-ked-up to waste it. It was perfectly good weed—it could have been used as medicine,” he said. “All of my options were shitty.”
Dispensaries wouldn’t touch it. Wholesalers didn’t want it either. And there was no way to donate it to poor folks with health problems.
Frustrated, he soon broke the law. When it came time to trash the rest of the crop, he logged into the state’s cannabis tracking software system and listed it as “destroyed.” But instead of actually tossing it, he handed some of it off to a friend, who converted it to THC known as “shatter” and sold it illegally out of state.
(*Griffin asked to use a pseudonym to avoid incriminating himself.)
He isn’t the only legal weed farmer who has been pushed, at least temporarily, back to the black market. In the past two years, at least 150 cannabis businesses, ranging from family farms to trendy Portland dispensaries, closed in Oregon—where farmers grew three times more weed than the state could consume, according to a state data.
Some growers in the too-crowded market were left with garbage bags full of weed they can’t sell anywhere legally, they told me. Farmers who fold are supposed to get rid of their pot by burning, burying or composting it. Or they can turn it over to state bureaucrats. But, yeah right.
“I’d be surprised if that’s actually happening,” said Donald Morse, chairman of the Oregon Cannabis Business Council. “People have a hard time destroying tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of product.”
Read the rest here: https://www.thedailybeast.com/oregons-ganja-glut-sends-pot-growers-to-black-market