“Oregon’s big marijuana harvests: How do you bring all that pot into the legal market?”

The title of this post is the headline of this interesting local article noting that Oregon already had a robust marijuana production market before it legalized the product via voter initiative last year.  Here is how it gets started:

More than any state that has legalized marijuana, Oregon is a champion when it comes to producing the drug. Seth Crawford, a marijuana policy researcher at Oregon State University, estimates the state grows three to five times the 150,000 pounds or so consumed by Oregon pot users — a crop potentially worth more than any other single agricultural commodity in the state.

A report from a Seattle venture capital firm specializing in pot says the state’s legally allowed producers – those who grow for medical marijuana patients – harvest enough to meet the needs not only of patients in Oregon but in Washington, Colorado and Arizona as well.

“We’ve got plenty of supply,” says Senate Minority Leader Ted Ferrioli, R-John Day, and a member of the committee overseeing implementation of the pot legalization initiative. He wholeheartedly endorsed the common quip that Oregon is the “Saudi Arabia of marijuana.”

As a result, the legislative debate over how to implement the November initiative that legalized recreational marijuana has revolved around how to turn this thriving – if often illegal — industry into an economic and societal success story. The abundance of the state’s marijuana crop is driving some of the biggest decisions that legislators face, from how strictly to regulate medical marijuana growers to whether to put a sales tax on pot despite the state’s historic hostility to such taxes.

A growing number of legislators on the Joint Committee on Implementing Measure 91 say they want to start retail sales as early as possible to entice growers into the legal market. The Oregon Liquor Control Commission, which Measure 91 charged with regulating the recreational marijuana market, says it probably won’t be ready to allow retail outlets to open until fall of 2016.

But key lawmakers on the marijuana committee say they are seriously looking at allowing the sale of at least smokable pot starting Oct. 1 at existing medical marijuana dispensaries. “There are already well-established black-market channels,” says Sen. Ginny Burdick, D-Portland and the co-chair of the Measure 91 committee, “and we need to make this (legal) market as appealing to people as possible.”

Burdick has been a particularly strong champion of legislation putting stricter limits on the size of medical marijuana growing operations, saying she wants to channel larger and more commercially minded producers into the recreational market.

Oregon has nearly 35,000 registered grow sites, according to the latest Oregon Health Authority records, but three-quarters serve just one or two patients, each of whom can have up to six plants grown for them. Nearly 400 sites grow for at least 10 patients and account for much of Oregon’s marijuana crop.

The heart of the industry is in southern Oregon, where growers have plenty of sun and rural isolation. “You can’t compete with the quantity and quality produced in southern Oregon,” says Crawford, the OSU expert who has extensively researched the area’s marijuana culture. He says many growers have been producing pot for decades, perfecting their strains and earning a supplemental income for their family.