So you want to sell marijuana across state lines

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2023

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the state of Oregon, there is a glut of grass. A wealth of weed. A crisis of chronic.

And, jokes aside, it's a real problem for people who work in the cannabis industry like Matt Ochoa. Ochoa runs the Jefferson Packing House in Medford, Oregon, which provides marijuana growers with services like drying, trimming and packing their product. He has seen literal tons of usable weed being left in marijuana fields all over the state of Oregon. Because, Ochoa says, there aren't enough buyers.

There are just over four million people in Oregon, and so far this year, farmers have grown 8.8 million pounds of weed. Which means there's nearly a pound of dried, smokable weed for every single person in the state of Oregon. As a result, the sales price for legal marijuana in the last couple of years has plummeted.

Economics has a straightforward solution for Oregon's overabundance problem: trade! But, Oregon's marijuana can only be sold in Oregon. No one in any state can legally sell weed across state lines, because marijuana is still illegal under federal law. On today's episode, how a product that is simultaneously legal and illegal can create some... sticky business problems.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This message comes from NPR sponsor, Barclay's Corporate and Investment Bank,
0:04.4	Powering Sustainable Growth in a Changing World,
0:07.2	Powering Financial Solutions that Transform Industries.
0:10.6	Barclay's Corporate and Investment Bank, Powering Possible.
0:15.0	Just a quick heads up, this episode contains details about buying and selling marijuana.
0:21.0	This is Planet Money from NPR. A few weeks ago, Matt Achoa and I were driving around rural southern Oregon.
0:36.1	Matt's in his 40s, kind of a burly guy, salt and pepper beard.
0:39.8	We're pulling into the farm right now. And we're driving because he wants to show me something.
0:45.1	We'll have to go check in because you have to sign in
0:47.1	and make sure you have ID and all that.
0:49.8	I get through check in.
0:51.2	Then we drive up a grassy hill and park right beside giant marijuana plants.
0:57.0	These are not even big big plants in Oregon scope. I've seen plants 12, 17 feet tall. How tall is this? How tall is this?
1:05.7	This is probably 7 8 feet. It's kind of like being at one of those giant corn mazes but instead of corn,
1:11.5	it's all weed. Where are we right now in the harvest?
1:14.2	We're at the tail end of harvest. We're at the end of what is known as Croptober.
1:19.4	It's kind of a giddy hecticctic season, I think Thanksgiving, but for weed.
1:24.0	Except this year, and for a few years, actually, there has been so much weed that it's not even worth harvesting all of it. They just leave perfectly good weed in the field to rot.
1:38.4	They're going to leave some of it, you think, in the field to rot? Well, you know, all of these,
1:41.5	like all of these little things are just, they're not worth messing with, but if we're in 1996 and a high school kid came through here, he'd think he died and went to heaven.
1:50.0	Because there's still a lot of weed here.
1:53.2	There's tons.
	...

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