Legalizing recreational marijuana was always bound to cause unintended consequences, including more traffic accidents, addiction, and worse mental health issues. But Jackson County, Oregon, has added another downside to the list: severe water shortages.
It turns out that when Oregon voters legalized recreational marijuana in 2014, southern Oregon saw a surge of illegal marijuana farms posing as legal hemp farms. The Oregon Liquor and Cannabis Commission recently reported that nearly 50% of registered hemp farms inspected by the state grow marijuana with THC content above the legal limits.
With marijuana “legal” in Oregon now, these illegal farms operate with near impunity next to Oregon’s highly regulated marijuana market. And now that Western states have been hit with a drought, these illegal farmers are illegally stealing water from the surrounding creeks and wells that legal fruit and nut farmers have been using for generations. One illegal cannabis farm recently raided by authorities was illegally drawing water from the Illinois River to feed over 72,000 marijuana plants.
It has gotten so bad that the Jackson County Board of Commissioners has declared a state of emergency warning of “an imminent threat to the public health and safety of our citizens from the illegal production of cannabis in our county.” It has asked the governor for more resources to address the problem since the Oregon Water Resources Department only has four full-time employees dedicated to handling complaints in Jackson County.
The governor has since promised help from the state police. “These are criminal enterprises that deplete water resources while our state is in drought, hold their workforce in inhumane conditions, and severely harm our legal cannabis marketplace,” a spokesman from the governor’s office told reporters.
It is nice that the governor is finally sending the state police in to crack down on the illegal marijuana farms. But the governor might also want to pause and consider how much the “legal cannabis marketplace” is helping fuel demand for the illegal one.
