Wednesday, June 27, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
CBD OIL: Half of
hemp crop goes
to CBD oil
Continued from page 5
form, CBD oil commands
thousands of dollars per kilo-
gram, and farmers can make
more than $100,000 an acre
growing hemp plants to pro-
duce it. That distillate can
also be converted into a crys-
tallized form or powder.
“Word on the street is
everybody thinks hemp’s
the new gold rush,” Jerrad
McCord said, who grows
marijuana in southern
Oregon and just added 12
acres (5 hectares) of hemp.
“This is a business. You’ve
got to adapt, and you’ve got
to be a problem-solver.”
It’s a problem few pre-
dicted when Oregon voters
opened the door to legal mar-
ijuana four years ago.
The state’s climate is
perfect for growing mari-
juana, and growers produced
bumper crops. Under state
law, none can leave Oregon.
That, coupled with a deci-
sion to not cap the number of
licenses for growers, has cre-
ated a surplus.
Oregon’s inventory of
marijuana is staggering for a
state its size. There are nearly
1 million pounds (450,000
kilograms) of usable flower
in the system, and an addi-
tional 350,000 pounds
(159,000 kilograms) of mari-
juana extracts, edibles and
tinctures.
“Usable flower” refers to
the dried marijuana flower
— or bud — that is most
commonly associated with
marijuana consumption.
The Oregon Liquor
Control Commission, which
regulates the industry, says
some of the inventory of
flower goes into extracts, oils
and tinctures — which have
increased in popularity —
but the agency can’t say how
much. A comprehensive mar-
ket study is underway.
Yet the retail price for a
gram of pot has fallen about
50 percent since 2015, from
$14 to $7, according to a
report by the Oregon Office
of Economic Analysis.
Growers and retailers alike
have felt the sting.
“Now we’re starting to
look at drastic means, like
destroying product. At some
point, there’s no more stor-
age for it,” Trey Willison
said, who switched his opera-
tion from marijuana to hemp
this season. “Whoever would
have thought we’d get to the
point of destroying pounds of
marijuana?”
That stark prospect is
driving more of Oregon’s
marijuana entrepreneurs
toward hemp, a crop that
already has a foothold in
states like Colorado and
Kentucky and a lot of buzz
in the cannabis industry. In
Oregon, the number of hemp
licenses increased from 12 in
2015 to 353 as of last week.
Colorado and Washington
were the first states to
broadly legalize marijuana.
Both have seen price drops
for marijuana but not as sig-
nificant as Oregon.
Like marijuana, the hemp
plant is a cannabis plant,
but it contains less than 0.3
From Transactions
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percent of THC, the com-
pound that gives pot its high.
Growing industrial hemp is
legal under federal law, and
the plant can be sold for use
in things like fabric, food,
seed and building materials.
But the increasing focus
in Oregon is the gold-colored
CBD oil that has soared in
popularity among cannabis
connoisseurs and is rapidly
going mainstream. At least
50 percent of hemp nation-
wide is being grown for CBD
extraction, and Oregon is rid-
ing the crest of that wave,
Eric Steenstra said, president
of Vote Hemp, a nonpartisan
organization that advocates
for pro-hemp legislation.
“There are a lot of grow-
ers who already have experi-
ence growing cannabis, and
when you’re growing for
CBD, there are a lot of the
same techniques that you use
for growing marijuana,” he
said. “Oregon is definitely
a hotbed of activity around
this.”
CBD is popping up in
everything from cosmetics
to chocolate bars to bottled
water to pet treats. One Los
Angeles bar sells drinks
containing the oil, massage
therapists use creams con-
taining CBD and juice bars
offer the stuff in smoothies.
Dozens of online sites sell
endless iterations of CBD
oils, tinctures, capsules,
transdermal patches, infused
chocolates and creams with
no oversight.
Proponents say CBD
offers a plethora of health
benefits, from relieving pain
to taming anxiety. Scientists
caution, however, that there
have been very few compre-
hensive clinical studies of
how CBD affects humans —
mostly because the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration
still considers cannabidiol
extract off-limits, and the
government requires special
dispensation to study it.
Pre-clinical studies have
shown promise for treat-
ment of chronic pain, neuro-
i n f l a m m a t i o n , a n x i e t y,
addiction and anti-psychotic
effects in animals, mostly
rodents, Ziva Cooper said, an
associate professor of clinical
neurobiology at Columbia
University who focuses her
research on the therapeutic
potential of cannabis and
cannabinoids.
The U.S. Food and Drug
Administration next month
could approve the first drug
derived from CBD. It’s used
to treat forms of epilepsy.
Christina Sasser, co-
founder of Vital Leaf, isn’t
waiting for government
action to market CBD prod-
ucts in stores and online.
She sells about 500 bottles
of Oregon-sourced CBD oil
a month and ships only to
customers living in states
with state-run hemp pilot
programs, to better avoid the
29
possibility of legal trouble.
“Everybody in the CBD
world has recognized the
risks involved, and I would
say the vast majority of us
really believe in the power
of the plant and are willing to
operate in this, sort of, gray
area,” she said.
Willison was selling mari-
juana clones to pot startups
when he realized last spring
he was selling way more
clones than Oregon’s market
could support. The two-story
building where he grew 200
pounds of weed a month sits
nearly empty, and a green-
house built to expand his pot
business is packed with hemp
plants instead.
He breeds hemp plants
genetically selected for
their strong CBD concen-
tration, harvests the seeds
and extracts CBD from the
remaining plants that can
fetch up to $13,000 per kilo-
gram. His future looks bright
again.
“The (marijuana) market
is stuck within the borders of
Oregon — it’s locked within
the state,” he said, as he took
a break from collecting tiny
grains of pollen from his
plants. “But hemp is an inter-
national commodity now.”
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