Washington will have missed out on a historic opportunity

It appears that the roll-out for Washington’s legal marijuana will be a whimper at most, with few retail stores opening and very little cannabis to go around. The comparison to Colorado’s huge tax windfalls will be the story of the day as Washington struggles to meet demand and open stores. The Liquor Control Board (LCB) has decided to take the long game in an industry where months count as years. By the time Washington has a thriving cannabis industry, California and other major states will be ahead. Washington will have missed out on a historic opportunity to lead a new industry as focus switches to other states.

The LCB has apparently lined up behind the indoor cannabis grower. Represented and funded by the Seattle based indoor-medical-turned-502 business community with names like the Washington Agriculture Industry Association evoke images of farms instead of the energy wasting and polluting warehouses that are the reality of industrialized, indoor growers. The goal of these groups is to limit sun grown production. Their lobbying makes sense, few indoor growers are capitalized enough to build a 90,000 square foot facility. Sustainable and cheaply produced sun grown cannabis creates an economic problem for indoor growers. So lobbying to reduce size of grows makes sense to them, but may not be the best path for the initiative to succeed or for Washington to grab the headlines for large tax revenues. Recent actions by the LCB to limit production don’t recognize that production was already limited by under capitalized and inexperienced applicants, moratoriums, and county zoning laws. by reducing size of operations for growers in jurisdictions that were not limited, the LCB has severely reduced a key source of product that would insure price stability and avoid wasting the public’s electrical resources.

There is a culture of disregard within the LCB for sun growers.

Sun growers were used to get by the huge environmental impacts associated with indoor growing that were well described in the white paper, “The Environmental Impacts of Cannabis Cultivation”. The SEPA process was mitigated as the LCB, with much fan fair, gushed over their responsibility to the environment as they allowed sun grown by rule, only to sacrifice sun grown cannabis at every decision point since. The LCB was never willing to treat cannabis as an agriculture crop and adopt a schedule for implementation that corresponded with spring planting. It just happens that the opening of stores may coincide with seasonal production. And now, overwhelmed by applicants, the LCB has decided to sacrifice the 2014 sun grown season. The long game strategy says that eventually sun growers will dominate because of price and sustainability. But to think that the indoor industry is not going to protect their huge capital investments with powerful lobbying efforts is naive. They have already demonstrated their ability to lobby. There is a reason electric cars are not ubiquitous.

Any sun grower that is to stand a chance for a 2014 crop had to buy land and build during winter conditions to be ready for spring planting. In fact some did, only to have their operations drastically reduced by the LCB. Any prudent indoor grower could assess the risk and sit on their wallets, and most did. So when LCB director Garza says that most people saw this coming, he is right, but sun growers didn’t have a choice not to build under the final rules as they were presented. Sun Growers never imagined that the LCB would take licenses away, only that they would reduce canopy. The LCB used a cleaver on a problem that needed a scalpel. Excited consumers will flood the few stores when they open, and this will result in scarcity and high prices.

The impacts of this decision cannot be understated.

The LCB is designing scarcity into the role-out. They seem fine with prices double that of the medical and underground markets. Not to mention the environmental impact and use of our electrical grid to produce a recreational drug crop. This fact that will not be overlooked by a wise and increasingly educated consumer.

A recent analysis conducted by the think tank: The Center for the Study of Cannabis and Social Policy, estimated that 5 million square foot of canopy, (Randy Simmons estimate stated in the Seattle Times) grown indoors, would consume over 2 million megawatt/hours or 1.9% of the states power. One Washington State Public Utility District recently lost $800,000 buying power on the open market for in one week,(read: coal power from California), our clean hydro power must be protected against such a large electrical load that benefits very few.

In response to Sun Growers complaints that their applications were not being processed in time for spring planting, they said it was a business decision to grow outdoors. This short sighted response is at the expense of our states natural resources and transfers a very large load from the sun to the grid.

It’s no wonder really that the indoor lobby was able to influence the process so much in their favor. Olympia is a long way to travel for the unorganized and under financed sun growers. However, sun-growers are on the right side of the issue, and with a governor that ran on his environmental credentials, Inslee will have to answer the question, “why did you allow this huge waste of our electrical resources on your watch”?

http://okcannabis.org/

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