Half a dozen industrial fans hum inside a football field-size warehouse in White City. Lined up on the ground in neat rows are 500 white plastic bags, each three-foot by three-foot. The bags are full of hemp.

“Each one of these are super sacks,” says Barry Epling, a consultant with this company, Hemp Inc. “Some of them don’t have a lot of weight – some are only 20, 30 pounds. Some of them are 125, 130.”

Hemp Inc. farmed on 42 acres of land on the Rogue River in Grants Pass this year. The hemp in these super sacks is drying to become smokable CBD cigarettes.

Gov. Kate Brown’s six-month ban on both flavored nicotine and cannabis vape products is on hold with new rulings Thursday by the Oregon Court of Appeals.

“We’re very happy,” said Andrew DeWeese, the attorney representing Herban Industries, which sued over the cannabis vape oil portion of the ban. “It’s a win for the cannabis industry and it is, frankly, a win for the Oregon consumer.”

The court a month ago temporarily halted the ban on only flavored nicotine vaping products. It now has extended that stay and granted a stay covering the ban on flavored cannabis vaping products as well.

The decisions are a major blow to Brown’s efforts to address the vaping-related lung illness epidemic.

In the four states where recreational marijuana was legal by 2016, there was a small uptick in cannabis use disorder among adults and teens, and a general rise in use by adults, a new study suggests.

Researchers looking at data on cannabis use between 2008 and 2016 found that rates of problematic use among teens and adults over age 26 rose faster in states where recreational marijuana had been legalized than in other states, according to the report published in JAMA Psychiatry.

How’s it going with legal recreational cannabis in Oregon after four years? Addressing a conference on Occupational Safety & Health in Ashland, a man from the governor’s office said it has been a complicated, controversial journey.

Among the state’s findings, said Jeffrey Rhoades, senior marijuana policy advisor to Gov. Kate Brown, is that pot use by youth 12 and older rose 9% between 2008 and 2016, the year after legalization.

Some of that increase could be because youth feel more free to tell the truth now that it’s legal, so it’s hard to know for sure, added Rhoades.

Oregon legislators established a moratorium on new recreational marijuana producer licenses earlier this year to manage an oversupply of product in the state.

But not everyone agrees there’s an oversupply.

SB 218 authorized a producer moratorium through Jan. 2, 2022, based on a January 2019 OLCC study that said in part, “As of Jan. 1, 2019, the recreational market has 6.5 years’ worth of theoretical supply in licensees’ inventory accounted for and contained within Oregon’s Cannabis Tracking System.”

Some wholesale and retail outlets at an OLCC listening session in July in Ashland said they were having trouble sourcing quality product. They were also concerned that the moratorium was a short-term fix that would cause market swings with unintended consequences.

Oregon regulators enacted a six-month ban Friday on the sale of flavored nicotine and cannabis vape products in stores and online statewide amid an outbreak of illnesses that has sickened nearly 1,300 people nationwide and killed 26, including two people in Oregon.

The Oregon Liquor Control Commission, which regulates the recreational marijuana market, voted unanimously to approve the temporary sales ban on the same day that the Oregon Health Authority, which regulates tobacco sales statewide, filed the ban with the Oregon Secretary of State.

A CBD producer based in Lexington, Kentucky, is suing an Oregon company, claiming they were sold “worthless” hemp seeds that ruined what would have been a multi-million dollar crop.

According to Elemental Processing of Kentucky, this crop was “destined to help fulfill the country’s booming demand for CBD”. As stated in a recent survey, one in seven Americans are currently using CBD therapeutically, and that number continues to grow. 

Since federal passage of the 2018 Farm Bill last December, interest in hemp farming has catalyzed a national industry reborn after decades of prohibition. Reports from state agriculture officials indicate that licensed hemp acreage for 2019 has more than tripled, with the number of hemp licenses issued having quadrupled since 2018. It is increasingly likely that the U.S. hemp industry will see more acreage planted this year than in 1943, the peak of cultivation during World War II.