A glut of legal marijuana is driving Oregon pot prices to rock-bottom levels, prompting some nervous growers to start pivoting to another type of cannabis to make ends meet, one that doesn’t come with a high.

Applications for state licenses to grow hemp, marijuana’s non-intoxicating cousin, have increased more than twentyfold since 2015, making Oregon No. 2 behind Colorado among the 19 states with active hemp cultivation. The rapidly evolving market comes amid skyrocketing demand for a hemp-derived extract called cannabidiol, or CBD, seen by many as a health aid.

A cannabis company in Oregon has teamed up with a dispensary to help kids taken from undocumented parents. Leif Goods will donate $1 for each of its chocolate bars sold at Farmaduring the next week. In the last six weeks, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has separated nearly 2,000 migrant children from their parents.

A cafe serving drinks and chocolate infused with CBD not extracted from cannabis plants has opened in Portland, Oregon, according to local news outlet KATU.

The cafe is owned and operated by Grön Chocolate, an existing licensed edibles manufacturer in Oregon. The cafe sources CBD from evergreen tree bark from southeast Asia — not from cannabis or hemp — so that it can remain unregulated by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission.

Faced with a backlog of applications for recreational marijuana licenses, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission says it will set aside any applications received after June 15 until the pileup is cleared.

The commission says it has issued almost 1,900 recreational marijuana licenses since April 2016 as well as almost 29,000 marijuana worker permits.

The agency says the pace of application submissions has not eased, causing the review process to lengthen.

To power through the backlog, the agency says it will temporarily shift employees to focus on renewals and applications that have already been submitted.

Oregon cannabis growers have been flooding the legal market with their plants. And no one can say with certainty how this will play out.​

The Oregon Liquor Control Commission, the state agency charged with regulating Oregon’s two-year-old legal cannabis market, has reported that growers in the state are producing far more recreational weed than is being consumed at the retail level.

According to OLCC data, licensed cannabis cultivators produced more than one million pounds of dry cannabis flower in 2017. But retailers sold only 108,330 of herb to consumers. That leaves an additional 891,000 pounds of weed in the market.

Charges against seven of the fifteen budtenders arrested for alleged illegal marijuana sales at Sweet Leaf dispensaries have been dismissed, according to the Denver District Attorney's Office and Denver County Court documents.

Christopher Arneson, Andrea Cutrer, Cassidy Thomas, Joseph Gerlick, Ian Matthew Ferguson, Timothy Macrorie and Devin Wagiand, all of whom were facing misdemeanor charges of marijuana distribution or possession, each saw their charges dismissed recently.

State regulators have been unable to keep cannabis overproduction under control, and now the federal government is planning to intervene.

In late 2017, the Oregon Department of Agriculture issued an alert that a new pest had been spotted feeding on a valuable crop. A kind of aphid, it damages and weakens plants and could even spread viral diseases, the alert said.

The creature, Phorodon cannabis, is also known as the cannabis aphid. “It appears to be a recent arrival in Oregon, and it is in the interest of all growers of cannabis to slow its spread,” the alert noted. The department has the bug on its list of cannabis pests, which includes four other species of piercing and sucking aphids.

The marijuana movement in North America is seemingly unstoppable at the moment. Mexico legalized medical cannabis in June 2017, 29 U.S. states have legalized marijuana in some capacity since 1996, and Canada stands on the verge of becoming the first developed country in the world to legalize adult-use cannabis by this summer. That's what I'd call a great recipe for rapid sales growth within the marijuana industry.

According to cannabis research firm ArcView in partnership with BDS Analytics, North American legal weed sales grew by 33%, to $9.7 billion in 2017 and they're expected to hit approximately $47 billion annually by 2027.

Growth like this is tough for investors to ignore, which is a big reason why marijuana stocks have ascended to the heavens.

Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer told canna-business owners that he believes cannabis will be treated like alcohol throughout the U.S. in five years during an appearance at the Cultivation Classic in his home state, Willamette Week reports. He said if lawmakers who support legalizing do their job “it’s game over in two years.”

“If Democrats control the House of Representatives in the first months of the next Congress in 2019, we will be having hearings on de-scheduling.” – Blumenauer, during the Cultivation Classic, via Willamette Week