Oregon cannabis stores sold $793 million in products to consumers last year, generating more than $110 million in tax revenue for state and county coffers, according to an analysis of Oregon Liquor Control Commission data.

That’s close to $150 million more in sales than 2018. By next year, totals are expected to climb to nearly $1 billion.

“We think sales will continue to grow,” said Beau Whitney, vice president and senior economist for New Frontier Data, a global analytics firm. “Demand is coming from converting consumers from the illicit market and people moving away from the medical market.”

Marijuana sales in Oregon along the Idaho state line are 420% the statewide average, according to a state report.

Idaho residents are purchasing recreational marijuana in Oregon because it is illegal in Idaho, the report released Friday by the Oregon Office of Economic Analysis said.

The report also showed stronger marijuana sales for Washington state along its border with Idaho in 2019 than along its borders with Oregon or Canada.

A hemp farm based in the Pacific Northwest is suing numerous processers for failing to show up and process their crop after receiving a hefty down payment.

Jefferson State Farms from Medford, Oregon – owned by Ben and Kathleen Yuma – is suing a group of harvesters who left them hanging after getting paid a six-figure down payment. Palex Enterprises, Hemp Warehouse, Great Horizons, and four individual processors are the listed defendants.

Oregon farm regulators have won approval from a key legislative committee to hire two specialists focused on hemp inspections and enforcement.

The Oregon Department of Agriculture has also gotten authorization to fund an assistant water master who’d investigate claims of water law violations by hemp farmers.

Hemp production has exploded in Oregon in recent years, increasing from about 100 acres in 2015 to more than 63,000 acres in 2019.

To keep pace with the industry’s growth, the ODA has assigned employees from other segments of its natural resources program to work on hemp licensing and other hemp issues.

Hemp growers and entrepreneurs who were joyous a year ago after U.S. lawmakers reclassified the plant as a legal agricultural crop now are worried their businesses could be crippled if federal policymakers move ahead with draft regulations.

Licenses for hemp cultivation topped a half-million acres (200,000 hectares) last year, more than 450% above 2018 levels, so there's intense interest in the rules the U.S. government is creating. Critical comments on the draft have poured in from hemp farmers, processors, retailers and state governments.

Cannabis vape sales tumbled 26 per cent in the two months following the health crisis that has killed dozens and sickened thousands, according to new industry research.

Legal sales peaked at a combined US$160 million in August in the states of California, Colorado, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona, according to a report from BDS Analytics and Arcview Market Research.

As reports of vaping illnesses grew and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention disclosed the first deaths related to the practice, sales slumped to US$126 million in September and US$119 million in October. This was significant for the legal cannabis market as a whole, where vapes accounted for approximately 25 per cent of total sales in the first three quarters of 2019.

Tom Garrison wants you to know he’s a realist, not a pessimist.

But from where he stands — on the 1,000-acre farm his family has worked for 150 years — things are looking bleak.

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my life, with the hemp crop... and I’ve never seen a more depressed (agriculture) economy than I’m seeing right now. It’s just gloom and doom, man.”

In 2018, Garrison, who owns Denver Downs farm in Anderson, was one of the first South Carolina farmers to be issued a hemp license.

“I just was trying to be an entrepreneur, just like my dad was,” Garrison said.

Twenty farmers, three from the Upstate, were awarded the first round of permits by the S.C. Department of Agriculture to grow no more than 20 acres.

Oregon is renowned for its craft beer and increasingly for its high-grade marijuana, but the state is keeping the two apart — for now.

In a new ruling, the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, which regulates both alcoholic products and recreational marijuana, says beer and other alcoholic drinks as of Jan. 1 may not contain either THC, the psychoactive component of cannabis, or CBD, the non-psychoactive part that is said to relieve stress and pain.

Mark Pettinger, spokesman for the agency, cited concerns raised by the U.S. Food and Drug of potential liver damage from CBD, also known as cannabidiol.

These are the only three American cities where residents smoke more cannabis than nicotine.

For a portrait of what marijuana normalization resembles, look no farther than Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland. Those are the only three American cities where residents smoke more cannabis than nicotine, according to analytics firm Nielsen.

Nathan Howard grows many varieties of cannabis at East Fork Cultivars, his farm in Takilma, Ore., an unincorporated community of 378 people on the state's southern border.