There’s something special about Oregon’s cannabis community. Besides our long history of cultivation and breeding, we’ve done groundbreaking research and innovation that focuses on understanding cannabis as a plant. Most of our successful dispensaries, farms and industry organizations are led by the same people who went to Salem to advocate for intelligent legislation.

But if you talk to those people, they’ll tell you they feel threatened.

“There’s this core of the industry here of people who care deeply, and they are under threat,” says Adam Smith, founder and director of the Craft Cannabis Alliance. “They are not just under threat by the federal government and overwhelming regulation, but by the local people who are behaving badly and all the out-of-state money already finding its way into the state, particularly from Canada. This is Oregon’s next craft industry, and we are at risk of not owning
any of it.”

How Oregon’s Cannabis Industry Plans To Keep Wealth Here, and Help Right the Wrongs of the Drug War