By Duck Frites
It’s been the most widely-known secret in the Oregon Cannabis industry for years. Just recently, the public has gotten a taste too:
La Mota’s business model is based off not paying their bills, choking out competition and buying politicians.
Full. Stop. They have gone well out of their way to destroy independent dispensaries, they have specifically withheld payment from producers whose business model they’re looking to co-opt and undercut. If you’re a producer in the state marketplace, you do NOT give them product on terms, if at all. If you’re a successful independent dispensary you can bet your ass they’ll try to open up a location down the street, or three locations if Rosa’s feeling it, and do everything they can to starve you out on pure spite alone.
Rosa and Aaron are carpetbagging sociopaths. We all know this. They deserve every bit of the reproach they’re receiving, and lots more. This goes all the way to Governor Kotek’s office and I daresay we’ve not heard the last of how this mess shakes out.
Here’s the real kicker though: One of the two major trade organizations representing Cannabis businesses in the state is run by an attorney in La Mota’s employ, who is being used to squash the media and silence any public detraction. Think about that: one of the people who’s supposed to be leading the charge for small operators and fair practices, is actively working to crush their marketplace in favor of a monolithic one with fewer options for consumers and workers alike.
This is the same person who ran an “initiative” that on its face was designed to help women entrepreneurs in Cannabis start small businesses. Once many of the participants got involved, however, they came to find that they were either being railroaded out of the marketplace to make way for a competing product, or that the organizer had contracted them into a ludicrous piece of their business.
Right now, this trade organization’s Instagram page has shifted tone from “Once you give us $1440/year, we’ll maybe let you meet our lobbyist and possibly get a word in!” to “Let us help you white label your brand in other states!” This is by no means a leg up for small producers: moreover, it’s an exit strategy under the guise of civic responsibility. This language is custom designed for well-funded outfits whose roots are almost unilaterally NOT based in Oregon Cannabis. It was all a scam, perpetrated by a bad actor and a closely-held gaggle of sycophants. There are some very rancid roosters coming home to roost from the whole affair.
But wait! Hold that thought. Allow me to switch gears, if I may. There’s a lot to unpack.
Focus North Gardens, one of the finest Cannabis gardens on the planet and a shining beacon of clean and renewable agricultural practices in the Oregon marketplace, just announced they’re no longer releasing flower to the state market due to the new testing requirements involving Aspergillus. Aspergillus is endemic to the air we breathe and the ground we walk on and aside from a very small number of immunocompromised people it’s of no danger. This is a damn shame and an entirely unnecessary one. More great businesses are sure to follow. More livelihoods are disappearing, now, today.
But why is this happening? How did this new law come to be?
This new legislation was advocated for by out-of-state companies who build “Remediation machines.” Their business model is predicated on otherwise clean Cannabis failing a new and hastily-implemented round of tests, so it has to undergo mandatory passes through their proprietary process. These processes involve irradiating the Cannabis with lasers, using toxic chemical agents, or baking the weed at 175 degrees Fahrenheit. This process can cost $125 per pound, if they think they can get it. None of this is great news. Some producers are reporting test failure rates of 50% - 100% of their product. The testing kits are not standardized, have an alarmingly high rate of false positives and are being administered at testing facilities by chemists rather than trained microbiologists.
Has the industry been fighting this? Are we petitioning our government to implement emergency regulation changes and save our small farms? You betchyer ass. Let me tell you how that’s going:
A sad truth about the Cannabis industry in Oregon is that while our industry is a major contributor to the state’s budget we still get treated like children, often to a more humiliating degree than before “legalization”. There’s some fine people lobbying as best they can for us, but when it comes to actually negotiating with agents of the state those agents refuse to budge, open a dialogue or listen to reason.
Happy to take our money, however. More than pleased about that part.
In a recent meeting between industry folks and the OLCC, the state made it clear they’d be happy with “combustibles” going away entirely. That’s everything that’s inhaled, essentially all Cannabis products that aren’t edibles. Think about that.
They’ve told us the only options they’d consider would be copying another state’s model, and generally they ask how California is handling any given issue.
Let’s call that how it is: California’s Rec system has been an abject failure, by any standard. More than two thirds of the dispensaries in the state are entirely black market and generate no tax revenue. Robbery and murder are rampant. And that’s not even getting into their agricultural nightmare: there was a Zoom conference recently on this issue for Oregon industry leaders featuring a California lab worker who was amazed that we’re still able to grow in soil here; she told us about a whole region of the state where Cannabis growers have to operate with contingency plans for windy days because of toxic clouds of arsenic and lead that get picked up from the ground, the legacy of decades of berry farming.
THIS is the dystopian market we’re supposed to accept and be happy with. THIS is the legacy we’re instructed to pass on to our kids.
In a lot of ways this part is the most shocking to me: we’re the state of the Trailblazers. Our state motto, Alis Volat Propriis (She Flies on her Own Wings), was chosen very deliberately. We still have clean water and good soil and a LOT of that is owed to communities and individuals fighting for that mentality. And rather than lift a finger and fulfill their job description, this small cabal of willfully ignorant, unelected pencil-pushers draws state salaries to do nothing, operate beyond reproach and sell us all down the fuckin’ river.
We Rec producers came into Rec Cannabis in good faith, with a spirit of law that small producers were going to be the protected focus of the marketplace. The state was almost overbearing in its language that we would be shielded from larger corporate entities and the focus was going to be local sustainable agriculture. And now here we are.
So! How are these two issues related? And what are we to do? I’ve got a couple ideas.
First of all: We will never know independence as an industry and a force for public good until we stop banging our heads solely on the walls of lobbyists and money. The one thing that will save our ass is grassrots support from Oregon’s voter base. That’s how we came to have a legal rec market in the first place. That’s how any major change will occur moving forward.
Oregon’s political system is obviously very corrupt. We are a small state, influenced by large and well-funded entities, and this is always going to be a challenge. One of the questions that keeps coming up in meetings with lobbyists and state representatives surrounding the new Aspergillus testing is “Why don’t we test all produce for Aspergillus? Why don’t we test tobacco? Or wine and beer?” These rules are clearly unfair and directed solely at Cannabis; our industry has been told very directly that the reason is alcohol and tobacco and corporate food producers pour millions into lobbying. The coldness with which it’s is explained, that it’s money and not democracy that decides these issues, is deeply unsettling.
Furthermore, we can’t count on our state to regulate bad actors. The OLCC and state government at large has proven itself entirely unwilling to take this issue on, not just in the case of La Mota, but for other predatory business operators as well, despite repeated pleas from the industry. There’s no real mechanism for a Cannabis producer to sue when a retailer takes their product and then refuses to pay their bill. There’s no stopgap to prevent vertical integration from becoming monolithic control. We NEED that. Badly. A framework has to be established whereby delinquent retailers are known and lose privileges, up to and including licensure.
If we’re going to have an OLCC, at all: the Chair position needs to be an elected one. This job has proven itself ripe for abuse. There will be no progress until the person we have to negotiate with is accountable to the citizens of Oregon and not powerful special interests and big money. This will shift the conversation within the agency towards good policy supported by the public and not just protecting their own asses. The OLCC has made it entirely clear that their relationship with our industry is going to be an adversarial one, which is bullshit and entirely unnecessary but can’t be ignored.
We have hundreds of dispensaries in the state. That is a LOT of advertising space, and ample room to foment grassroots advertising and petitions for sensible policy.
Between our producers, retailers and industry workers: we have millions of followers on social media. A coordinated effort to get people signing petitions and calling the governor’s office on specific issues would be spooky business indeed.
Something like the Aspergillus issue can be painted in great big red letters. People are gonna get pissed when their favorite brands start dropping off. If elected officials feel like they need to move quickly or lose their state pension: best believe they will.
There is a pervasive feeling within the industry that we have to play nice, that we’ll get squashed if we step out of line, that we just have to follow the rules of the game and let those who are aiding and abetting the cheating of the system find the benevolence to grant us the means to make a livable paycheck.
We didn’t get legalization by playing nice. We got it because we demanded it. There is NOTHING wrong with advocating for oneself and being angry when you get stepped on. That process never ends.
We’ll never get clean laundry out of a dirty washtub.
It’s time to flip the script, and take what we’re due.
We’re gonna WIN this thing.
Onward...
About The Author: Duck Frites is a culinary delight who occasionally moonlights as words on a page. In this literary iteration several core components are preserved: Fatty, Pale, perhaps not the most Visually Appealing Thing You’ve Encountered Today but hopefully of a Pleasing and Rich Odor nonetheless. As such it should be made very clear: Duck Frites is not an actual person, these rantings are clearly delusional and not at all based in our reality but moreover a very subtle emulatory shade that is both legally distinct from and in practicality indemnified against all comparisons to any persons or institutions living, dead or crumbling. I’m gonna go now. Hope you’ve enjoyed and thank you.