Expert talks illegal cannabis impacts on agriculture

• Although California legalized recreational cannabis in 2016, illegal cultivation continues. Gov. Gavin Newsom launched the Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task Force in 2022 to better understand and dismantle illegal operations. State officials have since spent hundreds of millions of dollars to address the problem. 

But much remains unclear regarding the size, scale and impacts from these operations. Ag Alert^® spoke with Dan Sumner, a Univeristy of California agricultural economist and co-author of “Can Legal Weed Win?: The Blunt Realities of Cannabis Economics,”about the effects of illegal grows on agriculture. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.  

How would you describe what illegal cannabis operations look like in California today? 

There’s still lots of illegal cannabis out there. The grower doesn’t have a license, the processor doesn’t have a license, the retailer doesn’t have a license.

That’s a problem for legal growers, and it’s a problem for politicians, because part of the way legal cannabis was sold was: We’ll take this illegal crop that’s very widely used and we’ll at least make it legal and regulated. 

But the problem for a grower switching from illegal to legal is that this involves a group of people who have been operating a business without government licenses, without necessarily paying minimum wage, without having a porta-potty on the farm that met state regulations, without having pesticide-use inspectors come. If I went down the list of regulations that farmers must comply with ... there are a lot of them, and they’re costly. The same with water-use restrictions or filling out forms or paying taxes. All of those things were new (for growers switching from illegal to legal businesses).

Some of those growers just said, “To heck with it. I have a buyer who wants to buy my stuff. That buyer doesn’t want to buy it from a legal person because they don’t want to get a license either. And we have consumers.” 

And the proposition for the consumer (who used to buy illegal cannabis) is: You have the opportunity now to buy from somebody you don’t know, who’s not in your neighborhood, to go out to the mall to the cannabis shop and pay twice as much. There were plenty of consumers that said, “Why would I want to do that?” It was a hard sell. 

Some farmers are concerned about potential environmental impacts from illegal cannabis operations. What do you know about the effects these operations have on their surrounding environment? 

The physical footprint of cannabis is tiny. You (can) grow a lot of cannabis on half an acre. Lots of it is indoors in warehouses or greenhouses. They’re not going to have the same environmental footprint as stuff that you pour on the ground outside.

Illegal cannabis operations can use pesticides that have been banned in California for a long time, and they can use pesticides that have not been approved for cannabis use in California for one reason or another. Certainly, illegal cannabis is using pesticides that are banned in California, some of which really do have significant spillover effects in the way they’re used in cannabis. 

Some of them may not at all. (If) they’re used indoors, it never spills over much, and even though they’re negative, it’s a pretty tiny pesticide impact, and it’s partly because the physical footprint is so small. The big-acre crops or the crops that are more likely to spill into the streams probably are the biggest emphasis for the California Environmental Protection Agency or our health services. 

The basic point is environmental impacts are a major concern locally in some places. But California cannabis is a small share of the land, water or chemical use in California agriculture.

There are particular concerns related to these operations diverting water. What do you know about that? 

What we know is that it tends to be local and really annoying, and it’s not just the diversion. It’s also the pollution. 

If somebody’s using an illegal pesticide, they divert a bunch of water out of a little stream that comes to you. Not only have they diverted most of the water, but the water that’s left is polluted with a pesticide. You simply can’t use that because you don’t want to have that pesticide residue on your crop, whether you think it’s really harmful as a grower or you say, “There’s a law against it. I won’t be able to market my crop if I use this because it’ll show up in the crops.”

Now, is that one of the big issues for agriculture in California? No, for the same reasons (stated before). A lot of the places where there is illegal cannabis, it’s grown outdoors, and they aren’t in places where there’s big commercial crops. People aren’t growing a bunch of outdoor cannabis in the middle of the Salinas Valley and spraying a bunch of illegal pesticides that are spilling over the celery and lettuce and broccoli. But if you’re a grower in Shasta County and you’re using stream water on your alfalfa crop and somebody’s diverted the stream—and particularly somebody who may be an illegal grower—then it’s really annoying and you want to get it stopped. 

How much do we know about the scale of these environmental impacts? 

We mostly don’t know. 

There is no definitive data on illegal, or unlicensed, cannabis production in California. We have rough estimates that illegal pounds produced are likely much higher than licensed production in California, but I have not seen a source of reliable estimates. Much of the unlicensed cannabis is shipped out of California to the rest of the U.S. 

Even for local licensed growers, there’s no data collected systematically on practices, for example. We know the licenses, but we really don’t know the production under those licenses. We don’t have historical data on cannabis. It’s just recently that we’ve been collecting that data for cannabis. There is a challenge in just knowing how much cannabis gets produced and marketed through the marketing chain.

To be clear, we have detailed data on licenses, and licenses set the maximum square-feet area, not production. But many licenses are not used and often a grower will decide not to produce the maximum area allowed because it would not be profitable. We also have a “track and trace” requirement, where every plant and every gram is entered into the system, but those data are self entered and riddled with errors and complications. 

I do think for policymaking and regulating and knowing things like environmental footprints, having some real data would help, and we just don’t.

Reprint with credit to California Farm Bureau. For image use, email agalert@cfbf.com.