Cannabis is Washington’s 4th most valuable crop, industry report says

Growers in Washington generated wholesale revenues of $653 million on 561,000 pounds of legal weed in 2020, according to a new estimate by Leafly, a Seattle-based cannabis marketplace and information site.

That makes cannabis Washington’s fourth most valuable legal crop, behind only apples ($2.1 billion), wheat ($949 million) and potatoes ($753 million), but ahead of cherries ($562 million) and hay ($501 million), according to figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

It’s also enough to rank Washington as the fourth biggest producer of legal cannabis, by wholesale revenues, among the 11 states with legal recreational sales, which last year totaled $6.2 billion in wholesale revenues, according to Leafly. California leads the U.S., with $1.7 billion, followed by Colorado ($1 billion) and Michigan ($736 million).

Washington and Colorado were the first states to legalize sales of recreational cannabis, in November 2012. Washington had its first commercial crop in 2014. The state currently has 1,070 licensed producers or producer/processors, according to the state Liquor and Cannabis Board.

Leafly released the wholesale estimates for Washington and other states in part because legal cannabis still lacks the recognition that other agricultural crops get as a source of economic value.

“Cannabis is now Washington’s 4th most valuable agricultural crop,” said Leafly editor Bruce Barcott. “But Washington’s ag community and state ag agencies still refuse to recognize cannabis farmers as farmers.”

Indeed, because cannabis isn’t federally legal, it’s not in the USDA data that Washington and other states use in their own yearly rankings of farm output, state and federal agriculture officials said.

Lack of federal status also means Washington’s cannabis farmers don’t get the same benefits and protections that most other farmers do.

They are excluded from protections under Washington’s Right to Farm Act, which shields farmers from nuisance lawsuits by neighbors. They also can’t get the state property and estate tax reductions that farmers get for croplands, and aren’t entitled to federal farm assistance programs, state officials say.

States typically publish data on retail sales and taxes, but there’s little available publicly on revenues that cannabis brings to farmers, Barcott said.

To calculate Washington’s wholesale figure, Leafly estimated that every dollar in retail sales generated 47 cents in wholesale sales, Barcott said. In 2020, Washington reported around $1.4billion in retail cannabis sales, according to calculations from LCB data.

Leafly only estimated wholesale revenues for 2020. But applying Leafly’s percentage to earlier years in Washington suggests that wholesale cannabis revenues have grown from around $68 million in 2015 to around $454.5 million in 2018 and $653 million in 2020.

Washington’s illegal cannabis industry, meanwhile, has shrunk considerably under pressure from legal weed, which was cheaper than its illegal counterpart soon after the state industry launched, LCB officials said.

The agency has no firm estimates for how much illegal weed is still grown in Washington, but acknowledges that some remains. “Today, we mostly see only large-scale [illegal] operations prepping to divert out of state to states that haven’t legalized,” said LCB spokesperson Brian Smith.

Even though state and federal agencies don’t rank cannabis as a farm commodity, Leafly’s effort earned a nod from Christopher Mertz, USDA’s Northwest regional director, who called it “a fair attempt at trying to see where that industry sits with other U.S. crops.”

Cannabis, also known as marijuana among other names, is a psychoactive drug from the Cannabis plant. Native to Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent, the cannabis plant has been used as a drug for both recreational and entheogenic purposes and in various traditional medicines for centuries. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the main psychoactive component of cannabis, which is one of the 483 known compounds in the plant, including at least 65 other cannabinoids, including cannabidiol (CBD). Cannabis can be used by smoking, vaporizing, within food, or as an extract.

Cannabis has various mental and physical effects, which include euphoria, altered states of mind and sense of time, difficulty concentrating, impaired short-term memory and body movement, relaxation, and an increase in appetite. Onset of effects is felt within minutes when smoked, and about 30 to 60 minutes when cooked and eaten. The effects last for two to six hours, depending on the amount used. At high doses, mental effects can include anxiety, delusions (including ideas of reference), hallucinations, panic, paranoia, and psychosis. There is a strong relation between cannabis use and the risk of psychosis, though the direction of causality is debated. Physical effects include increased heart rate, difficulty breathing, nausea, and behavioral problems in children whose mothers used cannabis during pregnancy; short-term side effects may also include dry mouth and red eyes. Long-term adverse effects may include addiction, decreased mental ability in those who started regular use as adolescents, chronic coughing, susceptibility to respiratory infections, and cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome.

Cannabis is mostly used recreationally or as a medicinal drug, although it may also be used for spiritual purposes. In 2013, between 128 and 232 million people used cannabis (2.7% to 4.9% of the global population between the ages of 15 and 65). It is the most commonly used illegal drug in the world, though it is legal in some jurisdictions, with the highest use among adults (as of 2018) in Zambia, the United States, Canada, and Nigeria.

While cannabis plants have been grown since at least the 3rd millennium BCE, evidence suggests that it was being smoked for psychoactive effects at least 2,500 years ago in the Pamir Mountains; the earliest evidence found at a cemetery in what is today western China close to the tripoint with Tajikistan and Afghanistan. Since the early 20th century, cannabis has been subject to legal restrictions. The possession, use, and cultivation of cannabis is illegal in most countries of the world. In 2013, Uruguay became the first country to legalize recreational use of cannabis. Other countries to do so are Canada, Georgia, and South Africa, plus 18 states, two territories, and the District of Columbia in the United States (though the drug remains federally illegal). Medical use of cannabis, requiring the approval of a physician, has been legalized in a greater number of countries.