Tons of legal marijuana leave regulators awash in data
SALEM, Ore. — To the beat of electronic dance music, men and women inside a slate-gray building harvested marijuana plants festooned with radio-frequency identification tags. In another room, an employee entered the tag numbers into a government database.
The cannabis tracking system used by Avitas, a marijuana company with a production facility in Salem, is the backbone of Oregon’s regulatory system to ensure businesses with marijuana licenses obey the rules and don’t divert their product into the black market.
A huge amount of data is entered into the system by Oregon’s 1,800 licensees every day, a reality that means the state has a tremendous amount of information at its fingertips. But the reality also is the state doesn’t have the manpower to monitor all that data.
The marijuana regulatory agency — the Oregon Liquor Control Commission — has only one marijuana data analyst, and not enough inspectors to randomly inspect grow sites and processing facilities to ensure the accuracy of the data they are providing.
A recent state audit concluded the lack of trained inspectors and “reliability issues” with self-reported data hurt the commission’s monitoring of Oregon’s adultuse marijuana program.
“I think this is a fundamentally sound system,” the commission’s executive director, Steve Marks, told The Associated Press. But he conceded: “It’s not being used to its capabilities. We don’t have the workforce there.”
Oregon’s experience is reflective of one of the significant challenges in the expanding legal U.S. marijuana industry: the ability of governments to keep track of their own markets.
Washington, which with Colorado became the first state to broadly legalize marijuana in 2012, recently switched tracking contractors after it outgrew the first system, and quickly ran into major technical problems. Colorado has reported no significant technical issues but has only five people on the data analysis staff to help with investigations and look for potential violators.
Last year, Nevada switched tracking companies after its first system crashed. California became the world’s largest legal marijuana market on Jan. 1 without the promised vast computer system for tracking. It won’t be available for months.
The Oregon tracking system was created by Franwell, a Floridabased technology company that has contracts in a handful of states, including California. Licensees log entries into the system as seeds sprout into plants, the plants are harvested, processed, sent to stores and then sold.
The flood of data is checked by the single full-time marijuana data analyst, with occasional help. Five more will be hired soon, but they’ll have their hands full as an estimated 2,000 medical marijuana growers start entering the tracking system on July 1.
According to the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, a recent inventory of adult-use marijuana in the state stood at more than 1 million pounds. That’s roughly 4 ounces for each of the state’s 4.1 million residents.