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Housed in a modest building along a scenic highway, it was the only dispensary in the city of Gates, Oregon, for 500 people.
Inside, however, visitors were greeted with an explosion of color and sound.
A classic Pioneer sound system bathed the room in music – Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder, old ska and blues – from owner Thorin Thacker’s personal collection of 3,000 vinyl records he kept on-site. Sometimes the soundtrack was provided by Thacker himself, a Latin dance musician and instructor, who played an 1882 Fairbanks & Cole banjo or played on the century-old piano in the lobby.
Beyond the experience, the dispensary’s curated selection of artisanal cannabis and hand-blown glass pipes from local artists helped attract a loyal clientele that included Portlanders 80 miles away.
Now everything is gone.
The fire burned so hot that it turned the safe into Swiss cheese, disintegrating the money that was left inside. Locally made glass pipes and bongs melted into a lot of art. Scraps of metal they were all that was left of the banjo and the piano.
“I’m crying,” Thacker said. “I have no more tears.”
Canyon Cannabis is one of thousands of pioneers who joined a rapidly growing multi-billion dollar industry on the West Coast. The recent wildfires underscore the unique obstacles cannabis companies face in trying to survive.
Thacker estimates his losses at more than $ 250,000. Your inventory could not be secured. After putting his heart and soul into his company and paying nearly $ 500,000 in federal, state and local taxes in nearly three and a half years in business, Thacker is back to square one.
“It just doesn’t seem fair that after providing so much tax revenue we can’t participate in any of the reasons why you trust the government to help you,” Thacker said.
And even for operators whose cannabis businesses and plants were saved, wildfires still present a mess of potential problems, such as smoke damage, pollution, smaller buds, stressed plants, and end products that might not pass regulation or the consumer. .
“We work year-round during this time period, when we work around the clock to achieve a successful harvest,” said Nathan Howard, co-founder and president of East Fork Cultivars, which specializes in CBD-rich breeding and cultivation. , cannabis and hemp for adults. “Most of our success in 2021 is determined by how successful we are during these six weeks, at the end of September and October.”
For several weeks, the situation has been challenging, he said. The 155,000-acre Slater Fire has surrounded much of Takilma, the small Oregon community that is home to the 33-acre East Fork Cultivars. The flames have approached a mile.
Howard and a small team have stayed behind to tend the plants as ash and charred leaves rained down from above. They put out the spot fires that arose nearby, scraping and digging into the mineral soil to create fringes of fire lines that served as barriers.
East Fork cultivars have been through fire seasons before, so Howard remains optimistic that the product the farm has been growing it will not suffer ill effects.
However, the farm lost two weeks of full operations and is now behind the ball in the overly critical harvest season. A bad year might not ruin most farmers, but it could spell ruin for East Fork cultivars and other cannabis growers who don’t have access to crop insurance or federal aid, he said.
‘Stillness in the air’
On September 9, when a red glow filled the sky and ashes fell like light snow, Tina Gordon feared the worst.
“There was a stillness in the air that was absolutely terrifying,” Gordon said. “There are no birds. There is no wildlife. Everything has taken cover.”
Growing cannabis, especially outdoors, is an incredibly expensive and risky business, especially when those operations cannot be easily secured, but Gordon said its main goal was to protect human and animal life while preserving the possibility of recovery.
Gordon chose to go through the mandatory evacuations and took some cannabis seeds when he left.
“Things don’t matter, vehicles don’t matter, infrastructure doesn’t really matter,” he said. “It’s the land and genetics.”
Gordon returned nine days later, after evacuation orders were lifted, to find that the farm had been mostly saved. They lost some of the vegetables that weren’t on automatic watering, but the cannabis plants remained.
The focus now has been to clean the plants, prepare them for harvest and testing to ensure the products are safe and free of impurities, he said.
He said some customers have reported cases of smoke damage, premature flowering and other factors that can reduce the quality and potency of cannabis or even ruin entire crops.
If environmental stress results in smaller buds and lower yields, that could lead to losses in the supply chain, Ellsworth said.
Complete losses
In Oregon, 20 licensed cannabis companies had operations in wildfire zones and 12 were total losses, according to the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, which oversees the state’s cannabis industry.
“But we suspect that the impact is greater than what we can find in a [Geographic Information System] map, “said Mark Pettinger, spokesman for the OLCC’s recreational marijuana program.
In addition to the destroyed operations, other cannabis companies have reported partial crop losses and damage to infrastructure and irrigation systems, according to the OLCC.
As of Sept. 16, about 17% of the state’s hemp growing sites were facing imminent wildfire danger, according to an analysis by Hemp Benchmarks, a provider of data and research for the industry.
Smoke, ash and other debris generated by fire pose a significant contamination risk to hemp crops, especially those that will supply the smokable hemp market, according to the report. Some crops were damaged by the strong winds that accelerated the deadly fires and others suffered water losses as power outages disrupted irrigation systems, Hemp Benchmarks found.
Thacker of Canyon Cannabis said he is hopeful of such legislation, but “I’m certainly not going to hold my breath.”
For now, he relies on a GoFundMe campaign to help raise funds to rebuild Canyon Cannabis, whether in Gates or nearby Mill City, where he was once mayor.
“It’s a lot of magic to recreate,” Thacker said. “I know we can do it, but it won’t be easy.”
