How the marijuana ‘green rush’ fell apart

This reminds me of the strawberry growers here in Australia, QLD. Many farmers switched to strawberries and the market was flooded for one season. They were literally selling them by the kilo when previously punnets (250g) were 3-5 dollars each.

Lots of farmers switched to other more stable crops. The big players stayed and the small farmers producing high quality fruit continued.

The market stabilizing. Interesting times.

Crops have a shelf life and a consumption window - they are perishable. There’s enormous investment going on in technologies to enhance the storage of downstream products. That will pay off, in the same way that the excess crops of the Ohio valley were profitable once they could be converted to alcohol. Today’s glut is an abundance of raw material that indicates demand for some method to store the product longer.

I'd be interested to know if the new market for "full spectrum hemp" in non-decriminalized states is also affecting the legal growers. Here in NC, you can go into stores all over the state and buy thc edibles for a very reasonable price. And I'm not even talking about the delta-8 stuff that was popular for a while (though that's around too). Basically a farm bill loophole has made it so that processing low-thc hemp and selling products made from that is very profitable, and it doesn't have the same tax burden of legal weed. Even real flower is available through a different loophole, and you can go to dab bars in cities like Nashville and buy concentrate from that loophole bud. I could see people who would otherwise travel across state lines for reputable product preferring the loophole stuff due to convenience and price.

I was in NC recently and totally baffled by the selection and availability of different cannabis products. I'm still not sure what I was buying/smoking half the time, but I mostly enjoyed it.

Here in NY, we have a different kind of "gray market" that has been filling the vacuum created by a lack of legally sanctioned stores. It started as weed vans all over the city (selling products of questionable quality) and then it was bodegas and smoke shops selling flowers and prerolls on every street corner. Now we have full-blown recreational shops with bright lights and branded packaging selling nothing but weed 24/7, and they are completely illegal.

The first legal stores finally opened up a few days ago.

> Isn't the oils and extracts that solution for the long term storage?

Yep, and you will see distillate used for things like edibles/drinks/vapes.

This has two problems (in my mind), but both the same cause...consumers are picky.

First issue is most states require the date of extraction to be listed on the product packaging. If they see a really old date, they get sketchy about it. (ex: I have recently got some R&D stuff from a grow, and the extraction date was listed as February 2022 and that set off alarm bells in my head, even though it's perfectly fine like you mentioned.)

The second is a group of issues in consumers minds and they are all closely related. Distillate doesn't have all the terpenes the other forms do (and therefore removes the 'strain specific' effects that some go after), so you lose out on the entourage effect[0]. Some grows will start re-adding the terpenes to distillate using cheaper plant based (tree in some cases) terpenes and again, people are picky and this turns them off of the product.

[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3165946/