It Would Take Oregonians Seven Years to Smoke All the Weed They Harvested This Year

As 2019 dawns, Oregon is sitting on 1.3 million pounds of unsold cannabis flower.

While that total includes some just-harvested flower that hasn't dried yet, it's still absurdly more weed than the 166,000 pounds of legal cannabis Oregon consumers smoked last year. (The Oregon Liquor Control Commission, which tracks legal cannabis grown and sold in the state, could not say how much its current inventory included still-wet bud.)

But the excessive inventory will still drive prices down, and put growers out of business.

"The impact of being over-inventoried is that suppliers into the system must lower prices in order to sell into the market," says Beau Whitney, an economist who studies the cannabis industry for New Frontier Data. "There is no real short-term solution to this. So this is going to be the environment for quite some time."

1.3 million pounds is a lot of pot. How much?

If all or most of the 1.3 million pounds consisted of dry flower ready to smoke:

It would fill 589,670,081 1-gram pre-rolls.

It would weigh the same as 359 2019 Subaru Outbacks.

It would take Oregon smokers 7.8 years to smoke it all, if Oregonians continued to purchase legal weed at the same rate they did in 2018.