In Washington, the second state to start recreational sales of cannabis, regulators combat cannabis diversion from the legal recreational and medical programs to the black market by limiting the number of producers and processors and the size of their growing sites, a state officials said.

Washington limits its number of licensed cannabis producers and processors to 1,200 statewide, and growing sites are limited to 30,000 square feet of canopy size, the footprint of in which mature and immature cannabis plants can be grown.

That differs from Oregon, where there are 1,102 active licensed producers registered at the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, which oversees the recreational marijuana industry. There are hundreds of applications pending before OLCC investigators or waiting for assignment to investigators, and state law does not set a cap on the number of producers, processors or retail outlets, according to OLCC data. In Oregon a canopy can be as small as 625 square feet and as large as 40,000 square feet.

“The original initiative in Washington directed us to limit the amount of cannabis that could be grown in Washington state,” said Mikhail Carpenter, Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board spokesman. “Way back, when this first started, the board understood that it had a finite market in the state.

“What we hear from consumers is that there is a wide variety of product on the shelves. For our purposes we are doing this similar to how we enforce alcohol.”

Both Washington and Oregon have a so-called seed-to-sale cannabis tracking system, but where they differ is that Washington has 102 enforcement officers, compared to Oregon’s OLCC 24 officers dedicated to compliance and 23 inspectors spread out across the state in Medford, Bend, Eugene and Salem.

Washington’s recreational marijuana program began retail sales in 2014, compared to Oregon’s which started in 2016. Adult-use cannabis spending in Oregon is expected to reach $553 million in 2018, according to a report by The Arcview Group, a cannabis analytics firm. Washington’s cannabis market is set to break $1 billion in 2018, making it the third-largest legal state this year, behind Colorado’s $1.7 billion and California’s $3.4 billion, The Arcview Group reports.

— Reporter: 541-633-2117, sroig@bendbulletin.com