On the Record
Expert talks illegal cannabis impacts on agriculture on half an acre. Lots of it is indoors in warehouses or greenhouses. They’re not going to have the same environmental footprint as stuff that you pour on the ground outside. How would you describe what illegal cannabis operations look like in California today? new (for growers switching from illegal to legal businesses).
n Although California legalized recreational cannabis in 2016, il- legal cultivation continues. Gov. Gavin Newsom launched the Uni- fied Cannabis Enforcement Task Force in 2022 to better understand and dismantle illegal operations. State officials have since spent hundreds of millions of dollars to address the problem. But much remains unclear regard- ing the size, scale and impacts from these operations. Ag Alert ® spoke with Dan Sumner, a Univeristy of California agricultural economist and co-author of “Can Legal Weed Win?: The Blunt Realities of Canna- bis Economics,”about the effects of illegal grows on agriculture. The in- terview has been edited for length and clarity.
Some of those growers just said, “To heck with it. I have a buyer who wants to buy my stuff. That buyer doesn’t want to buy it from a legal person because they don’t want to get a license either. And we have consumers.” And the proposition for the consumer (who used to buy illegal cannabis) is: You have the opportunity now to buy from somebody you don’t know, who’s not in your neighborhood, to go out to the mall to the cannabis shop and pay twice as much. There were plenty of consumers that said, “Why would I want to do that?” It was a hard sell. Some farmers are concerned about potential environmental impacts from illegal cannabis operations. What do you know about the effects these operations have on their surrounding environment? The physical footprint of cannabis is tiny. You (can) grow a lot of cannabis
There’s still lots of illegal cannabis out there. The grower doesn’t have a license, the processor doesn’t have a license, the retailer doesn’t have a license. That’s a problem for legal growers, and it’s a problem for politicians, because part of the way legal cannabis was sold was: We’ll take this illegal crop that’s very widely used and we’ll at least make it le- gal and regulated. But the problem for a grower switching from illegal to legal is that this involves a group of people who have been operating a business without government licenses, without necessarily paying minimum wage, without having a porta-potty on the farm that met state regulations, without having pesticide-use inspectors come. If I went down the list of regulations that farm- ers must comply with ... there are a lot of them, and they’re costly. The same with water-use restrictions or filling out forms or paying taxes. All of those things were
Illegal cannabis operations can use pes- ticides that have been banned in California for a long time, and they can use pesticides that have not been approved for cannabis use in California for one reason or another. Certainly, illegal cannabis is using pesti- cides that are banned in California, some of which really do have significant spillover effects in the way they’re used in cannabis. Some of them may not at all. (If) they’re used indoors, it never spills over much, and even though they’re negative, it’s a pretty tiny pesticide impact, and it’s partly because the physical footprint is so small. The big-acre crops or the crops that are more likely to spill into the streams prob- ably are the biggest emphasis for the Cal- ifornia Environmental Protection Agency or our health services. The basic point is environmental im- pacts are a major concern locally in some places. But California cannabis is a small
See SUMNER, Page 5
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4 Ag Alert October 21, 2026
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