Executive Summary
This project, entitled “Licensed and Unlicensed Production Across Ban and Permit Jurisdictions,” aimed to assess the evolution of unlicensed cannabis cultivation since legalization. We approached this with four objectives in mind:
(1) empirically assess changes in unlicensed cultivation amounts and geography over time;
(2) identify what policy, social, economic, and geophysical factors drove those changes across ban and permit counties;
(3) compare unlicensed cultivation changes with proximate changes in the licensed market; and
(4) assess whether local bans or permits demonstrably prevented environmental harms from unlicensed cultivation.
Over 30 months, six core researchers from environmental, data, and social sciences, along with 22 undergraduate researchers and two additional graduate students, addressed these objectives through multiple methods including ethnography, interviews, data modeling, analysis of energy records, license data, and policy. There are several top-tier takeaways:
1) The boom is over: After a post-legalization boom, cultivation levels have returned to 2018 levels.
2) Licensed farms are the best deterrent for unlicensed cultivation: The presence of a licensed farm best predicts declines in unlicensed cultivation nearby.
3) Local Permit programs reduce the environmental impact of unlicensed cultivation: Over time, counties with bans showed more negative environmental outcomes than permit counties.
4) Bans do not have any consistent effects on unlicensed cultivation: Bans correlated to increases and decreases in unlicensed cultivation.
5) Eradication-oriented enforcement lost its deterrent effect, while civil regulation showed increasing efficacy: While eradication-oriented enforcement initially discouraged unlicensed growing, it lost efficacy over time. Civil regulations (e.g. administrative fines, liens, landlord liability, hemp registrations) showed increasing efficacy as they stabilized and fostered norms.
6) Unlicensed cultivation is diverging from licensed cultivation: Unlicensed cultivators are persisting in more remote areas, far from licensed farms.
7) Persistence of unlicensed cultivation is driven by socioeconomic factors: As market conditions worsened, unlicensed cultivators who persist have few alternative livelihood options.
Stated strongly, our analysis concludes that permitting – particularly of numerous farms, dispersed over broad territories – can do more to address unlicensed cultivation and its attendant environmental outcomes than any other policy choices, including bans and eradication efforts. Bans have no consistent impact on unlicensed cultivation and eradication-focused enforcement has declining efficacy, particularly when cultivators are driven by socio-economic concerns, and lack of other opportunities. Conversely, licensed farms were the strongest localized deterrent of unlicensed cultivation and local permit programs in general were correlated with fewer environmental impacts.
Our analysis points to a number of important but less-appreciated points contained in our findings. The “whack-a-mole” dynamics referenced in enforcement efforts occur more often in ban counties. Licensed cultivation grew faster than unlicensed cultivation. Among unlicensed cultivators, there was a notable shift from outdoor to mixed-light methods. Indoor unlicensed cultivation grew while the total amount of unlicensed outdoor and mixed-light shrank (2020- 2023). State regulations and permit programs can create norms that shape how unlicensed cultivation occurs and what kinds of effects it has on society and the environment.
Persistent unlicensed cultivators are commonly “stuck in place” either for economic or social reasons. Surprising and counterintuitive results also abound, such as the increase of cannabis cultivation in 2022-24 in counties that are conservative, have bans, and have intensive histories of eradication-based enforcement. We invite readers to investigate the numerous results and findings detailed in this report and in the raw data reported in the Appendices. Together, these findings point to a substantial remaking of unlicensed cultivation after legalization.
Though patterns of cannabis cultivation changed numerous times over 50 years of prohibition, post-legalization patterns are distinct and divergent. A crucial difference is the application of a suite of new policy measures, from bans to hemp programs to fines to permits. This project is the first-in-kind to test how different policies affect – or do not affect – unlicensed cultivation.
In doing so, it offers to California policymakers and to legalizing jurisdictions in the US and beyond, empirical feedback on policy efficacy. Another key difference in this new landscape of unlicensed cultivation is economic: the unlicensed market is not the lucrative market of prior eras. Cultivators are responding to cost pressures by exiting cultivation, becoming more efficient, or just persisting because other viable options do not exist.
These dynamics intensify in the remote geographies where cannabis was traditionally grown and among the marginalized populations that have found livelihoods and social stability in cultivation, before and after legalization. At the conclusion of this report, we recommend several specific policies and policy approaches.
Derived from our findings and takeaways, we recommend measures that strengthen and expand permitting in ways that foster normalization but do not worsen market conditions. Permitting is the key policy associated with declining unlicensed cultivation.
Policies include: maximizing the number and dispersion of licensed farms, creating new pathways for small-farm local permits, and protecting the right to personal cultivation. We also encourage the reform of enforcement and ban policies to ensure responsiveness to the drivers of unlicensed cultivation, demonstration of efficacy, and parity between cannabis and other forms of agriculture. We encourage broader developmental policies for areas affected by declines in cannabis markets and, finally, reform of track-and-trace programs to improve data quality and facilitate and increase optimal use. eliminate barriers to proper use.
