How much marijuana can one person consume in a year? It seems like a straight forward question. I’d imagine if you are a rookie smoking for the first time, you probably don’t consume much out of your metal pipe or ‘customized’ soda pop can. On the other hand, I’d assume a staff member at a medical marijuana clinic in California could probably eat enough cannabis brownies to sedate a large rhinoceros. This is a question that many states have had to tackle when setting limits on their medical marijuana programs.
Take for instance the State of Montana. Their medical marijuana program allows 6 plants of any size, and you can possess up to one ounce of dried marijuana. This would be an example of a broken system, due to the fact that if the grower harvested even one good sized plant it would yield well over one ounce. So by cutting down their plant or plants, patients in Montana are felonies waiting to happen. This is how it was in my state, Oregon, before patients pointed out the obvious problem of having too much medicine.
In Oregon, the current legal limit per medical marijuana patient is 24 dried ounces, or 1.5 lbs. However, that doesn’t mean you can only have that amount once per year, it means that is your limit at any given time. There are people that I have met at the clinic that are yielding 14-22 ounces per plant (Oregon law permits 6 mature plants per patient) every 10 week cycle. That works out to 436.8 — 686.4 dried ounces a year. Now consider the fact that Oregon has a low limit level compared to some other programs in the nation. There are programs that permit up to 99 plants, and when grown outside, can yield several pounds per plant. These growers can also possess up to 10 pounds at a time. THAT’S A LOT OF MEDICINE! Attached is a great article from NPR about marijuana activity in Humboldt County, CA where medical marijuana limits are the highest in the nation. To quote a medical patient from the article ‘”I grow as much as I can consume in a year,” he says smiling. “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”
