As I walk through the various upscale recreational cannabis stores we have at our disposal, I can’t help but think back to my younger days. I would call my dealer; he said he would be there in ten minutes. Then several hours later, I’d hear a knock on my door. There was the obligatory chit-chat and then the inevitable question “indoor or outdoor.” Not indica or sativa. Indoor or outdoor. Those were my only two options. Now, it’s completely possible that he was just saying that and both were indoor, but it didn’t really matter; he was just asking me, “You want the good, expensive stuff? Or the cheap, not-so-good stuff.” Outdoor cannabis has always been synonymous with a lower quality than indoor. Even the famous stoner movie, Friday, references this when Chris Tucker and Ice Cube are smoking on the porch.

“I thought this was indo?” Cube asked, holding the lit joint.
“Yeah.” Said Tucker.
“It smells like outdo.”
“Will you just shut-up and smoke it already!” said Tucker, defensively. Again, it seems that at one point it was well understood and agreed upon that this was the case with cannabis grown outdoors. That was, until legalization came, and along game greed, jealousy and petty politics.

It may be hard to believe, but one of the largest enemies the cannabis industry has right now, is itself. Many outdoor farmers have banded together, investing considerable time and money into impeding the growth of and placing restrictions on indoor farms by forming lobbyist groups such as the Washington Sungrowers Industry Association. The WSIA comes across as an alliance that will fight, tooth and nail, for the rights of outdoor farmers stating that they will “work with county and municipal governments to ensure that land use and zoning requirements do not discourage, or place undue burden on, sun growers.” Meanwhile, they are funding legislative efforts to restrict the rights of indoor growers and purposely painting a false picture of indoor grows as evil.

But, why? What did the Washington indoor growers do to the outdoor farms that would inspire them to spend money on a lobbyist group, instead of investing in their farms to put out a better product? The truth may sting a little. Big outdoor farms in Washington couldn’t sell a mediocre product harvested in 2016, so they started manipulating things behind the scenes.

Washington is not Southern Oregon or Humboldt county. It’s overcast, cold, and constantly wet from October to June. Simply put, Washington is a less than ideal place to grow cannabis outdoors. Most outdoor growers have to either take their crop down prematurely, or cross your fingers the rain will hold out and your crop won’t mold. Factors that are nearly impossible to control. With only a couple of harvests a year, they have to get it right or risk losing all their profits for the year. Indoor farms have instead chosen to adapt and invested considerable funds to have the ability to grow year round. They use LEDs, hydroponics, and different configurations to attempt to control every element of the grow and reduce their environmental footprint where possible. Due to the high start-up costs, indoor grows are far outnumbered by outdoor farms. Most of the cannabis on the shelves today is produced cheaply, in mass outdoors, as the small indoor farms cannot supply the sheer volume of flower produced in outdoor operations. However, this is a market driven by educated consumers who have swayed toward quality over quantity, given the choice. They’ve created a clear demand and the market has been left with a natural surplus of mid-grade cannabis that just happens to be grown by large outdoor farms.

The WSIA’s response to the surplus of their product is what is truly alarming. Because they still have massive amounts of cannabis they can’t sell and losing the crop would be a massive blow to their bottom line, they have lobbied to have the once mandatory harvest date removed from their packaging. This allows outdoor growers to sell one to two-year-old cannabis without having to disclose that to consumers. Some customers may not care about the date of harvest, but the information should be made available and the decision left up to the individual, it should not be hidden in an attempt intentionally deceive the consumers and patients that use cannabis. This is just one example of the underhanded tactics outdoor farms have been using to mislead their customers and spread misinformation about their competitors.

These coalitions of outdoor growers are actively trying to alter the public’s perception on indoor farms, spreading misinformation, while marketing an inferior product with terms like “green,” “organic,” or “sungrown only.” They are forcing a narrative that indoor farms are harmful to the environment, and people are starting to believe them. At least three articles have been released in the past few months against indoor cannabis, all of them are from the perspective of outdoor cannabis farmers (some members of the WSIA) and none of the articles allowed a rebuttal from an indoor farm. The first claim is always that indoor grows  use more power, stating “outdoor growers use 80 percent less energy,” and compare indoor farms to “factory produced chemical laden food.” The energy consumption of any farm depends on the size. Even sun-grown cannabis needs power for a packaging facility, storage, and office space. Indoor farms conscious about their energy use, turn to LEDs. There are pros and cons to both ways of growing. Indoor grows could argue that they conserve water much better than the outdoor grows. At the end of the day, both farms are growing plants that are constantly converting carbon dioxide to oxygen providing an overall benefit to the environment.

This hostility from an over-representation of outdoor grows needs to come to a halt. The comparison to factory farms is just Ludacris. If anything, indoor grows are more comparable to similar indoor produce farms. For instance, tomatoes. We all like tomatoes, but if we relied on outdoor grown tomatoes, we would have a huge crop in late summer, then nothing for the rest of the year, just like cannabis. That’s why we grow them indoors with supplemental light. Yes, it uses energy, but it gives us a great product all year. We use supplemental light to grow petunias- why can’t we use it to grow cannabis in a climate where it wasn’t designed to grow year-round? If we allow outdoor farms to have their way, there would be one or two big crops a year that would have to satisfy the market until the next year. You would lose many strains (mostly sativas) that wouldn’t be able to grow to their full potential. The beautiful variety of flower we have available to us would be reduced to a mere monoculture. A situation that would be especially bad for medical patients, as they would now be limited in their access to medicine.
It is important to keep in mind these accusations are not being put forth by a reputable environmental agency. It’s being put forth by the same people who see successful indoor grows hurting their bottom lines. They aren’t doing this because they are proactively trying to protect the environment. This is a petty and jealous business move. Indoor growers have never had a problem with outdoor farms.  We believe that the people and patients of our state deserve the best quality cannabis, and the broadest range of strains possible, and each farm has the right to choose what they think is the best way to achieve that goal. The market decides which farms made the right decision. There is excellent, mediocre, and poor cannabis being grown by both indoor and outdoor farms. These tactics of spreading misinformation are all too familiar in this day and age, and they have to be addressed. There is more than enough of the market to go around, and by all means, grow outdoors and try to make the best product you can make. Just don’t set the entire industry back by spreading lies and fear-mongering. The outdoor coalitions have been slowly trying to whittle away the rights of indoor grows because they are unable to keep up with the constant change and regulations in the cannabis industry. The worst part is they are making progress. Many people, consumers and otherwise, are accepting this information as fact without looking into it. After all, it’s information about farming from outdoor farmers who seem like trustworthy sources. But for too long they have been getting away with underhanded tactics with little pushback from the indoor grows. The indoor farms have instead chosen to spend their time working to grow the best weed possible, not attacking the competition.

The difference is that most indoor grows are profitable and often cannot keep their product in stock. For this reason, many of them want to increase their canopy size or go up a tier, allowing them to increase production to meet demand. It makes sense, your business does well, you hit a point where your at maximum growth and you need a new facility to grow as a company, so you expand. Outdoor grows have expressed that this would be a disaster, arguing that there is already a huge overproduction of cannabis, and going so far as to lobby for legislation to ban going up a tier. There is only an overproduction of mediocre cannabis and they are leaving out the part where these successful companies are growing a far superior product, and have already proven they can sell through it without trouble. It should not be up to outdoor farms to weigh in on indoor farms. That would be like a failing pizza chain blocking the expansion of the popular local mom and pop shop with the reasoning being “we make enough pizza for this town, it would be insane to let you make more pizza.” If that sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is. A business that has proven itself in the marketplace should be allowed to expand. It’s that simple. If indoor farms aren’t given the opportunity to expand, they will remain stagnant and eventually become irrelevant to their competitors. If outdoor grows can’t grow comparable flower year round, they need to embrace quantity over quality or utilize various extraction methods to provide a high-quality alternative to flower. It’s a simple rule of any growing industry. You adapt or you die.