Pot shops on the state line are the latest flashpoint in the Idaho-Oregon border debate

ONTARIO, Ore. — When Steven Meland and his business partner opened Hotbox Farms in the small eastern Oregon town of Ontario, they knew there was a big opportunity on the other side of the Snake River.

Ontario, population 11,600, is less than an hour’s drive from Idaho’s largest metropolitan area, Boise, population 700,000 and growing, where marijuana of all kinds, including medical, is illegal .

“Politicians have been able to have this scenario where they say they don’t have legal cannabis,” says Meland. “But actually we all know that there is legal cannabis in Boise.”

Hotbox Farms is a major player in an economic boom that has occurred since Ontario allowed recreational marijuana shops in 2018. There are now twelve dispensaries in this small farming town once known primarily for inventing the tater tot. Ontario now sells more marijuana per capita than anywhere else in Oregon. The industry employs about 600 people. Many get health insurance and most, like their clients, appear to be traveling here from Idaho.

That’s where Meland is from too.

“There are over a million people within a hundred-mile radius of the store,” says Meland. “Of course they are serving a broader market.”

But this boom has quickly become the latest flashpoint in a larger political and cultural battle that has been heating up since 2020, when a group of Oregonians from the rural eastern side of the state petitions began to circulate on a proposal to break away from the majority blue state and join the conservative Idaho.

How “Greater Idaho” Came to Shape

People in rural America have long complained about having to live under laws created by people who live primarily in cities. For decades, the highest profile example in the West has been the so-called jefferson statereferring to regions of northern California and southern Oregon that are heavily dependent on natural resources, where some people have long felt disconnected from powerful cities like San Francisco and Portland.

Today, Portland looms large in a more recent push to create “Greater Idaho.”
Some in sparsely populated eastern Oregon say they feel so divorced from the politics of the liberal city and the West Coast that they are asking for a real divorce.

This year in the Idaho Legislature, where Republicans hold a large majority, the effort has gained some steam of late because of what’s been happening in Ontario.

“We have a little drug problem right on the side of our border,” said Rep. Barbara Ehardt, an Idaho Republicanat a recent state legislative hearing on a bill that would authorize Idaho to start talks with Oregon lawmakers about moving the border.

“A lot of Idahoans go there (Ontarios) and get drugs,” Ehart said, “and that’s going to be pushed hundreds of miles away.”

Your measure of Greater Idaho recently passed by the Idaho House.

The urban rural divide is in the heart of Greater Idaho

Pushing the Idaho border hundreds of miles west is just one of the litany of far-right bills introduced in Idaho’s Republican-majority legislature. Others have included a proposal to make it a Crime for doctors to administer the covid vaccineor if someone help a girl under 18 to have an abortion.

By contrast, Oregon voters recently decriminalized small amounts of hard drugs like cocaine and heroin and approved stricter gun laws. These hot topics have long been unpopular in the sparsely populated lands east of the Cascade Mountains.

Many small farming and ranching communities have been severely affected by addiction and people will also tell you that it can take an hour or more for a deputy sheriff to respond to a call. Rural eastern Oregon is also predominantly federal public land, which has long been a source of tension and even violence in this corner of the west.

“Partisanship has grown and cultures have drifted apart,” says Matt McCaw, an Oregon resident and spokesman for Citizens for Greater Idaho.

The group helped convince eleven eastern Oregon counties to pass resolutions in support of Idaho’s annexation.

One of them is Malheur County, where Ontario is located, and where longtime local Ron Jacobs sits on the county commission.

“We feel like our conservative values ​​are different from theirs,” says Jacobs. “They pass so many laws there that they don’t even take into account that we are kind of stepchildren here in eastern Oregon.”

While Idaho businessmen are interested in crossing the Snake River into Oregon to start marijuana businesses, Jacobs sees a trend in the other direction. Farmers and ranchers, he says, are increasingly looking to relocate some or all of their businesses to Idaho.

“We have farmers moving across the river to get Idaho residency to avoid having to pay (higher) inheritance taxes,” he says, adding that he is helping some families avoid selling their farms.

Jacobs says that most of her constituents feel more politically aligned with Idaho. But the question is also a practical one: Parts of Malheur County are considered to be conjoined with the Boise metropolitan area, home to the region’s major shopping, entertainment venues and airport.

Is Greater Idaho really a possibility?

Jacobs knows that Greater Idaho is a long shot. Even if both state legislatures pass it, it would still take an act of Congress to start moving forward.
But he thinks he’s started an important conversation.

So does Steven Meland, the owner of Hotbox in Ontario, though for a very different reason. He thinks the revived debate within the legislature of his home state may actually backfire and end up building more support to legalize marijuana in Idaho.

The industry is betting that the cultural and political divide over legal marijuana will evaporate in the face of another conservative value: the free market.

“Remember Ontario was also a right-wing conservative Ontario just a couple of years ago, they always said they never legalized,” says Meland.

But today the people bring more than two million dollars a year in taxes from dispensaries like this.

“People don’t see cannabis as the scary thing that politicians have historically made it out to be,” says Meland. “When given the opportunity to vote on legal cannabis, the vast majority of the time they choose to have it.”

And in Ontario, anyway, marijuana is starting to look pretty mainstream. Some of the dispensaries help with city cleanup projects and partner with local charities for Covid relief and coat drives. There are also two more dispensaries ready to open.

That will soon bring the operating total here to fourteen, at least for now.