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Local water districts in Washington and Colorado, as well as other states where marijuana cultivation has been decriminalized, contract with federal water projects for supplies.
While Washington and Colorado both legalized medical marijuana over a decade ago, and while several of the other 17 states served by Reclamation have also legalized the drug for medical use, USBR's Soeth said that the issue of cutting off water supplies for marijuana had never come up before.
Marijuana advocates condemned the federal water ban for state-legal crops.
"This decision just further underscores the absurdity behind federal marijuana laws, and the need for Congress to fix them," Dan Riffle, director of federal policies for the Marijuana Policy Project, told HuffPost.
"Put another way, this decision says that because of the Controlled Substance Act, federally-controlled water can't be used to produce marijuana, but can be used to distill liquor or grow tobacco," Riffle went on. "I'm fine with the Bureau of Reclamation restricting water usage, but it should do so on the basis of sound science, not by deferring to outdated marijuana laws the public wants repealed."
It's not clear exactly how many people use federal water for marijuana grows in the various states Reclamation serves, but the impact on Washington's legal growers may be significant. The state's marijuana laws allow for outdoor growing and, according to McClatchy, the Bureau of Reclamation controls the water supply of about
two-thirds of the state's irrigated land.