How One of the Reddest States Became the Nation’s Hottest Weed Market

United States News News

How One of the Reddest States Became the Nation’s Hottest Weed Market
United States Latest News,United States Headlines
  • 📰 politico
  • ⏱ Reading Time:
  • 392 sec. here
  • 8 min. at publisher
  • 📊 Quality Score:
  • News: 160%
  • Publisher: 59%

Oklahoma is a state that has long stood out for its opposition to drug use. Now it's the biggest medical marijuana market in the country on a per capita basis.

WELLSTON, Oklahoma—One day in the early fall of 2018, while scrutinizing the finances of his thriving Colorado garden supply business, Chip Baker noticed a curious development: transportation costs had spiked fivefold. The surge, he quickly determined, was due to huge shipments of cultivation supplies—potting soil, grow lights, dehumidifiers, fertilizer, water filters—to Oklahoma.

“This is exactly like Humboldt County was in the late 90s,” Baker says, as a trio of workers chop down marijuana plants that survived a recent ice storm. “The effect this is going to have on the cannabis nation is going to be incredible.” “Turns out rednecks love to smoke weed,” Baker laughs. “That’s the thing about cannabis: It really bridges socio-economic gaps. The only other thing that does it is handguns. All types of people are into firearms. All types of people are into cannabis.”

But lax as it might seem, Oklahoma’s program has generated a hefty amount of tax revenue while avoiding some of the pitfalls of more intensely regulated programs. “This is a perfect test in front of the world,” says Norma Sapp, who has been waging an often lonely campaign for marijuana legalization in Oklahoma for more than three decades. “How will this shake out?”

Sapp managed to cobble together enough funding to commission a poll gauging whether there was support for overhauling the state’s marijuana policies. The: 57 supported ending criminal penalties for possessing small amounts of marijuana, while 71 percent backed legalizing medical marijuana. At that time, voters in Colorado and Washington had just become the first in the country to back full legalization, but most red states in the Midwest and Great Plains hadn’t even authorized medical programs.

Oklahoma’s rank among states in the percentage of population enrolled in its medical marijuana program“I think it’s the largest quality of life state question that we’ll have to vote on in my lifetime,” Rogers County Sheriff Scott Walton. “It just starts a whole other option that people have to destroy their life. We’ve got a problem right now with weed, especially the Colorado weed that is genetically engineered knock-you-on-your-butt weed.

In the end, the opposition by state officials had little effect: The legalization referendum passed with support from 57 percent of voters. “It only serves to enrich a small group of people who win a lottery ticket,” says Peter Barsoom, CEO of 1906, a Denver-based company that began distributing its line of cannabis “drops” to dispensaries in Oklahoma in September. “Patients never win on that. They pay higher prices, they have worse products and they have a worse customer experience. It really is just crony capitalism at its worst.”

“Typically, we get a small rush on Sunday after church lets out,” Hamilton says. The onset of the pandemic back in March also shook out some new customers: “As soon as the schools shut down, we had a huge flood of parents saying, ‘This is really stressful.’” Despite the robust competition, business at Hamilton’s Bud and Bloom is booming. Dixon says that sales have been climbing month after month. The Broken Arrow dispensary recently began staying open 24 hours a day on Thursday, Friday and Saturday—drive-thru sales only after midnight—and they’re thinking about opening a second shop in nearby Sapulpa.

“Out here, they’re letting talent shine. You don’t have to be one of these big players in the marijuana industry. It’s really an open market.”“It’s a lot harder to bust on the scene out there than it was out here,” Henderson says of the difference between Colorado and Oklahoma. “Out here, they’re letting talent shine. You don’t have to be one of these big players in the marijuana industry. It’s really an open market.

Jive can’t grow fast enough to meet the demand, Henderson says. Eventually, he and his partners will start thinking about expansion plans, but for now they’re content to just focus on continuing to develop their brand. “Everyone and their dog has some kind of marijuana license,” says Chip Paul, the libertarian legalization advocate. “You have just a stupid amount of grow licenses and process licenses.”

“We have a lot of elderly patients, people that at the beginning, they were afraid to park their car out here,” Malone says. “But now they’re comfortable.” Kelly Williams, who was named interim director of the OMMA in August, says the seed-to-sale system is a long-overdue tool to bolster accountability and transparency.

“We’re not making any money, because there’s such a money grab,” Malone laments. “Everybody just wants a piece of the pie.” That’s in part because the demand isn’t quite as insatiable as it was at the outset. “We went to all four corners of the state,” he recalls of the early days. “We were on the road five to seven days a week.”

“If they use it for a medical reason and a patient’s getting benefit out of it, it’s a medical use of marijuana,” he says. “I haven’t run into anybody that didn’t qualify for it.” “Oklahomans have historically been a chemical-seeking society. We like to take things to feel different than we do right now.”“Oklahomans have historically been a chemical-seeking society,” Beaman says, citing the opioid addiction crisis as one particularly destructive example.according to the National Institute on Drug AbuseBeaman doesn’t deny that marijuana has therapeutic effects for some patients. But he scoffs at the idea that Oklahoma’s program is primarily medical in application.

Pasternack’s biggest concern is that many doctors—particularly pain specialists—refuse to provide recommendations for the medical marijuana program out of a misguided fear that they could lose their license or face costly lawsuits in part because marijuana remains illegal under federal law. In fact, Pasternack says, some doctors threaten to stop treating their patients if they’re using marijuana.

Moe, Pasternack and Norma Sapp formed an advocacy group called the Oklahoma Cannabis Liberty Alliance in 2019. Their primary goal: preserve the free-market approach to marijuana sales that makes Oklahoma unique, but scrap the façade of calling it a medical program. “Anybody who wants to use marijuana is already using marijuana. You’re not stopping that,” Fetgatter says. “The goal is to eliminate the black market.”

“It will be determined by the temperature of the legislature, and how bad the budget is,” he says. “If we ended up with a $1.3 billion budget shortfall, and are looking for money, we might use a recreational marijuana program to produce a few hundred million dollars additional revenue.” “I worry that we get to a point where we miss an opportunity to marry marijuana reform with criminal justice reform.”Echols didn’t take a stance on Oklahoma’s 2018 medical marijuana referendum, but says he sensed it was going to pass during a Sunday school class when he realized that about half of the participants intended to vote for it.

Top Image: Cattleman’s Café is an iconic restaurant in the stockyards of Oklahoma City Middle Left: A statue of a cowboy roping a steer outside the National Stockyard Exchange in Oklahoma City Middle Right: A church in Oklahoma City. Bottom: Strip mall signs near Tulsa’s Oral Roberts University. Recreational legalization would have almost certainly been on the ballot in Oklahoma this year if not for the coronavirus pandemic. The proposed initiative would have made it legal for anyone at least 21 years old to purchase marijuana and it also would have created a way for people with past marijuana convictions to get those records expunged or to have their sentences modified.

Left to right: The Friendly Market’s Max Walters, Robert Cox and Stephen Holman stand in front of a display of memorabilia documenting their succesful two-year legal battle over criminal charges for allegedly selling drug paraphernalia prior to the legalization of medical marijuana in Oklahoma.o one embodies the transformation of Oklahoma from drug war battlefield to marijuana mecca better thanCox opened the Friendly Market in downtown Norman in October 2014.

We have summarized this news so that you can read it quickly. If you are interested in the news, you can read the full text here. Read more:

politico /  🏆 381. in US

United States Latest News, United States Headlines



Render Time: 2025-02-07 09:17:13