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

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.

Baker, who has been growing weed since he was 13 in Georgia, has cultivated crops in some of the world’s most notorious marijuana hotspots, from the forests of Northern California’s Emerald Triangle to the lake region of Switzerland to the mountains of Colorado. Oklahoma was not exactly on his radar. So one weekend in October, Baker and his wife Jessica decided to take a drive to see where all their products were ending up.

Voters in the staunchly conservative state had just four months earlier authorized a medical marijuana program and sales were just beginning. The Bakers immediately saw the potential for the fledgling market. With no limits on marijuana business licenses, scant restrictions on who can obtain a medical card, and cheap land, energy and building materials, they believed Oklahoma could become a free-market weed utopia and they wanted in.

“Turns out rednecks love to smoke weed. That’s the thing about cannabis: It really bridges socio-economic gaps.”

Chip Baker

How Oklahomans learned to love weed

The yawning gap between Oklahoma’s official attitude toward marijuana and public opinion was first revealed in 2013.

At that time, the overwhelming consensus among the state’s lawmakers was that the best way to deal with illegal drug use-including marijuana consumption-was to lock up lots of Oklahomans for long periods of time.

“I knew that we were ruining families,” Sapp says of the state’s harsh criminal penalties. “It literally will take generations to repair the damage that we’ve done to people and their children and their grandchildren.”

Sapp managed to cobble together enough funding to commission a poll gauging whether there was support for overhauling the state’s marijuana policies. The surprising findings: 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.

But the realization that public officials were so far out of touch with public opinion inspireda small group of politically diverse activists to challenge the conservatives’ stranglehold on public policy. Sapp partnered with Chip Paul, a right-wing libertarian who discovered during a 2012 trip to Colorado that marijuana eased his chronic lower back pain, and Frank Grove, a left-wing activist who is often semi-jokingly touted as the “head of Antifa in Oklahoma” to put medical marijuana legalization on the ballot in 2014. They fell short, only managing to collect roughly half of the number of signatures required.

Two years later, they tried again and narrowly surpassed the signature threshold. Then-Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who would later serve as Donald Trump’s chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, intervened and rewrote the ballot question in a way that advocates thought misleadingly suggested that marijuana would be fully legalized if it passed. Oklahomans for Health, as their group became known, sued to have the initial ballot language reinstated. Ultimately, the group prevailed but by then it was too late to get on the 2016 ballot.

That meant the issue would go to the voters in 2018. Though polls indicated the measure was getting roughly 60 percent support from voters,Republican Gov. Mary Fallin and practically every member of her cabinet opposed the legalization referendum, as did the entire Oklahoma congressional delegation. Police and prosecutors came out against it, along with every major religious organization, the Oklahoma State Medical Association and most of the business community, including the State Chamber of 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.”

Jeff “Freaux” Henderson

“Oklahomans have historically been a chemical-seeking society. We like to take things to feel different than we do right now.”

Jason Beaman

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. That means that some patients who would potentially be most likely to benefit from the program-people who are dealing with chronic pain-are afraid to enroll, while people who just want to get stoned have no problem obtaining a card.

“We have this upside-down world,” Pasternack says.

Chris Moe, says he’s experienced this phenomenon firsthand. Over a decade of treating excruciating chronic neck and back pain that’s required seven surgeries, he developed a prescription drug addiction that worsened until he was taking nearly 10,000 pills a year-painkillers, muscle relaxers, anti-anxiety meds, sleeping pills-all with the permission of his doctor.

“He watched me come in and tell him, ‘I just stuck a 20-gauge in my head, I’m suicidal, I’m going to kill myself if I don’t stop taking these,’” recalls Moe, who everyone knows as “Uncle Grumpy.”

What’s next for Tokelahoma?

Rep. Scott Fetgatter never envisioned becoming the “pot guy.” The 52-year-old, three-term Republican lawmaker says he’s never used the drug and voted against the 2018 legalization referendum. But after voters in his district strongly backed the initiative-it passed in all four counties that he represents in eastern Oklahoma-Fetgatter decided that it was his duty to delve into the nitty gritty of cannabis policy.

Since then, it’s practically taken over his life.

“For two years, there hasn’t been a single day-not one, including Saturdays and Sundays-that I don’t receive some sort of phone call, text message, or email and have a discussion about medical marijuana in Oklahoma,” Fetgatter tells me recently over lunch at the Boomarang Diner in Okmulgee, where they know he likes his bacon “extra crispy.”

Fetgatter portrays himself as a realist. Oklahomans have proven beyond any doubt, he reasons, that they’re going to smoke weed. Therefore, as he sees it, the legislature’s job should be to ensure that products are safe and that businesses can thrive.

“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.”

But he also sees dollar signs. Like many states, Oklahoma is facing a looming budget crisis. That’s in part due to the coronavirus pandemic. But it’s exacerbated in Oklahoma by a steep downturn in the oil and gas industry, a linchpin of the state’s economy.

Fetgatter argues that lawmakers would be negligent to not at least consider enacting full legalization given the state’s dire budget situation. Estimates are that recreational sales could bring in $200 to $300 million in annual revenue, with the specter of Texans pouring across the border to purchase weed an especially alluring prospect. But Fetgatter doesn’t know if there will be enough support to make a legislative push.

“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.”

But House Majority Leader Jon Echols is adamant that’s not in the cards. Echols has also emerged as a key Republican ally of the marijuana industry. (Democrats are largely irrelevant, controlling just 28 out of 149 seats in the House and Senate.) He initially became interested in cannabis policy after discovering that his niece had to travel out of state to obtain CBD products to treat her epileptic seizures.

“It’s very, very hard to be deeply rooted in your faith, and still be against something that eases suffering,” he says.

Echols was the chief sponsor of one of the country’s first CBD legalization bills, way back in 2015, and believes that likely paved the way for Oklahoma’s booming medical marijuana program. “In other markets where medical marijuana comes in, that might have been their first encounter with the cannabis plant,” Echols says. “Oklahoma had a very mature CBD product market.”

“I worry that we get to a point where we miss an opportunity to marry marijuana reform with criminal justice reform.”

Ryan Kiesel

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.

But Echols opposes recreational legalization and is blunt about what he thinks of its prospects at the capital. “I think the chances of passing the Legislature are zero percent,” he says, citing continued wariness about marijuana legalization from a broad swath of GOP lawmakers.

Instead, Echols believes the state should focus on fixing problems with the current program so that it can continue to flourish. Specifically, he wants to make sure that the OMMA has the enforcement teeth necessary to ensure that products are legal, safe and accurately labeled. That includes implementing the seed-to-sale tracking system and making sure the state’s testing labs are delivering accurate results.

“We’ve got to do it to stop bad actors from bringing illegal drugs from outside the state of Oklahoma,” he says. “Right, wrong or indifferent, 788 said ‘grown in Oklahoma,’ period.”

Echols also wants to engage with the Oklahoma State Medical Association and find a way to bring more doctors into the medical marijuana program in order to ensure that chronic pain patients have access to the drug.

“People need to feel like they can talk to their doctors about what they’re taking, whether it’s federally illegal or not,” Echols says. “That excuse to me is such malarkey. The feds aren’t going to do anything about that.”

Conservative lawmakers might soon discover that once again they’re not the ones with the final say on drug policy. Voters have shown they intend to keep liberalizing the state’s drug laws.

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. But supporters ultimately decided it wasn’t feasible to try and collect the necessary signatures in the midst of a pandemic.

Originally published at https://www.politico.com on November 27, 2020.