Okla. cannabis market booms
Staunchly conservative state emerges as a highly unlikely place for marijuana to thrive
KEOTA, Okla. — Across Oklahoma, a staunchly conservative state with a history of drawing people in search of wealth from the land, a new kind of crop is taking over.
Next door to a church in the tiny town of Keota, the smell of marijuana drifts through the air at the G & C Dispensary. Strains go for $3 a gram, about a quarter of the price in other states. Down the road, an indoor-farming operation is situated in a residential area near mobile homes, one of about 40 in the town of 500 residents.
Since the state legalized medical marijuana in 2018, Oklahoma has become one of the easiest places to launch a weed business. The state now boasts more retail cannabis stores than Colorado, Oregon and Washington combined.
The growth is remarkable given that the state has not legalized recreational use of marijuana. But with lax rules on who can obtain a medical card, about 10% of Oklahoma’s
nearly 4 million residents have one, by far the most of any state.
Fueled by low barriers for entry and a fairly hands-off approach by state officials, weed entrepreneurs have poured in. It costs just $2,500 to get started, compared to $100,000 or more across the state line in Arkansas. And Oklahoma, a state that has long had a tough-on-crime stance, has no cap on how many dispensaries can sell marijuana, the number of cannabis farms or how much each farm can produce.
That growth has pitted legacy ranchers and farmers against this new breed of growers. Groups representing ranchers, farmers, sheriffs and crop dusters recently joined forces to call for a moratorium on new licenses. They cited climbing prices for land, illicit farms and strains on rural water and electricity supplies.
Signs of the explosive growth are hard to miss. There are now towns with far more dispensaries than food stores. And cannabis operations now outnumber wheat and cotton farms. The industry has also created thousands of jobs in a state that remains among the poorest in the country. Supporters of the industry also argue that the less punitive approach to possession of marijuana and other drugs, along with other sentencing reforms, has eased pressures on the state’s prisons.
But critics assert that growers in Oklahoma are producing far more marijuana than can possibly be sold in the state and are feeding illicit markets around the U.S.
Growers can produce cannabis for as little as $100 a pound, and then turn around and sell that for between $3,500 to $4,000 a pound in California or New York, said Mark Woodward, a spokesman for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.
Eyeing such violations, authorities carried out a series of raids last year, shutting down nearly 80 farms starting in April.
Some growers have groused that the ever-expanding supply has made cannabis prices plunge by about half in the last six months, to as low as $800 a pound for some strains.
Tara Tischauer, co-owner of Red Dirt Sungrown in Guthrie said falling prices have reduced her revenue by about one-third in 2021. Still, her operation employs 25 people and steadily produces about 125 pounds of cannabis a week.
“A few years ago I thought Oklahoma would have been the last state in the country to get cannabis going,” she said. “If we can’t succeed, it’s our own fault.”