Oklahoma’s Marijuana Wake-Up Call

A simple promise—less prosecution and more freedom—turned into a complex fight against organized crime. We walk through Oklahoma’s hard lessons from “just medical” marijuana: how cheap licenses, light regulation, and an all-cash market drew in well-funded networks using straw owners, laundering money through land purchases, and operating grows tied to trafficking, extortion, and violence. The numbers tell the story: farms ballooned from roughly 2,000 to 8,000 in under three years, then fell t...