By James Bridges | Herbage Magazine
I walked into my local dispensary the other day, the same one I’ve leaned on for years when I wanted something truly worth smoking. Top shelf. Real deal. Great prices and a good atmosphere. It sounds simple enough. One would have to imagine that this formula would be a successful one for most any retail outlet. But with weed…. Apparently it’s not.
What I walked out with was different. The bag cost me the same as two full tanks of gas in my Jeep, and when I cracked it open….dust. Dry, lifeless, brittle. Bud that had been stripped of its soul. It burned my throat before it ever touched my head.
I looked at the label to catch the harvest and packaging dates. Harvest less than 2 months ago and packaged in mylar soon after. Should not have been a problem. The flower vendor is a well known multi-state operator who has done quite well in the market. The dispensary, again, is one of my go to stops. The names of both mean nothing to me other than they have, up until this point, had a proven track record.
This is what overregulation does.
Across Oklahoma, shops are stacking shelves with below-mids, chasing price points instead of quality because patients won’t, or simply can’t, pay for the good stuff anymore. And why would they? The market has been designed to reward the cheapest option, not the best one. Growers are cutting corners just to survive. Dispensaries are buying whatever they can keep on the shelf. Patients are walking away with medicine that feels like leftovers. It’s very disappointing to see the destruction of quality all due to over regulation and bad actors within the industry…
The tragedy is that this is exactly the opposite of what we dreamed of when we first legalized. We weren’t supposed to end up here. We were supposed to dive deeper into terps, into curing, into cultivation practices that elevate quality of life. We were supposed to celebrate craft. Instead, ignorant suits who see nothing but dollar signs and control have drowned the craft in paperwork and fees. They’ve pushed the small farms, which are the heart of the Oklahoma market and cannabis industry, closer and closer to collapse.
Now we are being blinded and walked through another set of falsities just so that those in power can remain and those without can get left behind… You must understand that by begging for federal “rescheduling” instead of true de-scheduling, we’re inviting Big Cannabis in through the front door. We’re paving the road for corporations to dominate a plant that was supposed to be about people. While they’re setting up their boardrooms, real connoisseurs are slipping back to the black market, because it’s the only place left to find flower with any kind of a heartbeat.
So here I sit, holding a bag of dried plant matter that used to be medicine, asking myself, what the hell have we done? The sheep have been led to the slaughter and the ones that consider them to be “black” sit by non-chalantly watching as an industry is being mowed over and squashed and revamped into a solid goldmine for only a select few.
We’ve let our celebration turn into compliance theater. We’ve traded a culture for a commodity. We’ve turned the cure into cornflakes.
Something keeps me up at night and that is that we won’t notice what’s been lost until it’s gone for good. That by the time we demand better, the small-batch growers will be gone, the shelves will be filled with corporate mids, and the spirit of Oklahoma cannabis will be just another marketing slogan.
It doesn’t have to end like this. Stop settling.
Because if we don’t, then the culture we built, the one rooted in medicine, art, and lifestyle, and better quality of life dies right here, like the dust at the bottom of this bag…