THE STATE BUILT THE MACHINE. NOW IT PRETENDS TO BE SHOCKED.
James Bridges | Herbage Magazine
There’s a particular smell in Oklahoma politics.
It ain’t cow shit, crude oil, or burnt rubber on some county road outside Ardmore. This one reeks of money, panic, and that special selective amnesia only career politicians can muster.
Right now, brothers and sisters, it smells like marijuana.
For years, Oklahoma flung open the gates to the cannabis gold rush. Cheap licenses. Paper-thin barriers. Thousands approved. Foreign cash, local cash, family cash, borrowed cash. It didn’t matter. Fill out the forms, survive the bureaucracy, and grab your slice of the green dream.
At peak, more than 9,000 licensed grow operations. Today, per Attorney General Gentner Drummond’s own little fantasy world, the numbers are down below 1,200.
That’s a slaughter.
Now the same crowd that printed the licenses and cashed the checks is touring the carcass like they just stumbled on the crime scene.
In February, Drummond’s office dropped Operation Blunt Force. This is a multi-state hammer hitting fraudulent licensing, racketeering, money laundering, and black-market trafficking. 20 arrests, 50+ warrants, $1.5 billion in alleged proceeds. If the cases hold, prosecute the bastards. No serious operator defends cartel-style games or Chinese syndicate straw-man fraud.
But here’s the part that stings.
Many of these ops weren’t ghosts in the machine. They ran on state-issued paperwork. The state approved the applications. Took the fees. Looked the other way while rural counties screamed bloody murder for years. Rubber stamps flew. Revenue flowed. Surprise! Who woulda’ thunk the very same apparatus acts shocked when the shit hits the fan.
Where was the scrutiny when the checks cleared? Where was the “law and order” when thousands of approvals stacked up? Where was the outrage before the cameras rolled?
Suddenly it’s press conferences and task forces. The political class campaigning on cleaning up the mess they built.
Potheads can be put in a corner and called dumb lazy potheads once again.
Drummond went further. On local TV covering Blunt Force, he said, as a law enforcement officer, he’d love to see the whole marijuana industry “gone.” Not just the fraud. Not just the traffickers. The industry. Fact check that.
To patients, veterans, legitimate growers, processors, dispensary owners, and entrepreneurs who followed the ever-shifting rules, hired locals, and paid taxes. This hurts and it’s happening right in their faces.
Drummond’s public ties to Oklahoma banking, specifically board and ownership connections to Blue Sky Bank, don’t prove conspiracy. But they do invite the obvious question in a state this small: When policy flips to political theater, whose interests get protected and whose get fed to the machine?
Blue Sky Bank also publicly promotes cannabis business banking services. Again, that does not prove conspiracy. It does make the question fair.
The cannabis industry is NOT in defense of crooks. The cannabis industry must demand consistency.
Thousands of Oklahoma operators played by rules the state kept rewriting. They built something real in the chaos the politicians invited. Now they watch the same suits pose as saviors amid the wreckage.
Justice my ass…. That’s convenient amnesia with sirens and spotlights.
The industry and those that support it remember the smell.
We remember who opened the floodgates.
We’re not buying the BS.
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