OKLAHOMA CITY- (KOKH) — Top drug enforcement officials released a new report Friday on the state of marijuana in Oklahoma.
“Oklahoma has twelve times as many licensed growers as the state of Colorado, and Colorado has two million more people than what we have,” said Senator James Lankford.
More marijuana being produced could be creating more problems for the sooner state. According to the report from the Texoma High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), Oklahoma has gone from 43rd in the nation in child marijuana use in 2018 to now 3rd in the nation.
“We’ve seen a giant growth in children showing up two years old and younger, this also comes out of the report that end up with marijuana poisoning; this is a very serious issue,” Lankford said.
Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics Director Donnie Brown said there are 2,400 marijuana grows in the state and they can’t account for 70 million pounds of marijuana from March 25th last year to that date this year, which has created a shady environment.
“We provided a safe haven basically under the laws that we have for criminal organizations to come to the state and that’s why we see almost every trackable statistic of crime shot up,” Brown said.
What’s also shot up is the number of marijuana plants seized through investigative efforts, which has jumped a staggering 69,573% over the last five years.
But Anderson said the answer isn’t arrests alone.
“If we did raids every day, and we’re doing them about every day people, but if we continue to do raids every day for the next five years, we won’t end this. We’ve go to address this legislatively, we’ve got to clean this up, we got to come to the table, see what’s really important,” he said.
Lankford said State Question 788, which legalized medical marijuana in Oklahoma, was written very loosely and believes more safeguards are needed to rein in the problems Oklahoma is seeing. There are several bills in the legislature this year that address marijuana.
