U.S. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) said at an event on Friday that voters in his home state didn’t understand what they were doing when they legalized medical marijuana in 2018.
Pointing to a new report from the Texoma High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program, which covers north Texas and Oklahoma, Lankford said the state has been overrun by growers and dispensaries and has “seen rising crime, human trafficking [and] illegal migration coming into our state” since the law took effect.
Although citizens voted in favor of medical marijuana legalization, he said, “I don’t think a lot of Oklahomans realized, when that vote actually occurred, what the consequences of that would be.”
The senator’s comments are in keeping with criticisms that Republican politicians in Oklahoma have levied against medical marijuana for years. In 2022, for example, Gov. Kevin Stitt (R) similarly suggested that state residents misunderstood the cannabis initiative they voted to enact.
Stitt said at the time that he was directing law enforcement to “crack down hard on the black market,” adding that “drug cartels, organized crime, foreign bad actors have no place in the state of Oklahoma.”
But in comments on Friday, Lankford—a longtime critic of legalization—painted a dire picture of what’s happening in the state.
“The findings that are coming out are stark,” he said of the new HIDTA report. “We have Chinese criminal organizations and organized crime that has moved in to Oklahoma in just the last six years, in numbers that have skyrocketed.”
That’s led to what he described as “execution-style murders in rural areas of the state” that are connected “directly to marijuana grows and what is happening here on the ground.”
“We, as a state, have to decide what we’re going to do about it,” the federal lawmaker said. “We have hard decisions to be able to make on what we’re going to do to be able to protect our kids in the days ahead… This is a very serious issue that we need to be able to take on and to be able to address.”
“To be clear, I was opposed from the very beginning,” he said of medical marijuana legalization. “We’re now seeing the results of people backing off on the law enforcement side as our state rushes into this issue.”
Oklahoma has 12 times as many state-licensed marijuana growers as Colorado, Lankford said, and five times the number of licensed dispensaries—despite Colorado being home to an additional 2 million people.
While Oklahoma once ranked 43rd in the nation in terms of marijuana use by minors, he added, it now ranks third.
Nevertheless, Lankford said it is helpful for lawmakers to have the new HIDTA report available.
“This is helpful for us to be able to get a snapshot of where are we,” he said. “We can tell where we were six years ago, we can tell where we are now. And that’s helpful to be able to pick up national trends.”
To combat what he described as a scourge of foreign nationals setting up criminal marijuana businesses, he pointed to legislation he introduced in 2023—the Security and Oversight of International Landholdings (SOIL) Act—meant to tighten laws around the acquisition of agricultural land by foreign businesses.
Another congressional bill that Lankford sponsored earlier this year would continue to block marijuana businesses from taking federal tax deductions under Internal Revenue Service (IRS) code 280E—even if cannabis is ultimately rescheduled.
Lankford has also been sharply critical of the federal rescheduling push itself, leading a public comment letter with GOP colleagues last year opposing the reform and alleging the government’s recommendation was based on politics rather than science.
As he’s done repeatedly in past years, the senator on Friday also criticized Oklahoma’s medical marijuana program as “wide open.”
“Every other state has some kind of parameter for limiting medical marijuana,” he said. “In Oklahoma, you can say, ‘My left toe hurts every third Thursday,’ and get a permit on that.”
Lankford has been making similarly dismissive comments about medical cannabis for years.
“They can say, ‘I have a headache.’ They can say, ‘My left toe hurts every other Thursday,’” he said in 2018. “They can go to a veterinarian, a doctor, a chiropractor, any number of medical people of any type.”
“Marijuana is not used for anyone on chronic pain other than just getting high and to escape from the pain,” he claimed at the time.
Lankford used the same phrase when mocking the voter-approved law in 2022.
“You could say, ‘My left toe hurts every other Thursday,’” he said, “and they would say, ‘Great, that’s a medical condition.’”
Meanwhile in Oklahoma, lawmakers last month advanced legislation aimed at protecting gun rights of state-registered medical marijuana patients, although federal law still bars cannabis users from owning firearms regardless of their patient status.
If it’s enacted, the bill would specify that applicants for state-issued handgun licenses would not be disqualified merely for being a medical marijuana patient.
A separate measure introduced in January would make it illegal for women to use medical marijuana during pregnancy.
Late last year, medical marijuana industry representatives also weighed in on lawmaker-proposed changes to the medical program.
Photo courtesy of Philip Steffan.
The post GOP Senator Paints Dire Picture Of Medical Marijuana Legalization In His State, Saying Voters Didn’t Understand ‘Consequences’ appeared first on Marijuana Moment.
