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.”
Hellbound and Down 