GCM Roundup | May 1, 2021
I have an insane news diet. It comes from reporting for years on security, criminal justice, and technology. Seemingly every Web site and newsletter on the planet does link lists or news curation. But I see the same cannabis stories shared from different outlets in my feeds all week long. Cannabis Twitter is even worse.
So I'm working hard to make the GCM news roundups genuinely enlightening. They’re heavily biased to cannabis in Oklahoma and flyover country with splashes of national where it's interesting or relevant or both. Or I just can't resist the chance to say something snarky.
There should be several items in each roundup that you haven’t seen elsewhere, or I need to turn up the voltage of my radar systems. I’m a heavy user of Google Alerts already and have other alerts set up for all new scholarship papers and patent applications containing the words “cannabis” and “marijuana.” I haven’t seen a cannabis-related patent from Oklahoma yet. It’ll be a fun post when I do.
Thank you so much to the subscriber who left a tip this week. I couldn’t thank you in text through the Cash app. But that was an encouraging nudge to keep going. And it shows people are reading all the way through. “Listening to” at the end of each post leads to a playlist on Spotify that “grows” with Green Country Monitor. Substack is a curious journalism experiment. But I like curious journalism experiments. They’re the only thing that might save journalism in the digital age.
GCM Roundup | Oklahoma and Beyond
An armed employee at an Ardmore dispensary shot a guy to death on Saturday as he was attempting to rob the store at gunpoint.
The Journal Record is a heavily paywalled business and trade publication that covers Oklahoma from the capital. Their stories are difficult to access online (even with a library card). But they’ve been doing some good reporting on Oklahoma cannabis. This headline alone should be enough to get your attention: “Cannabis franchising on the horizon.”
Rep. Scott Fetgatter (R-Okmulgee) told KJRH in Tulsa that he believed his three major House bills having to do with cannabis were dead in the Senate. That includes HB 2022 (temporary patient licenses lasting two years), HB 2023 (allowing the transfer of cannabis business licenses for $500), and HB 2004 (a laundry list of cannabis rule changes that’s similar to HB 2646, which is still active).
I collect examples of bad pot puns in mainstream news stories about cannabis the way other people collect records. I present to you the worst pot pun in a headline for the week courtesy of the Ponca City News: “Legislative options proposed to weed out duplicitous growers.”
Illinois just joined an elite club that includes Oklahoma of states that are officially generating more taxes from cannabis than alcohol. Oklahoma reached the threshold in January.
What was once the police academy building for Flint, Michigan, is going to become a cannabis grow operation.
Snoop implies in a new song that he once blazed up with Obama. I’m guessing that never happened, but it’s fun to imagine it did.
The New York Times did a great profile of one of the longest-serving cannabis-reform activists in the United States: Dana Beal. “His decades demanding pot legalization have included battles with the authorities, arrests, stints in jail, and the loss of a home.”
The cannabis technology company Cova Software put a bunch of work into creating a “free guide” explaining to Oklahoma cannabis how to comply with Metrc. They’re plan was to then ask for your email address before you downloaded it, so they could later sell you cannabis software using that email address. Then the lawsuit over Metrc happened. Poor Cova. (Here’s another free guide to Metrc compliance, and I won't try to sell you shit.)
A contributor wrote for Forbes that cannabis is helping to create a renaissance of American entrepreneurship. I strongly believe that is occurring here in Oklahoma, and it’s really awesome to watch.
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