When I saw the headlines last week that four people were found dead and another injured following a reported hostage situation at a cannabis farm in rural northwest Oklahoma, I didn’t want to read the articles.

Whenever a mass shooting occurs, I reflect back on the Chardon High School shooting in 2012 in northeast Ohio, where three students were killed and another was paralyzed. I was part of a local team of journalists who covered that event, and educators told me the shooting was not so much an eye-opener as it was a reality. That was more than 10 years ago. Ever since then, it’s been difficult for me to dive too deep into reading about mass casualties elsewhere. But I’m a firm believer that to heal a wound one must first open it up and clean it out.

In Oklahoma, authorities said the attack was done “execution style,” and that a suspect, Wu Chen, 45, was arrested in Florida two days after the shooting, The New York Times reported. Capt. Stan Florence of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said at a news conference that Chen knew the victims, who were Chinese citizens.

Mark Woodward, a spokesman with the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control, told the NYT that his bureau was still investigating whether the license for the cultivation site near Hennessey had been obtained legally. In Oklahoma, where medical cannabis was legalized following State Question 788’s passage in June 2018, an unlimited license structure has led to the issuance of more than 8,000 grower permits. To be awarded a license, applicants must be at least 25 years old, pay a $2,500 license fee and represent a company in which 75% of the owner interests are Oklahoma residents. However, many nonresident applicants received their cultivation permits by skirting the rules via paying off “ghost owners.”

While the paperwork may appear sound for those applications, Woodward told Cannabis Business Times last yearthat ghost owners are not involved in the farm operations that their names are tied to but receive compensation for the fraudulent ownership. Oftentimes, he said, the product from the resulting operations “is being moved off the farm in box trucks in the middle of the night to the East Coast and the money is laundered all over the U.S. and outside of the U.S.”

Woodward told various media last week that he couldn’t say whether that was what was going on at the rural farm where the killings occurred. Regardless, he said several homicides have been tied to medical cannabis operations throughout the state.

-Tony Lange, Associate Editor

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