Tulsa, Oklahoma, CBD Shops Multiply Amid Medical Pot Legalization
Tulsa’s market growth for cannabis-derived products without the high of THC was inevitable regardless of Oklahoma’s medical marijuana legalization, according to advocates.
Proponents of medical marijuana have fielded questions about whether entrepreneurs are opening cannabidiol, or CBD, shops with the intention of more easily transitioning to marijuana businesses since the June passage of State Question 788.
Isaac Caviness manages Tulsa CBD store Hemp Rx, which intends to acquire a medical marijuana business license to sell products with THC in addition to items without the intoxicating chemical. Caviness downplayed the notion that anticipating medical marijuana legalization compelled him to open his business. He told the Tulsa World that the store would succeed anyway because of CBD’s health benefits.
CBD products are used to help alleviate chronic pain, insomnia, anxiety and some cancer-related symptoms.
“With the products that we have — and I’m sure all the stores feel the same — we have customers who talk about how much they’re helping them,” Caviness said. “So whether we have full access to the plant or not, it meant a lot to us to be able to have a good third-party-tested product that people could find relief with.”
Caviness estimated nearly a dozen stores currently offer CBD products in northeast Oklahoma. Only two stores in the area supplied the products during this time last year.
The rising number of CBD stores can be attributed to how people are beginning to see CBD’s potential and understand its effects, said Joshua Lewelling, co-founder of pro-marijuana activist group Green the Vote.
“I’ve been standing in CBD shops when a patient or client would come in and say their doctor had told them to come down and get educated,” he said. “Even the doctors are coming onto it as well.”
Lewelling believes many of the CBD businesses don’t intend to get medical marijuana licenses, which require stricter regulations.
CBD is legal to buy, sell or use in Oklahoma as long as it has no more than 0.3 percent THC.
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