Oklahoma’s illicit marijuana market may now be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, according to new statistics presented Friday by the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and the Texoma High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.
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Between March 2024 and March 2025, state tracking systems failed to account for roughly 70 million pounds of marijuana — nearly 30 times the amount needed to supply Oklahoma’s roughly 300,000 licensed medical marijuana patients, said Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics. From 2022 to 2023, that figure was 22 million pounds — meaning the amount of lost marijuana has roughly tripled over the past two years.
The numbers show how, despite years of enforcement, Oklahoma’s illicit market has continued to thrive. A senior state official told The Frontier the increase likely stems from more growers complying with reporting requirements amid tighter enforcement, rather than a surge in production.
The new data comes from a report from the Texoma High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area commissioned by U.S. Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma. It ties the overproduction to illegal farms run by Chinese criminal groups and cites reporting by The Frontier and ProPublica.
At a press conference Friday unveiling the report, officials called for legislative action.
“We can’t arrest our way out of this,” said Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics. “If we did raids every day for the next five years—and we are doing them about every day — we won’t end this. We’ve got to address this legislatively. We’ve got to clean this up.”
Anderson urged the legislature to commission a formal study to determine how much marijuana is needed for the state’s medical market and to develop production limits for grows based on the findings. Unlike most other states in the country, Oklahoma does not limit the amount of marijuana its farms can produce.
That position stands in contrast to what other state leaders have said. Senate President Pro Tempore Lonnie Paxton told The Frontier in February that he believes law enforcement agencies already have the tools they need to deal with the issue, and that major new legislation is unnecessary.
