Courtesy of Buckeye Relief

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EASTLAKE -- Medical marijuana company Buckeye Relief LLC planted thousands of marijuana seeds two weeks ago, but where those seeds came from is a secret.

Marijuana remains illegal in federal law, and Ohio law is silent on where and how state-licensed medical cannabis cultivators are to get their first crop of plants. Ohio's legal medical marijuana growers will have to break the law before they start growing the plant.

It's called the "immaculate conception" problem, and it has been met with different responses in the 29 states that have legalized marijuana for medical or recreational use. In most cases, state officials looked the other way while growers brought seeds or seedlings from out of state or from the in-state black market.

The Department of Commerce, which licenses and regulates cultivators in the medical marijuana program, does not advise growers about how to get plants.

"That's not addressed in the Ohio Revised Code," commerce spokeswoman Stephanie Gostomski said. "That's a business decision for how they're going to manufacture their product."

A farmer who has illegally grown marijuana for decades in Ohio said importing thousands of new plants could be disastrous for Ohio's ecosystem.

"You can't say you're doing all this oversight if you're not doing it at the beginning," the farmer, who asked not to be identified, told cleveland.com.

The farmer said there are plenty of seeds and plants available in Ohio, and many popular strains were developed here and exported to other states.

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Seeds or clones?

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Jackie Borchardt, cleveland.com

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Clones taken from mother plants grow in an Illinois medical marijuana facility.

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Ohio's program was supposed to be "fully operational" by Sept. 8, according to state law. But licensing delays and local construction issues, including a cold winter, set back the state's time line by at least two to three months.

Commerce officials acknowledged the delay in June, when none of the cultivator licensees had been granted certificates of operation.

At the time, the agency's point person for the program, Mark Hamlin, told cleveland.com that bringing in mature plants, especially across state lines, could attract attention from federal law enforcement. He also noted that program rules require plants to be tagged with individual identifying bar codes when they reach 12 inches in height or are transplanted into containers or another apparatus for the vegetative or flowering stages, whichever happens sooner.

This "seed-to-sale" system keeps track of every plant as it's grown at a cultivator, harvested, turned into lotion or another product and sold to patients at dispensaries.

There are two ways growers start their plants: with seeds or with clippings from established mother plants, called clones.

Growers typically rely on clones, which have the same genetic profile as the mother plant, to ensure they're producing marijuana with consistent qualities. Starting with clones also shaves a few weeks off the growing time line.

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Courtesy of Buckeye Relief

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A Buckeye Relief employee plants marijuana seeds at its Eastlake facility on July 31.

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The farmer said cultivators planting seeds will have a longer and less predictable process to get product out the door and probably won't have enough to meet initial patient demand.

State regulators have given the OK to start growing to three cultivators out of 26 awarded provisional licenses. All three told cleveland.com they had started growing but did not say where they got their plants. FN Group Holdings LLC, which does business as Wellspring Fields, received its operating certificate June 29 and expects its small-scale Ravenna cultivation site to have some strains available in October or November. Agri-Med Ohio LLC, a small-scale grower in Meigs County, declined to share details about its time line.

A partner one of the other 23 licensed cultivation companies, who asked not to be identified, said the company plans to grow clones from mother plants in a legal state where its master grower has experience.

"Growers have grown in other places and they know what they like, so if they can get it from other places that's what they'll do," the cultivator said. "They have years of data on these strains. These are like their babies."

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What other states have done

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Ted S. Warren, Associated Press

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In this 2014 file photo, a Washington marijuana cultivator employee moves a "mother" marijuana plant that was used to produce small "clone" plants.

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Regulators in other states similarly have taken a hands-off, don't ask-don't tell policy.

When Washington legalized recreational marijuana, regulators gave growers 15 days to collect its starter plants but didn't say where they should come from. In Nevada, licensed cultivators were expected to get their starter seeds or clones from licensed patients, who are allowed to grow plants for personal use.

Oklahoma, where voters approved legalizing medical marijuana in June, is weighing several options for legal starter crops, which by law have to be from Oklahoma. One possibility there: routing seeds through Native American tribes not subject to federal law enforcement.

Daniel Shortt, a Seattle attorney at Harris Bricken, said there's no recognized way to address the problem and the legality issue resolves itself. Once Washington had its starter crop in place, he said, growers could legally buy clones and seeds from others.

"Looking the other way doesn't seem the best a state can come up with, but it seems it's the only practical way to do it," Shortt said.