Medical Marijuana Application Numbers Compared To Colorado, Arkansas

Monday, April 8th 2019, 9:16 am

By: Ashley Holden

It’s been nearly seven months since the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority started accepting applications from patients, caregivers and businesses. As of April 1 there were nearly 91,500 patient applications submitted to the OMMA, 78,000 of those applications were approved.

Oklahoma is definitely not the first state to have a medical marijuana program, so News 9 looked into a few others.

Colorado's program was approved back in 2000. In that first year the state's data shows they only had 94 patients. But when their state law caught up and established guidelines for dispensaries in 2010, their patient numbers jumped. They went from 41,000 to over 100,000.

Arkansas is more comparable to Oklahoma in terms of timeline, but not implementation.

They started accepting applications in 2017, but still today product isn't even available. State employees have been working through that process and expect it to be finalized soon. They told News 9 they just started sending cards out but only have approved around 10,000.

Overall Oklahoma's implementation process was pretty quick. In just months, marijuana was available for card holders and businesses were up and running.

This could contribute to the high volume of applications the OMMA is seeing.

Clearly people are showing they are willing to pay the one hundred dollar application fee for a card.