Oklahoma is one of the later states to legalize medical marijuana but they haven’t been slow in coming forward. Just a year after legalizing the industry, sources have said the state has issued 7,300 licenses to operate medical cannabis-related businesses.

That’s a lot of activity within a single year of an industry being legal!

According to the Medical Marijuana Authority, those licenses break down as:

• Growers: 4,287
• Processors: 1,173
• Dispensaries: 1,848

That’s a healthy start for such a new market and offers a decent balance between supply and demand. With twice as many growers as processors and dispensaries, the industry as it stands should be able to sustain itself over the longer term.

This is on top of the news that Oklahoma has licensed over 200,000 medical marijuana patients, has created a new business license category called transporter, specifically for the MMJ industry and has begun a tender process for laboratory testing licenses for the testing of medical marijuana for compliance.

Regulators are also considering a new industry standard for compliance that will span the entire industry. That will include labeling, product testing, waste management and seed-to-sale tracking. That last is already in force with demands businesses provide a complete audit trail of the entire business.

All new medical marijuana license applications must come from Oklahoma residents who can provide that 75% of the company’s ownership is resident in the state.

The state is doing a lot of work to create an ecosystem that delivers the regulation required to operate to modern standards while not stifling innovation and business creation. Despite only being a year old, the industry is maturing at pace and the authorities are mostly managing to keep up.

Aside from local authorities trying to shut down the industry or trying to implement more restrictive rules over medical marijuana, it seems the genie is well and truly out of the bottle and public opinion and the law is on medical marijuana’s side.