Business Formation

Yes, you can. However, you are required to disclose each level of ownership when it comes to a cannabis business.

The cost of the transportation agency business is almost identical. The licensing is almost identical to all the other business licenses.

Dispensaries need an Oklahoma tax permit because they sell retail and so they’re going to be collecting taxes. So if you are wanting to start a dispensary, then you must apply for an Oklahoma tax permit through the Oklahoma Tax Commission.

Sixth Step to Starting a Medical Cannabis Business in Oklahoma: driver’s license, and your proof of residency. Before you can make application to OMMA, you need to have all these documents ready. It’ll make your life so much easier. The driver’s license is for all owners. You have to provide a color copy of the front of your driver’s license, and you have to also provide a copy of the back of your driver’s license. It will make your life a lot easier, and prevents you from being rejected, if you remember to do your copy of your driver’s license, in color, that’s for the front. I get it that the back is black and white, and it’s not going to change colors. But you need a copy of the back of your driver’s license. And again, this is for each and every owner of the business. You will get rejected if you forget the back, or if you don’t provide it in color. The next thing which is proof of residency.

The Fifth Step to Starting a Medical Cannabis Business in Oklahoma is the affidavit of lawful presence form and your background check requirements. So the background check is regarding you have to get this done at OSBI or through OSBI. That’s the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigations if you’re not familiar with that. And you also must not have any felony convictions in the last two years or any violent felony convictions in the last five years.

Step four would be to get the proof of distance from a school for the property, as well as your proof of location using GPS. Now, the OMMA has a tool on their website that will help you determine the distance from a school, which is a thousand feet. You must be at least 1,000 feet from any open school. I don’t mean any school that is open just during the school year. It includes the non-school year as well. You would need to do that. Then, to get the GPS locations, you would put the address into Google and you would hit search, and then you’d get the Google map. When you go on the Google map, you can right click and it says, “What’s here.” If you click on that “What’s here,” it’ll give you your GPS coordinates. Those are required for OMMA to obtain your license. This is for a grow, a dispensary, a processor’s license, a transportation agency license. You have to have this GPS, I believe even for the laboratories, because this isn’t about the school. This is just where the GPS location is. That’s step four.

There are multiple requirements you must be at least age 25 or older. There’s no getting around that. You must be a resident of Oklahoma, to hold the majority license or sole license of a medical cannabis business. You must not have any felony convictions in the last two years. You can have no violent felony convictions in the last five years. So those are your primaries. Now, as far as residency goes, you must have lived in the state of Oklahoma for at least two years or you must have a business partner who has lived in the state of Oklahoma for at least two years. So now, if you are a non-resident or have not lived in the state of Oklahoma for at least two years, then you can only hold 25% of that business license. They require proof of residency. So, with that being said, you will need to be able to provide that if you want to hold more than 25%. Now, if you’ve lived in the state of Oklahoma for five years within a 25-year period, and you can prove it, then you can hold a license but you have to have the documentation to prove it. They’re not going to just accept your word.

Step three to starting a medical cannabis business in Oklahoma is to apply for and obtain your employer identification number from the IRS.

So now that you’ve found your location and you’ve registered your business with the Oklahoma Secretary of State, your next step would be obtaining your certificate of good standing from the Oklahoma Secretary of State. And you would also print off the certificate of compliance from the OMMA website, and you would take it into whatever department within the city, county, township, municipality that the property that you’re going to operate your business from is located in.

We get a lot of questions about, “Where do I start?” And it’s becoming more and more frequent that I’m getting those questions, so I’d like to discuss, where do you start? There’s a couple of different ways to start, and the first one is setting up your LLC. If you don’t know how to do that, we can do that for you all day long. However, you also need to start with having a location for your business. So how do you find a location? What town do you get it in, or do you start your business in? Because we’ve got 77 counties, we have a lot of towns, even places I’ve never heard of before. So you have to look around.

Tulsa Attorney Isaiah Brydie explains how to start up a grow processing and distribution operation for medical marijuana in Oklahoma.