Oklahoma must fight back against ‘invasion’ by foreign drug cartels

But regardless of what the voters decide, it is his duty to uphold the law — and he has made it his mission to fight the new wave of organized crime he says has accompanied thousands of illegal marijuana grow operations across all 77 counties.

“I want to give my children … a good reason to stay in Oklahoma,” Drummond said. “And to do that we have to have safe communities. We have to be able to go to bed at night in rural Oklahoma and not fear being murdered in our sleep. We have to be able to walk the streets of downtown Tulsa without the fear of having the criminal element continue to magnify and the magnitude increase in our state.”

Medical marijuana brought the state $59 million in tax revenue last year, but Drummond said only $1 million was left to increase funding to public education, as designed by the previous state question that legalized medical marijuana.

“That’s not a fair trade. It costs so much to administer and oversee the illegality of those that have invaded our state,” he said.

He shared that the latest Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control intelligence suggests that as many as 3,000 of the current 6,299 marijuana grow operations are illegal.

“To put that in perspective, the three largest legal grows in Oklahoma (could) supply every adult Oklahoman enough marijuana to smoke 10 joints a day,” Drummond said.

Lawmakers are currently considering the creation of an organized crime task force that Drummond said is desperately needed.

“That will be kind of the epicenter of not just cutting the head off of each snake as we find them, but find the den of snakes and take them out,” he explained. “Presently, we’re kicking in doors and taking their marijuana plants and what fentanyl we find, cash in the facility, their cars, their guns. But what we need to do and what we’ve begun doing is tracing the money through numerous varieties of banks back over to mainland China or down into Central America and bringing it back.

“If we start taking the money away, we start taking the fun away from operating here. And then they’ll be encouraged to go to Arkansas or Texas.”

To that end, Drummond recruited to Oklahoma a new first assistant named Amie Ely, who had been a prosecutor for the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

She oversees four other new Drummond hires — a solicitor general, a general counsel and the heads of the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office’s civil and criminal divisions. “Her primary focus is to assist Oklahoma in standing up a task force that can abate and then eventually drive out organized crime in the state,” Drummond said.

Drummond’s military experience as a fighter pilot, which included combat service in the 1991 Gulf War, was brought up early in Friday’s event when the moderator, Tim Landes of Tulsa People, said he was curious to know what his aviator call sign had been.

“Stick,” Drummond replied.

Later, Drummond referenced his military experience in explaining how the Attorney General’s Office under his leadership is taking on new challenges and tackling many high-profile public corruption investigations so early.

“I looked at business and I look at government leadership very much like I looked at the structure of the military,” he said. “I’m the commander, and I’ve got deputies right underneath me that have their respective divisions. And they are empowered to make decisions inside the defined objectives of the office.”