Editor’s Note: In honor of 4/20, we’ve invited Uncle Skunk – a former contributor for our now defunct cannabis vertical The Happy Ogle – to emerge from whatever smoke-filled cave he’s been living in since 2021.
It’s a 4/20 miracle!
Your favorite Skunk Unc has risen from the tomb to be your stoned savior once again; all praise be to the mythical flying thunder lizard!
Why did I stop contributing to the Happy Ogle almost exactly five years ago in the distant COVID-fogged culture wars of 2021? I have my theories, ranging from a Patrick-led coup d'état to a self-induced pot psychosis to the website going under like every other half baked Oklahoma cannabis business idea, but whatever the cause, I’m back!
To spark up this reboot session we’re going to take a look back at how things have changed in the Oklahoma marijuana scene over these very long five years – for better or worse.
The Dispensary Drop-Off
I don’t know about you, but I kinda miss when there was a dispensary on every corner. Whether it was seemingly partnering with every 7-Eleven in the metro – a perfect combo if you ask me – to jamming up mini strip malls with competing businesses; the numbers don’t lie.
According to my extensively deep research and what the internet told me, the guesstimated number in 2021 was around 2,500 (which seems low), whereas today we are down to 1,400 (which seems... high?).
If my skunk math is correct, which it is usually within a 420 margin of error, that's about a 42.0-ish% decrease in our ability to go from dispensary to dispensary and get the first-time customer discount semi-indefinitely – a secret stoner cheat code. My small town of around 10,000 has gone from four dispensaries to one, all located within a mile of my house, but we will get by!
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A Shift in Strains
I used to be a Sativa man. Green Crack, Sour Diesel, Bruce Banner, Hazes of the strawberry, lemon, silver, Ghost Train and others were in high rotation. Over these long five years, I began to find the uplifting energy that these strains offered began to be overwhelming. Eyes bulging, mind racing, feet pacing, panicking over stupid shit and convinced that a gnat was living in my beard… it all became too much, and I slowly started to slip to the more chill side of strains.
Now, I am an avowed Indica enthusiast and still find the creativity and energy that Sativas offered without the mental and physical strain. I guess that’s why they call them strains, because the wrong one will stress you out. Ba-dum ching, the first of many Skuncle jokes to grace this publication.
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Event Extinctions
Remember when you could spend a Saturday afternoon wandering through a haze-filled parking lot, listening to a Sublime cover band while a guy named “Terp Daddy” tried to sell you a pre-roll that promised to “unlock your third eye and possibly your childhood trauma?” Those were simpler times. Now, with the industry cooling off and dispensaries disappearing, those hazy little community carnivals have mostly gone up in smoke right along with them.
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The Happy Ogle: The End of an Era
RIP to one of the best gigs I ever had. I was literally paid and reimbursed to buy, smoke, vape, eat and stone my way to an article. The Happy Ogle was populated by lovely people, such as Croctopus, James, Beth and a whole list of other people who came after and tried to replace me. Uncle Lenny, I want a word.
Gone are the days where I could get high off the fruits of my verbal labor reviewing the very thing that I consumed and not worrying about being witty or current. This created a self-sustaining smoking machine that floated too close to the cherry in the sky and burned out, but I’ve learned my lessons and am getting back on this horse once again to bring you my best and brightest highdeas!
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Pain at the Pump
Speaking of getting around, the price of that magic ground juice has bounced around in the five-year span of old men doing and saying stupid things to make it fluctuate for no real apparent reason.
According to AAA and the Energy Information Administration, the average gallon of the cheapest gas in Oklahoma would cost you $2.22, whereas today we’re paying around $3.44! My skunkulator tells me that is about a 55% increase or a buck twenty-two for you dollars and cents folks. If you don’t like this and voted for the brain damaged orange man, you have no one to blame but yourself. I didn’t vote for him, so I blame Patrick. If he never put the proverbial dagger in the back of my career, I would have gone on to become a highly paid New York Times journalist who broke all the most damning evidence of Trump’s pedo-ring shit and saved our timeline! Thanks Patrick…
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Oklahoma politicians trying to cancel weed.
According to my editor, that's one thing that hasn't changed. Disregard.
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Pandemic Then, "Normal" Now
Let’s go back in time, clear the brain fog and remember what was going on at this time on 4/20/2021. Masks of all sorts of effectiveness were being worn in public places, vaccines were just becoming widely available in Oklahoma, and we were the 6th state to administer one-million doses, which is wild to my mind when I remember all the pushback and Ivermectin-touting people of certain political opinions gave.
In Oklahoma City, Mayor David Holt announced the city’s mask mandate would expire on April 30, 2021 and we started to get back to whatever the world had become over those months of lockdown with a load of unanswered questions and uncertainty about the future… shit, maybe things haven’t changed so much, but my editor says that’s a topic for another article!
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Uncle Skunk is resin, He is resin indeed!
