“You’ve seen countless billboards for Missouri and Oklahoma cannabis businesses, yet you’ve never seen one for an Arkansas dispensary. So you assume Arkansas must not have dispensaries.”
By Amanda Strickland, The Source Craft Cannabis
I was two sips into a mezcal cocktail at a bar in Bentonville, Arkansas—Walmart’s hometown—when a new friend said the six words that keep me awake at night: “I just drive to Missouri for cannabis.”
Because I have no filter, I responded, “You’re killing my business!”
She laughed, and I asked the real question: Why would a smart, well-traveled professional drive twenty-five minutes north to spend money at a dispensary chain when there’s a locally owned craft dispensary ten minutes from her house, with better product, better prices and established community give-back programs?
The answer: “I didn’t know The Source existed.”
Then the follow-up: “Getting a medical marijuana patient card in Arkansas seems hard.”
I’ve had this conversation with hundreds of Northwest Arkansans, and my field research has revealed an unfortunate truth: my friend is not an outlier. She is the average Arkansan.
Arkansas voters approved a medical-only cannabis program in 2016. Nearly a decade later, many Arkansans, particularly those who live near states with more permissive programs, do not know that Arkansas dispensaries exist.
Billboard Advertising: The Ultimate Catch-22
Take a drive in Arkansas, and you’ll get an education in neighboring cannabis programs whether you asked for one or not.
Head north on U.S. 65 toward Branson, Missouri, and count the cannabis billboards. Stairway Cannabis, in tie-dye script. Roughly eight more along I-49 between Fayetteville and Bella Vista. Five on the last stretch of I-40 into Memphis. Three around Jonesboro, in the state’s northeast corner, including a purple one for a Missouri brand called Codes promising “your state line dispensary.”
Simply driving makes you privy to the deals. A recent weekend special at Stairway’s Branson store: $100 ounces. Oklahoma, with 1,295 dispensaries, has stores along our western border simply named State Line Dispensary, because why be coy?
Now I’d like to ask you to count the billboards for Arkansas dispensaries—but you can’t, because there are none.
By regulation, an Arkansas dispensary may have three physical signs attached to its building, none bigger than 36 square feet.
No billboards allowed.
So the human brain does what it’s compelled to do, and it makes an assumption. You’ve seen countless billboards for Missouri and Oklahoma cannabis businesses, yet you’ve never seen one for an Arkansas dispensary. So you assume Arkansas must not have dispensaries, and who could blame you?
A Rule Outsmarted By Time
When Arkansas built its program from scratch, it was surrounded on every side by prohibition states. Nobody across the line was advertising to us, because there was nobody across the line.
Then February 2023 happened. Missouri opened recreational sales to anyone over 21, no residency required, under a state constitutional amendment that says cannabis advertising can be no more restricted than alcohol advertising. If Budweiser can buy the board, so can the dispensary, and “the board” can be anywhere the customers are—including 300 miles inside Arkansas.
Our neighbors adapted their cannabis programs; we didn’t. And of course Arkansas’s cannabis advertising rules apply only to Arkansas dispensaries.
Dramatic Differences In Barriers To Entry
Twenty minutes north of The Source, in Jane, Missouri, population 400, Flora Farms opened a store a third of a mile past the state line in January 2024. It runs 14 registers, roughly nine of every ten license plates in the lot are from Arkansas, and it has become one of Missouri’s highest-grossing dispensaries. High Profile opened up across the street shortly after.
So why would an Arkansan choose a dispensary chain in another state over shopping local?
- They don’t know Arkansas even has a medical marijuana program.
- In Missouri, the front door only requires a driver’s license.
- Shopping at an Arkansas dispensary requires a doctor’s visit and fee, a $50 state fee and a card that arrives in about two weeks.
- The card has to be renewed every year.
The impact on Arkansas’s program is staggering. The patient count rose 9 percent this year, to more than 119,000, and revenue fell anyway. More patients in the program, less of their money staying in Arkansas, which means less tax revenue, and fewer breakfasts for Arkansas schoolchildren. (Uunder a 2025 law, tax revenue from Arkansas medical marijuana helps make sure no kids go to school hungry.)
The Rule Rewards Whoever Has A Second State
Any company operating in Arkansas that also operates in a second state now has a valid loophole for billboard advertising. For example, the CODES billboard in Jonesboro points toward a dispensary in Missouri, while also operating as a brand and a dispensary in Arkansas.
Now that’s clever.
Any company’s Missouri stores can buy billboards in Arkansas. Its Arkansas stores can’t. The name recognition bears weight either way.
That’s legal, and if I had a Missouri license, I’d probably do it too. But I don’t, and neither do the remaining independent operators. A single-state, single-location dispensary has no second state to advertise from. As the industry consolidates, that gap stops being a quirk and becomes a real problem for operators like us.
Ask Me How To Buy Local Weed
I run a locally owned, single-location cannabis company that offers subsidized health insurance and creative careers, and works alongside more than 15 local nonprofits. It is not threatened by Missouri, or by the other 36 dispensaries in Arkansas. It is threatened by invisibility.
The state could fix that with one sentence: if a cannabis ad is allowed to appear in Arkansas, an Arkansas licensee should be allowed to buy the same space. That’s rulemaking, not a constitutional amendment, and nobody who wrote the current rule could have predicted Highway 65 in 2026.
Until then, I’ve made it my mission to tell Arkansans they still have the option of shopping at a business that keeps their money local and puts values over profit, which is roughly the speech I gave my friend at the bar that night.
Two weeks later, she had her Arkansas medical marijuana card. Not because of me, but because for the first time she had the information she needed to decide where her hard-earned dollars should go.
Thanks to her, I got savvy. Since no billboard in Arkansas is allowed to say it, we printed the question on a T-shirt and built a website, howtobuylocalweed.com, to answer it.
Ask me how to buy local weed; I’ll point you straight to The Source.
Amanda Strickland is CEO of The Source Craft Cannabis, an independent, vertically integrated medical dispensary in Rogers, Arkansas and Director of the documentary Roots & Reefer: The Arkansas Cannabis Story.
Photo courtesy of Brian Shamblen.
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