Elisabeth Johns was kidnapped twice, first by a prison gang, then by the state of Oklahoma.

In 2014, Johns was 18, just out of high school. She met a man named Tyler Bristol. They spent some time together; Johns had no idea Bristol had recently been released from prison and was a member of a gang known as the Indian Brotherhood.

After a couple of weeks, Johns knew she didn’t want to pursue a relationship with Bristol. She didn’t think much of it when he called to ask for a few items he’d left in her car.

Bristol pounced when she arrived to deliver his belongings. He pulled Johns out of her vehicle, took her keys, and dragged her into a house.

As Johns tells the story, Bristol was in an insane rage; he accused her of having stolen drugs from him.

Accompanied by two other men and a woman, Bristol performed a clumsy interrogation, a shotgun pointed at Johns the entire time.

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He threatened to cut off Johns’ pinkie finger if she didn’t tell him where the drugs were, but Johns hadn’t stolen any drugs.

He cut her finger to the bone; to this day Johns has little grip in her hand.

After six hours of fruitless searching, the kidnappers relented and Bristol tried to apologize. Johns convinced him to take her to a hospital, then seized the opportunity to contact police. The kidnappers were arrested.

The horror continued as threatening letters forced Johns and her parents out of their home for the duration of the legal proceedings. Bristol was sentenced to 38 years for kidnapping and maiming.

It felt like an ending, but it was just a prelude.

In 2025, Johns was kidnapped again: she spent more than a week in jail for an offense that would be thrown out of court. Johns’ experience is a perfect symbol of the struggles of the Oklahoma justice system — or the reluctance — to comply with the state’s rapidly changing cannabis laws.

Closer to Feeling Like Me

When Johns first dabbled with marijuana as a teenager, it was illegal; it was still illegal in the months after she almost lost her finger, when she had begun to feel anxious in crowds and have difficulty following conversations.

Family and Children’s Services diagnosed Johns with severe anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I couldn’t eat; my anxiety was sky high,” Johns said. “I was on full watch mode constantly. I was feeling like I have to be looking over my shoulder. It’s still like that sometimes.”

Holding jobs was tough. The stress of McDonald’s was too much; an episode with an angry customer at a bank job set off her anxiety.

The drugs that Family and Children’s Services gave her made her feel weird. She recalled the effects of marijuana and resolved to try it. After all, recreational use was already legal in Colorado.

Cannabis was ten times better.

“It was way, way closer to feeling like me again,” Johns said.

She never made big purchases. When she was caught the first time, in 2015, it was a misdemeanor, like a traffic ticket. Later the same year, she was cited again.

In 2016, when she was caught again, she didn’t know the third misdemeanor would make it a felony.

Change was in the air by then. In 2015, House Bill 2154 made weak CBD oil legal in Oklahoma, and in 2016 a petition was launched to put medical legalization on the ballot statewide. Johns pleaded guilty to keep it simple; at that point, a sentence of probation when she could have gone to prison seemed like leniency.

Her lawyer took $1,500 and made little mention of the trauma she had suffered.

Johns’ period of probation straddled the legalization of medical marijuana in Oklahoma. She tested positive for THC at every check-in, but her probation officers made no fuss about it. By the time she completed probation, State Question 788 legalizing medical marijuana had passed. Johns got her marijuana card, and a Human Skills and Resources official told her she was free and clear.

Nevertheless, a Creek County warrant was issued for Johns’ arrest in 2019; in addition to having tested positive for THC — now legal — she had missed a few check-ins and owed $200.

Unaware of the warrant, Johns pulled her life back together. She had three children and was doing bookkeeping work for her real estate agent father. By 2025, she was close to being licensed as a real estate agent herself.

In April, she was pulled over for a burned-out brake light; the warrant popped up.

“I don’t even want to be doing this,” Johns recalled the sheriff’s deputy who arrested her saying.

Johns’ attorney, Keith Flinn, said Creek County set her bond at $10,000.

That violated Johns’ constitutional right to affordable bail, Flinn said. Her bail should have been $1,500, tops.

She was taken to Tulsa County Jail; she would need to be driven 15 minutes to Creek County to bond out. When at last her case went before a judge, Flinn’s motion to dismiss cited Title 63 of Oklahoma law, which stipulated that Johns was guilty of a misdemeanor, at most.

“Any person who violates this section a second time within ten (10) years, upon conviction, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor,” the statute reads.

Flinn recalled the judge and the assistant district attorney nervously examining the pages of his motion; the assistant district attorney withdrew the application to sentence Johns before the judge ruled.

Arguably, the system worked, but it didn’t feel like justice.

Johns was arrested on the Wednesday before Easter; she was not taken to Creek County for eight days.

Resistance or Ignorance

Oklahoma has a long history of being slow to catch up to national trends on controlled substances.

Prohibition was written into the 1907 state constitution, and even after the 21^st Amendment decriminalized alcohol nationally in 1933, states were permitted to write their own liquor laws.

“During the 1930s through the 1950s, when some states were ‘wet,’ Oklahoma was still dry,” Lynn wrote for The Oklahoman. “Homes and businesses were regularly raided and cars were searched for hidden contraband.”

Alcohol became legal in Oklahoma in 1959, and alcohol laws have been evolving ever since, most recently with new statues adopted in 2018, alongside the legalization of medical marijuana, enabling the sale of refrigerated wine and beer and permitting liquor stores to stay open until midnight, among other changes.

Cannabis law may be in for just such a lengthy process of adoption.

For Flinn, Johns’ case was representative of a class of individuals wrongly persecuted because of either ignorance or malice on the part of law enforcement.

“There are countless people who have been charged under the old felony laws, who are subjected to treatment under those laws, because the changes were not retroactive,” Flinn said. “They face the jeopardy of these district attorney offices’ discretion when there is a probation violation under these old laws.”

Paul Armentano, Deputy Director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, argued that persecution of cannabis consumers is consistent across the political spectrum. Some red state officials have launched efforts to repeal cannabis access, while others have urged lawmakers to ignore new laws; blue state officials have proposed excessive, punitive tax increases on cannabis products.

“In all cases, elected officials are treating cannabis consumers as targets, not constituents,” Armentano wrote in an op-ed for the Ohio Capitol Journal. “These concerted attacks are an explicit reminder that the war on cannabis and its consumers remains ongoing — and in some cases is even escalating.”

In Oklahoma, hostility to cannabis law was apparent in the controversial effort in Kay County to charge pregnant mothers with child endangerment despite legitimate prescriptions for cannabis.

Last year, that practice was upended by the Court of Criminal Appeals. Nevertheless, law-abiding citizens continue to be inconvenienced and incur significant financial costs as a result of resistance to new laws or ignorance of them.

Attorney Rachel Klubeck, recipient of a 2019 NextGen Under 30 award for achievements in the Oklahoma cannabis law industry, acknowledged that police go out of their way to hew close to the letter of cannabis law; she suggested that some of the problem could be attributed to the speed of change in the legal landscape.

“Law enforcement is not educated on cannabis law as quickly as cannabis law changes,” Klubeck said. “We are coming down with new laws every three months.”

A separate problem, said Oklahomans for Criminal Justice Reform Executive Director Damion Shade, was that cannabis laws were not applied equally across the state.

“We have 77 counties in Oklahoma,” Shade said. “It is accurate to say that we have 77 different systems of justice.”

Shade was reluctant to ascribe motives to law enforcement, preferring to note county-to-county discrepancies. In some counties, an individual who could not afford a bond might remain in jail for a lengthy period of time; in others, philanthropists, nonprofits, and community partners could help individuals to post bond.

Shade preferred focusing on discretion — that is, on-the-ground decisions on how and whether a law enforcement officer chooses to apply laws — and the problem was simple: discretion was not consistently applied.

“Why should it be that the amount of time you spend in jail is contingent on the zip code in which you are arrested?” Shade said. “I don’t believe that anyone believes that that is how the American system of justice is supposed to work.”

It may be impossible to determine how widespread the problem of inconsistently applied discretion may be.

The difficulty, Flinn said, was that small injustices were unlikely to be recorded as statistics.

“The problem is that it’s all going to be anecdotal because it’s all based on unique, individual interactions with the state,” Flinn said. “Because who’s tabulating the numerical consequences of prohibition? Who would? The state, maybe, is the one who should, but I don’t think they’re tabulating numbers.”

Shall Not Be Subject to Arrest

Tulsa cannabis attorney Jay Ramey did not count himself among those who were inclined to attribute small injustices to ignorance of laws or a patchwork of enforcement strategies.

“I don’t like cops, and I think they’re all full of it,” Ramey said. “You can give them all the training in the world, and they’ll still be full of it.”

It wasn’t just police. Ramey was fond of including in his court filings another portion of Title 63 that is remarkable for its clear language.

“A medical marijuana patient or caregiver in actual possession of a medical marijuana license shall not be subject to arrest, prosecution or penalty in any manner or denied any right, privilege or public assistance,” the statute reads.

Nevertheless, judges had sometimes ruled against Ramey.

Ramey has handled 40 or so cases of what he calls bogus DUIs; that is, law enforcement wrongfully arresting individuals for something that is illegal because they can no longer rightly arrest them for something that has been legalized.

One case was particularly illustrative of the problem of inconsistent discretion.

In April 2023, Johnathan Spyres was driving home from Ponca City when he was pulled over for speeding.

“How much weed is in the car?” the officer asked.

Spyres recalled that the officer claimed he had glassy eyes and a green tongue.

Spyres had a sealed eighth of an ounce of marijuana and his medical marijuana card in the car. He also had his knowledge of the law. He refused to answer questions, then refused a field sobriety test; he was arrested.

He was lucky in that he got to see a judge quickly, but he spent 17 hours in the Pawnee County jail. It left a bad taste in his mouth.

“You’ve paid for your card, you’ve got your doctor’s note, you’ve done everything as outlined by the state of Oklahoma, and you get arrested for it,” Spyres said.

Spyres recalled that Ramey made his arresting officer look foolish on the stand; glassy eyes and a green tongue can’t be used as evidence of driving impairment.

That’s where it got strange, because the arrest was nevertheless found to be legal. But then the case was dismissed without prejudice by Pawnee County DA Mike Fisher.

In other words, Spyres was rightly arrested for something that could not be rightly prosecuted.

Spyres got off, but he was stuck with thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees and still has an Intoxalock breathalyzer device attached to his vehicle. He has terrible memories of his night in a dorm-style jail.

“It was absolutely terrible,” Spyres said. “Terrible food. Terrible water. It was awful.”

192 Hours

Elisabeth Johns didn’t even have food and water.

At the time of Johns’ arrest Oklahoma law gave jurisdictions a 10-day window to pick up individuals from another county. Attorneys and law enforcement officials consulted for this story said it almost never took that long, even for individuals who needed to be transported the full length of the state.

Johns needed to be moved from Tulsa County to Creek County, a 15-minute drive.

At first, she was put into a booking area with approximately 40 other people. One by one, the others bonded out or were taken to a cell; Johns remained in the booking area for 11 hours, and she had the sense that a vehicle was expected for her at any moment.

Later, Johns’ bondsman, Jeff Disher, said he was astonished it took as long as it did.

“I can’t believe that it took eight days,” Disher said.

When Johns was finally taken to a cell, the jail had run out of sheets, blankets and toilet paper. Her cell had no bed, and no place to sit until they relented and gave her a chair.

The first night, she ate with her hands.

“My anxiety and depression were already battling with me,” Johns said. “Not having a cellmate or bunkie was very hard, because I was very alone.”

She had to beg others for a cup, even to get a drink of water; finally, someone brought her some toilet paper.

Her parents and lawyer were making calls. Creek County knew she was being held at Tulsa County Jail, but people at the jail said there was only one Creek County transport officer, and he showed up once per week, sometimes less.

“Good luck,” Johns recalled someone telling her. “He comes when he wants to.”

The weekend arrived; Easter passed without Johns’ children.

Then the jail went into lockdown.

Johns was sealed in her cell, 24 hours of solitude and aloneness. Now the trauma of the experience erupted.

“I was completely distraught,” Johns said. “I could not stop crying. I was having vivid dreams of my children. It was terrible.”

“It was like the pain when I was being kidnapped,” Johns said. “Just how hard and terrible the crying was.”

She had a full-on panic attack; no one answered when she called for help.

In 2014, when the Indian Brotherhood kidnapped Johns, it lasted six hours; in April, she was held without bond in Oklahoma for 192 hours.

We Have Got to Do Better

The transport deputy of Creek County is Sgt. William Campbell. In fact, Campbell is not the only transport officer in Creek County; he oversees a team of five transport officers, according to Creek County Undersheriff Joe Thompson.

Campbell did not respond to requests for comment.

Oklahomans for Responsible Cannabis Action Director Jed Green said that Johns’ experience in the system was unusual but characteristic of both cannabis law enforcement and of issues in the justice system unrelated to cannabis.

“There have to be more of these out there,” Green said of Johns’ case. “On the surface, the question is whether a person is being punished twice for something that is no longer illegal.”

Oklahoma needs to be forward-looking on cannabis law, Green said.

“Ultimately, we need our system to take a look at where we are today, and not work to enforce a stigma of days gone by,” Green said. “It’s tragic that anyone, for any reason, is held up in our system longer than they have to be. It’s a burden to taxpayers, it makes people fall behind on their rent and lose their jobs, it tears apart families. We have got to do better.”

Johns agreed.

“I need to get on with my life, and be a mom to my kids,” Johns said.