A Kansas City man spent his weekends in Cole County jail in June, after pleading guilty last year to two misdemeanor charges for submitting fraudulent documents to cannabis regulators in 2021 to obtain a marijuana cultivation license. It's a license his company still holds, according to the Missouri Division of Cannabis Regulation, along with a manufacturing license issued in January 2020. And the state shows no signs of taking the cultivation license away from him, despite his application resulting in a criminal conviction last August.
"Neither of these licenses is operational and has never been," the division's spokeswoman Lisa Cox told The Independent in an email last week. "Due to the licenses being suspended and not operational, DCR has not taken any additional enforcement action at this time. DCR is currently reviewing the guilty plea and monitoring the civil litigation to determine if additional enforcement action is necessary."
A Missouri State Highway Patrol investigation in 2023 alleged Kelly Waggoner committed 20 felonies, including identity theft, forgery and conspiracy, according to the probable cause statement investigators gave to Cole County Prosecutor Locke Thompson. In an interview in June, Waggoner told The Independent that he knew he was submitting erroneous documents but he only did it to "buy more time" in the application process.
"I didn't think I was doing anything malicious because I knew those documents, as soon as they hit DHSS would be rejected," Waggoner said, believing cannabis regulators would give him time to fix the errors. "But that's not how the highway patrol saw it. I made a mistake, so I have to do the time."
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