UPDATE — Friday, Nov. 6, 2026: The charges behind Thursday’s warrant arrests are now public. According to the Ross County daily arrests report, Julian Stokien, Jesse Burns and Jacob Wolfe are each charged with trafficking in drugs under Ohio Revised Code section 2925.03(A)(2), the provision covering preparing a controlled substance for shipment, transport or delivery. The report lists the Chillicothe Police Department as the arresting agency for all three men and shows all three still in custody at the Ross County Jail on Friday. The report does not name the drug involved in the charges. The charges land three years after Ohio voters legalized marijuana for adult use, and months after a state law redefined the hemp products the men’s shops sold as marijuana. All three men are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court.
CHILLICOTHE — The two owners of Bud City Smoke Shop were booked into the Ross County Jail on Thursday on warrants, the latest turn in a two-year run of enforcement against their shops that began with a police raid on Western Avenue in 2024 and ran through a statewide crackdown on the hemp products their stores were built on.
Booking photos from the Ross County Jail roster.
Julian Christopher Stokien was booked into the jail Thursday afternoon, and Jesse McKee Burns was booked minutes later, according to the Ross County Jail roster. Both bookings list a warrant arrest with no bond, and both men are listed as awaiting transfer, the jail record shows. A third man booked the same afternoon, Jacob E. Wolfe, is also listed on a warrant arrest with no bond and awaiting transfer. Wolfe was identified as an employee of the owners’ earlier shop in a police investigation two years ago.
The jail roster did not state the charges behind the warrants when the men were booked, and it did not identify the court or agency that issued them. The charges were published Friday in the county’s daily arrests report, which lists the Chillicothe Police Department as the arresting agency for all three men (see the update at the top of this story). No agency has said whether the charges are connected to the raids on the shops or to the earlier investigation.
Stokien and Burns own Bud City Smoke Shop, at 1080 N. Bridge St. in Chillicothe, one of three Bud City locations the pair operated in southern Ohio. The business grew out of Western Avenue Exotics, the shop Stokien opened at 431 Western Ave. in 2024.
The enforcement history started on Dec. 13, 2024, when Chillicothe police executed a search warrant at Western Avenue Exotics. In a release issued that day, the Chillicothe Police Department said complaints received in August regarding the illegal sale of marijuana prompted its investigation into the shop. “The investigation revealed that the business was selling products containing high levels of THC, confirming the items were marijuana and not legally classified ‘hemp products,’” the department said, adding that Western Ave Exotics did not hold a dispensary license and that items seized under the warrant would be sent to a lab for testing.
A store spokesman said at the time that the shop sold only federally compliant products and held lawyer opinion letters and vendor certificates backing its position, and said the store would reopen the next day.
Security-camera video of officers inside a Bud City store during the Nov. 18, 2025, raid, posted to Facebook by co-owner Jesse Burns:
The shops were hit again on Nov. 18, 2025, when officers raided the Bud City locations in Fairborn, Chillicothe and Waverly on the same morning. Burns later posted his own store’s security-camera video of officers inside the shop, writing that all three locations “were raided simultaneously by multiple departments, including the ACE Task Force,” and that the raids rested on what he called the task force’s misinterpretation of the law. “Bud City has always operated transparently and within our rights,” Burns wrote. “Bud City is not backing down. Bud City is not going anywhere. And we fully intend to reopen.”
The legal ground under the business shifted this year. Governor Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 56 on Dec. 19, 2025, and the law took effect March 20, 2026. It rewrote Ohio’s definition of hemp so that products above the law’s total-THC limits are treated as marijuana, and marijuana can be sold in Ohio only through state-licensed dispensaries. Ohio voters created that legal market in November 2023, when they approved Issue 2 with about 57 percent of the vote and legalized marijuana for adult use. Before signing the bill, DeWine line-item vetoed a provision that would have let lower-dose hemp beverages keep selling through the end of 2026.
The ban behind that shift was fought over from the start. DeWine moved first, declaring an adulterated consumer product emergency in October 2025 and ordering intoxicating hemp products off store shelves, months before Senate Bill 56 took effect. Announcing the order, DeWine said the products had no required safety testing, no age limit on who could buy them, and were sold in packaging modeled on well-known candies. “Intoxicating hemp products are known to have significant impacts on young, developing brains, yet these products are legally marketed to kids, sold to kids, and ingested by kids in Ohio,” DeWine said. “When voters chose to legalize marijuana, they voted for a highly regulated market that only allows sales at licensed dispensaries to those 21 and older. Intoxicating hemp completely bypasses these laws, and we must do more to keep these products away from kids.” His office cited Ohio Poison Control figures showing reported exposures among Ohioans 19 and younger rose from 419 in 2021 to 994 in 2024, with more than half of the cases involving children five and under.
Hemp businesses and their supporters argue the ban was never mainly about safety. They say the law wiped out a legal industry of small Ohio retailers and funneled their customers into a state-licensed marijuana market with a limited number of licenses — about 190 dual-use dispensaries operate statewide — where adult-use marijuana carries a 10 percent state excise tax on top of regular sales tax, a tax hemp products sold on ordinary store shelves did not carry. “They have a limited license program,” Cleveland hemp beverage maker Wesley Bryant said of the licensed marijuana industry in the Columbus Dispatch. “It is in their best interest to abolish competition. And with SB 56, that’s what you have, an abolition of competition.” Michael Tindall, executive director of the Ohio Healthy Alternatives Association, called DeWine’s order “an attack on Ohio’s consumers who will lose access to safe and legal products, and a gut punch to Ohio farmers and small businesses.”
The fight carried into 2026. A group called Ohioans for Cannabis Choice tried to put part of Senate Bill 56 before voters in a referendum, but the campaign missed its March 2026 signature deadline. Ohio’s licensed marijuana industry opposed the referendum and defended the law, arguing that hemp retailers were selling marijuana-strength products without the testing, packaging and licensing rules that dispensaries are required to follow.
Stokien, Burns and Wolfe are presumed innocent of the charges unless proven guilty in court.
