The two owners of Bud City Smoke Shop in Chillicothe, Ohio, and a third man were booked into the Ross County Jail on Thursday, November 5, on warrants — and on Friday the charges behind the arrests became public: Julian Stokien, Jesse Burns and Jacob Wolfe are each charged with trafficking in drugs, according to the Ross County daily arrests report published on Friday, November 6. All three were still in custody at the Ross County Jail on Friday, the report showed. The charges are allegations; all three men are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in court.
The arrests are the latest turn in a two-year run of enforcement against the men's shops — a run that began with a police raid on a Western Avenue store in December 2024, continued with simultaneous raids on three Bud City locations in November 2025, and now lands months after a new Ohio law redefined the hemp products the shops were built on as marijuana. No agency has said whether the new charges are connected to the raids or to the earlier investigation, and the arrests report does not name the drug involved in the charges.
What the jail records show
Julian Christopher Stokien was booked into the Ross County Jail on 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. Jacob E. Wolfe was booked the same afternoon, also 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.
When the men were booked, the jail roster did not state the charges behind the warrants and did not identify the court or agency that issued them. The charges were published on Friday in the county's daily arrests report, which lists the Chillicothe Police Department as the arresting agency for all three men. Each man is charged under Ohio Revised Code section 2925.03(A)(2), the provision covering preparing a controlled substance for shipment, transport or delivery. The report does not name the drug involved.
Two years of raids before these charges
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 December 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, and that the investigation revealed the business was selling products containing high levels of THC — confirming, in the department's words, that the items were marijuana and not legally classified hemp products. The department added that the shop did not hold a dispensary licence 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. The shops were hit again on November 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 law changed underneath the business
The legal ground shifted this year. Governor Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 56 on December 19, 2025, and the law took effect on 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.
DeWine had 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 modelled 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.” 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.
Burns's own position was on the record a year ago. At Bud City's Fairborn location in October 2025, Burns told the Springfield News-Sun that his shops had never sold Delta-8 or synthetic cannabis and focused on THCA products, which he and his attorney said were not covered by the governor's order because they were not Delta-8. “We've never sold Delta-8 or any kind of synthetic cannabis,” Burns said. “There is a misconception, because a lot of other smoke shops do carry those types of products.”
Source: Springfield News-Sun (Oct. 2025) — Bud City owner Jesse Burns on the hemp ban, via Cox Ohio
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 funnelled their customers into a state-licensed marijuana market with a limited number of licences — 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 told 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.”
A referendum that failed — and what happens next
The fight carried into 2026 in politics as well as in court. 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.
For Stokien, Burns and Wolfe, what happens next is procedural — and, as of Friday, largely unstated by officials. The jail roster listed all three men as awaiting transfer, but no agency has publicly said which court issued the warrants, whether the trafficking charges grow out of the 2024 and 2025 shop raids or from a separate investigation, or when the men will first appear in court. What is established is narrow and should be stated plainly: three men who built a hemp business that Ohio law has since reclassified are in the Ross County Jail, each facing a trafficking charge under the same section of Ohio law, and each presumed innocent unless a court finds otherwise.