Marijuana plants - Photo by WFAE
WAUSAU, WI (WSAU) – As Wisconsin and other states continue to discuss legislation to legalize marijuana medically and even for recreational use, some US states and agencies are seeing a rise in illegal Chinese-based growing farms across the country.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office in Maine said it executed a search warrant on a property in June in response to complaints from the neighborhood and seized about 3,400 marijuana plants and 111 pounds of processed marijuana. The state announced that it was bringing charges against two Chinese nationals and two naturalized U.S. citizens of Chinese descent, including trafficking and illegal marijuana growing.
Citing a document from the Department of Homeland Security, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported back in August that law enforcement agencies had identified more than 270 locations in Maine alone suspected of being used for Chinese illegal marijuana growing.
Law enforcement officials told the Journal that even in cases where Chinese-run growing farms possess a license, illegal activities such as money laundering, human trafficking, and the cross-state trafficking of marijuana remain a common theme.
The Journal also reports that while some large-scale illegal growing operations are linked to Mexican cartels and other international crime networks, according to law enforcement officials in many states, a significant portion are managed by Chinese transnational crime groups.
According to Aaron Halegua, a lawyer representing Chinese workers who claim they have been mistreated by these groups, Chinese-operated marijuana farms frequently rely significantly on illegal Chinese immigrants working in conditions akin to forced labor and human trafficking.
“They didn’t treat us as humans,” said a worker represented by Halegua to the Journal who crossed the U.S. southern border in July. He said workers were rarely fed, slept on hard boards, weren’t allowed to leave the farm, and, without a car, had no means of escape.
The Oklahoma Narcotics Bureau posted on social media that the state had indicted two Chinese men on counts of human trafficking. The allegation is that the men ran a brothel in Oklahoma City where about a dozen women were trafficked between the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019. The statement on the arrests said, “Evidence from the investigation reveals many of the brothel’s clients were managers and administrators of commercial marijuana farms.”
Marijuana is illegal in China recreationally and medically, but the communist nation does allow hemp to be grown as long as the product contains no more than 0.3% THC. The Chinese communist government is thoroughly involved in every step of the process, which includes CBD extraction factories outfitted with security cameras and monitored by state police.
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