National Left-Wing Media Has No Trouble Naming "Chinese Organized Crime" as Culprit Behind Illicit Marijuana Markets

The proliferation of Asian Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) in America — especially illicit drug trafficking groups operated by Chinese nationals — has gotten so severe even the left-wing ProPublica has taken a notice.

Light on original reporting and with only a glancing mention of Maine, the story is largely a rehash of local and national reports concerning a quadruple homicide at a Asian TCO-controlled marijuana grow in Oklahoma.

That ProPublica is covering the topic, however, and daring to name the culprit — Chinese mafia — shows a shift in the national media’s willingness to properly assess a problem that is only growing deeper roots in American communities.

Triad Weed: How Chinese Marijuana Grows Took Over Rural Maine

The illicit marijuana market, a lucrative segment of the global drug trade, has witnessed the emergence of Chinese mobsters as formidable players, exploiting the expansive fields and massive greenhouses of Oklahoma for their operations.

The burgeoning illegal trade has not only brought violence but also a myriad of crimes including drug trafficking, money laundering, and environmental damage, according to ProPublica. It has exploited thousands of Chinese immigrants, many smuggled across borders, to labor under harsh conditions in farms encircled by surveillance and armed guards.

Chinese organized crime “has taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States,” Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, told the news site.

This criminal network operates under the auspices of mafias known as “triads,” based in southern China but extending their reach across the United States from a command hub in New York, a detail that tracks closely with the findings of the Maine Wire’s own Triad Weed reporting series.

According to the news site, the triad operations in Oklahoma leverage the marijuana trade to fuel their global money laundering operations, aiding Latin American cartels and expanding their influence worldwide.

Much as Maine’s 2020 marijuana laws had the unintentional consequence of opening the doors for unscrupulous criminal operators, the legalization of medicinal marijuana in Oklahoma in 2018 unwittingly opened the floodgates for these criminal organizations.

Similar to Maine, Oklahoma’s lenient regulatory environment, coupled with its failure to enforce residency and business ownership laws strictly, has facilitated the sprawl of illegal grows, contributing to an illicit market worth billions annually.

Federal enforcement has lagged, with priorities shifting away from drug enforcement towards counterterrorism post-2001, further complicating the challenge of curtailing this sprawling criminal enterprise.

To the extent drug enforcement remains a federal priority, the top target is, understandably, fentanyl and other deadly synthetic drugs. But even those chemicals, and their precursors, have ties to China and Asian TCOs.

According to extensive reporting from Peter Schweizer, the author of the recently released “Blood Money,” individuals and organizations explicitly sanctioned by China’s ruling Communist Party are subsidizing and encouraging drug trafficking operations in the Americas.

The goal of these operations is not only to make vast amounts of money, according to Schweizer, but to compromise U.S. officials and weaken the U.S. population through a modernized version of the Opium Wars.