Review: Triad Weed is a Crazy Story You Can Only Ignore at Your Peril – Sam Patten

Editor’s Note: We’re aware of the moral hazard inherent in publishing a positive review of a documentary produced by the Maine Wire at TheMaineWire.com. To address any concerns, we’ve decided to double Mr. Patten’s usual fee.

It doesn’t take a groundbreaking documentary to tell you we live in crazy times, but The Maine Wire’s Triad Weed movie is a can’t miss expose — not only for Mainers, but for any American who questions whether our country is truly going to pot. Starring Maine Wire editor-in-chief Steve Robinson, this eye-popping, 90 minute documentary tells a real story about foreign interference in rural America, and it is terrifying.

A few quick disclaimers: I helped Steve with some of the early research for this project so have a positive bias, am a recovering marijuana addict myself so have perhaps a heightened interest in the subject matter, and was convicted in 2018 of being an unregistered foreign agent for Ukraine in an investigation about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, so may be susceptible to the kind of Schadenfreude that follows revelations about what real foreign meddling in American lives looks like. Now that’s out of the way…

[RELATED: Dangerous Company: Sam Patten’s Memoir Is a Riveting Insight Into 25 Years of American Foreign Policy…]

This is a movie about a story so crazy, as Robinson admits in one of the opening scenes, that it might be hard to believe. But if you bear with him, the facts Triad Weed establishes are difficult to refute and demand action from anyone in power in this country who doesn’t happen to be on the payroll of the Peoples’ Republic of China … crickets. Bottom line is that Maine’s medical marijuana market appears to have been captured in large part by illegal Chinese growers who have been flooding it with substandard and dangerous products.

Maine has a bifurcated pot market. First there were medical marijuana sales, which required a prescription, and now there are also recreational marijuana sellers, which only require the buyer be over 21 years of age. Strangely, the recreational market is fairly well regulated when it comes to quality and source, but the medical market, conversely, is akin to the Wild East. That is especially troubling when you consider medical pot caters to the more vulnerable population, including veterans and others who suffer PTSD and related disorders for which marijuana is prescribed as medicine.

Following up on a leak from the Department of Homeland Security, around this time last year the Maine Wire began looking into approximately 200 properties around the state that had been purchased with mortgages from a single, China-linked bank in New York. Shockingly, that bank utilized a U.S. Treasury Department program to access and distribute financing to buyers with scant oversight about income sourcing, source of funds, or even citizenship. As a result, Chinese nationals were able to purchase distressed properties all over Maine which were quickly, surreptitiously, and without any safety oversight turned into illegal pot grow houses.

As Robert Front once wrote, good fences good neighbors make. Here in Maine as elsewhere in New England, we tend not to meddle in our neighbors business — after all, Karen is more of a Midwestern creature, isn’t she? That is how Chinese illegals were able to grow massive amounts of pot in these low-profile and sometimes isolated (though sometimes not — one in Machias was right next door to the office of the Customs and Border Patrol office in an embarrassing instance for federal law enforcement). Only in talking at length to neighbors were the Maine Wire investigators able to learn how U-Haul trucks would arrive at these properties at odd hours in the evening for shift changes and to transfer product. Two red flags here: 1. the shift changes, surreptitiously conducted in the dead of night, almost certainly involved illegals who were spirited away in these houses for weeks on end without being allowed outside, ie. potential human trafficking, and 2. moving pot across state lines is a violation of federal law, so where was all this product going?

Sometimes, the slinking about became tough to cover up. One house in Winterport caught fire — almost certainly caused by jerry-rigged wiring. The massive amount of electricity required for these grow houses led the growers to create dangerous daisy-chains and in many cases out-right rob power from utilities. Who but the ratepayer picks up the tab for that?

Then there is the question of the chemicals. Robinson sent samples found at one abandoned site to a testing facility that confirmed the presence of carcinogenic pesticides on the product that are illegal in the United States. Other additives detected attack the human endocrine system. In other words, the pot grown at these houses and presumably distributed across Maine (unless it is being illegally trafficked across state lines also) is a health hazard to users. Yet when former State Rep. John Andrews (R-Paris) introduced legislation in earlier this year to crack down on these operations, no one in Augusta seemed particularly interested — both the House and the Senate killed his bill.

Who other than the consumers of these tainted products are getting hurt? Honest pot growers who play by the rules is the answer. Triad Weed interviews several of these who, unlike the Chinese growers, pay through the nose to comply with Office of Cannabis Policy’s various regulations for health and safety. These businesses are finding it near impossible to compete with the illegal market.

Triad Weed raises tons of unsettling questions about a massive system of abuse that is happening in communities throughout the state. It is happening under the cover of economic devastation experienced by the rural poor and denied by those in Washington who insist America’s economy is doing just fine. It’s an insidious problem, and whether you’re stoned or sober, it equates to undeniable public harm. To her credit, U.S. Senator Susan Collins has held FBI Director Christopher Wray to account for some of these questions since the Maine Wire began exposing what is happening. But for now, her voice appears to be a lone one in the wilderness.

Maybe Triad Weed will change that. Let’s hope so.

A Maine Wire columnist who has worked for Maine’s last three Republican senators, Patten is the author of Dangerous Company: The Misadventures of a “”Foreign Agent”