Shipping industrial amounts of fentanyl into the US, investing inthe illegal cannabis market.
One might think that the CCP are covertly trying to destabalize US civil society via illegal drug market development !
The agency believes that 2,000 of those farms have a Chinese connection — supplying workers, funding or both. Of the more than 800 farms the OBN has shut down in the last two years for operating illegally, Woodward said roughly 75 percent are linked to China.
“I would comfortably say over 600 of those we’ve linked to Chinese investors and Chinese organized crime; some sort of a nexus to back to China,” he said.
Much is still unknown about Chinese-funded cannabis cultivation — including whether the money is coming from groups with connections to the Communist Party, and how much of the cannabis produced through Chinese-funded grows stays within the U.S. or leaves the country. It’s also not clear how deeply involved Chinese organized crime syndicates are in American cannabis cultivation.
The Chinese government has a complicated relationship with organized crime, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors.
Despite the Chinese Communist Party’s strict stance on drugs, the triads — which run global crime networks distributing chemicals needed to manufacture methamphetamine and fentanyl, among other potentially dangerous substances — often curry favor with the CCP by functioning as extralegal enforcers for the government, Felbab-Brown said. The CCP in turn often allows them to continue their operations, though it does not control them.
Politico
Multiple states in the West are seeing an increase in Chinese workers and funding at unlicensed cultivation operations.
A few days before Christmas, a joint law enforcement task force found nearly 9,000 pounds of cannabis worth almost $15 million during a raid in a suburban neighborhood in Antioch, Calif.
The California Department of Cannabis Control believes that the four houses searched in the bedroom community 45 minutes outside San Francisco were linked to China.
Mexican cartels have a long history of importing, growing and redistributing illicit cannabis in the United States. But Chinese investors, owners and workers have emerged in recent years as a new source of funding and labor for illegal marijuana production.
What is known — from interviews with state law enforcement officials, experts on the international drug trade, economists and lawmakers — is that the number of farms funded by sources traceable back to Chinese investors or owners has skyrocketed. Chinese owners and workers have become a larger presence at illegal grows in Oklahoma, California and Oregon, they say.
In Oklahoma, close to 3,000 of the state’s nearly 7,000 licensed marijuana farms have been flagged for suspicious activity by law enforcement over the last year. Those operations are now being investigated for obtaining their licenses fraudulently and/or for selling into the illicit market, according to Mark Woodward, spokesperson for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.
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https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/21/illicit-cannabis-china-00086125
