#243 Steve Robinson - What If China’s Secret Weapon Was Sold at Your Local Gas Station?

Steven Robinson, Editor-in-Chief of the Maine Wire, leads New England’s fastest-growing digital media outlet focused on exposing political corruption and organized crime across local, state, and regional levels. A native of Dexter, Maine, and Bowdoin College graduate in political philosophy, he previously worked at Regnery Publishing, produced the Howie Carr Show, and handled Barstool Sports' Kirk Minihane Show and true-crime podcast The Case, which spurred murder charges per season. During COVID-19, he quit his job to travel 35,000 miles across North America in a camper van before returning to Maine in November 2022 to revitalize the Maine Wire as an aggressive, independent platform for underreported stories, bold investigations, and commentary. Robinson's groundbreaking "Triad Weed" series, launched in August 2023 after a leaked DHS memo revealed over 270 illicit cannabis operations by Asian Transnational Criminal Organizations in Maine, uncovered a vast Chinese mafia network spanning Maine to southeast China. His reporting exposed racketeering involving black-market cannabis, human and sex trafficking, money laundering, bank fraud, illegal border crossings, neurotoxins poisoning homes, murder, and national security threats—including CCP-linked properties near U. S. Army facilities. He provided exclusive details on the exploitation of U. S. Treasury–subsidized loans that allowed foreign nationals to purchase over 70 properties.. Cited in Congressional reports and featured on CBS, Fox News, the Daily Mail, OANN, and more, Robinson's work has led to over 60 articles, property raids, arrests, Sen. Susan Collins' interrogations of intel agencies, and the documentary Triad Weed: How Chinese Mafia Infiltrated Maine. Local police praise it as a field manual, though Maine media avoids the story. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Buy PYSOP - ⁠https://psyopshow.com⁠ ⁠https://betterhelp.com/srs⁠ This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. ⁠https://bunkr.life⁠ – USE CODE SRS Go to https://bunkr.life/SRS and use code “SRS” to get 25% off your family plan. ⁠https://blackbuffalo.com⁠ ⁠https://meetfabric.com/shawn⁠ ⁠https://shawnlikesgold.com⁠ ⁠https://helixsleep.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://hillsdale.edu/srs⁠ ⁠https://ketone.com/srs⁠ Visit https://ketone.com/srs for 30% OFF your subscription order. ⁠https://patriotmobile.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://prizepicks.onelink.me/lmeo/srs⁠ ⁠https://ROKA.com⁠ – USE CODE SRS ⁠https://simplisafe.com/srs⁠ ⁠https://trueclassic.com/srs Steve Robinson Links: X - https://x.com/BigSteve207 X - https://x.com/TheMaineWire Substack - https://robinsonreport.substack.com The Maine Wire - https://www.themainewire.com High Crimes Documentary - https://tuckercarlson.com/high-crimes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:04Shawn Ryan?

  Steve Robinson, welcome to the show, man.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:09Shawn Ryan?

  So I have had a ton of people reaching out to me wanting to cover this 70H thing that's going on. And so we had a bunch of, what a bunch of people were looking at, and Jeremy found you. And I think we were going to get you on earlier about something too, but I don't know much about the subject. It sounds like a very, very toxic chemical that they're putting into stuff. And so I can't wait to dive in. Sounds like you're way ahead of the government on this right now.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  Well, I think the government's always way behind on the new substances that the fringe of society are using to get high. I know that the FDA has recommended that 70H be scheduled. Who knows how long that process is going to take? But the idea of sketchy substances that you can buy at gas stations and convenience stores has been around for a long time. And the timeline that I've observed is...

• 2:10Speaker 03

  You know, it's maybe a product shows up in a gas station or a convenience store and word spreads very quickly amongst the drug-using community. They they figure it out real quickly what makes you feel good and what simulates the feeling of whether it's cannabis or heroin. And they know where to get it. They know the stickers and the logos and the brand names that kind of subtly communicate what they're looking for. And then these things start to turn up at law enforcement raids. So local police, sheriff, state police, DEA, whatever, they'll go in for a regular fentanyl raid, heroin, or, you know, Oxycon, whatever it is. And they'll start to notice these other things are turning up and they don't really know what they are.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  They've got weird labels, weird names, and they kind of brush them aside, but then they start to see more of them and then they realize that there's a pattern here. And the same people who are using maybe fentanyl or heroin or prescription opioids are also using some of these other products. And so from that point, you know, that's maybe a five-year window. And then when it trickles up to the level of state policymakers or federal policymakers or people who are at the DEA, it takes maybe another two years or three years for there to be any kind of policy formulated that's going to limit the import of these drugs.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  And in a lot of cases, like with the case of 7OH, it's incredibly difficult to regulate it because it's hard to test for. You don't really have a test right now. If someone dies in a parking lot and they have an autopsy, they're not immediately going to test for 7OH. I don't even know if they have the capability to look for the metabolites in their bloodstream to say like, oh, this person might have died from 7OH. In most cases, their deaths will probably just be attributed to a regular opioid overdose. 7OH is, I think. Most comparable to bath salts.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Oh, man, that shit was nasty. I haven't heard about that in a couple of years, but. They successfully regulated it out of existence, but it took a while. And the the similarity between uh 70H and bath salts is that it's just it's a molecule like bath salts was just a molecule. And so regulators, beginning in Florida and some other states, would say, okay, this molecule is now illegal. And so the chemists in China and in the United States and in Mexico, they would just figure out a way to add another hydrogen atom to that chemical. And all of a sudden, you've got a new molecule and that's legal.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  And it gives you the same experience, but because it's a little bit more complex, it's harder for your body to metabolize. Still gets you high, but it's worse for your body. And people start using that and then they figure out, okay, well, they've got a new formulation for bath salts. And so they make that illegal and then the chemists go back and add another hydrogen atom and so on and so forth. So it's like a it's a war of escalation between the uh the regulators and the people who are making drugs illegal and the chemists who are churning out new substances to make people high, um you know, fast enough so that people end up on a freeway like gnawing some guy's face off because they ate like eighth generation bath salts. Is this seven? We're gonna get more into this towards the end of the interview. We got a journey.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  For sure, for sure. I think it took me to circumspect my my arrival at 70H was a little circumspect through the investigation of the illicit Chinese marijuana that was happening in Maine. But it's it's ultimately derived from a a a tree that grows in Southeast Asia, in Indonesia. And it's um harvested, the tree is harvested, there's this elaborate chemical process that it's that it goes through. And so they call it natural because it begins with a plant, but it's really a lab-made synthetic drug that is uh more potent than morphine, depending on how you measure it. Damn, yeah, I think I've read 46 times. Yeah.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  And again, it depends on how you measure it, but it's it is an opioid. It's it's it's a legal opioid, just like Percocet or OxyContin. And you can buy it at gas stations and convenience stores all across the United States. In fact, I landed here and it took me. 10 minutes to find a place near your studio where I was able to find some gas station heroin.

• 6:51Shawn Ryan?

  This is a drink mix?

• 6:52Speaker 03

  It's a drink mix wonderfully flavored. Yeah wonderfully flavored uh lemon and watermelon. Not like they're targeting that at kids at all.

• 7:01Shawn Ryan?

  15 milligrams of pure 70H. Says it's lab tested. Should we try it?

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, lab tested. I don't know where the lab is. You you can scan that barcode and it probably comes back to some fake certificate of analysis generated on, you know, a a large language model. Who knows where the lab is, but um Senator Mark Wayne Mullen uh recently gave a press conference and I know he's had some personal experience with um uh losing someone he loves to overdose uh to to opioid overdose, opioid addiction and talked about this and he estimated uh based on information he'd received that this is already a nine billion dollar industry.

• 7:43Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  Just 70H, just the

• 7:45Shawn Ryan?

  Nine billion dollars?

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Nine billion dollar industry.

• 7:47Shawn Ryan?

  Is this stuff as bad as bath salt? I mean, I remember, I came here from Florida.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  You remember the face gnaw?

• 7:54Shawn Ryan?

  Dude, yep, the face gnawing. You'd be driving down the road, somebody'd be humping a palm tree, humping a parking curb. I mean, it it it we'll put some B-roll up of this stuff. I mean, it is like the real Walking Dead.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:08Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it is crazy.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  Are you on drugs? Man, who's this? Tell me what's wrong. No, I just

• 8:17Speaker 04

  What's wrong? I've been, I was getting hot.

• 8:22Speaker 04

  No, I'm not going. I never sit down. I'm going to go. I don't want She asked me on Flaca. Are you on Flaca?

• 8:32Shawn Ryan?

  Alright Steve, before we get too far into it, let me give you an intro here. Everybody starts off with an intro. So Steve Robinson, editor in chief of The Main Wire, New England's fastest growing digital media outlet dedicated to exposing political corruption and organized crime. Former producer of The Howie Carr Show and he helped handle Barstool Sports Kirk.

• 8:56Shawn Ryan?

  Can't say that name. Menahan. Menahan Show, along with the True Crime Podcast, The Case. The journalist who uncovered a massive Chinese mafia network stretching from rural Maine all the way to southeast China. Exclusively detailed how these criminals exploited US Treasury subsidized loans to snatch up over seventy properties, putting the spotlight on vulnerabilities in our own system. Your work has been cited in congressional reports and featured on major outlets, resulting in over sixty hard-hitting articles, property raids, and arrests. Creator of the documentary High Crimes: The Chinese Mafia's Takeover of Rural America. And like I said, you know, I think you are way ahead of the government on this stuff.

• 9:41Shawn Ryan?

  Uh, 7OH and gas station heroin. And as of September 2025, the US Drug Enforcement Agency has not yet scheduled 7OH, but is in the process of, of, uh, currently scheduling it. Did you say it's Schedule One? Schedule One, yeah. So, so that's good. At least, at least somebody's on this shit. But, um, but all right, a couple, just a couple more things to crank out here. Everybody gets a gift. Oh, fantastic. Sorry, I don't have any 7OH for you. But I do have some gummy bears. Thank you very much. Gummy bears made in the USA, legal in all fifty states, just candy. Beautiful.

• 10:26Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, and then I have a Patreon account. It's a subscription network that we've turned into quite the community here. And so, uh, they're the reason that I get to sit here with you today. And, um, so one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. This is from Kevin O'Malley. Is there any indication that Chinese nationals involved in organized crime are acting at the directive of the Chinese government? Yes. Yes. How so? Uh, so.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  Law enforcement sources that we've communicated with time and again have drawn direct bright lines between the organized crime activities in Maine, in New York, California, Oklahoma, straight to the Chinese government. That's not satisfactory for me, but some law enforcement or government source says, oh, this is connected to the CCP. What I prefer to rely on is my own reporting and things that I have uncovered and things that I've worked with other journalists to uncover. And to give you a specific example, I grew up in a town called Dexter. It's right in the center of the state of Maine, used to be home to Dexter Shoes.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  And at a property that is maybe a five-minute walk from my childhood home, this property was purchased by some Chinese individuals from the Flushing, New York area around 2021 and converted into a drug house, a marijuana house. And we, as part of our investigation into the Chinese drug cartel activity in Maine, had identified as many of these properties as we possibly could and then began driving all around the state, visiting them, trying to interview the people who were there, if there were people there, trying to interview the neighbors and learn what we could. While we were visiting this particular site on Highland Avenue, we found there were two

• 12:28Speaker 03

  abandoned vehicles there. One was an abandoned Ford Express van that looked like it had been converted to carry either the maximum number of laborers or maybe the maximum number of trash bags full of cannabis. The other was a very nice BMW car. Dexter is a poor town. A BMW sticks out. You know, that vehicle's probably worth more than the median income of most people in that town. And as I... Observed the vehicle, there were two T-shirts, bright red T-shirts, strapped over the front driver's seat and the passenger's seat. Which is weird, who does that?

• 13:08Speaker 03

  And as I looked closer at them, they had Chinese script and Chinese logos on them. And I photographed them, saved them for analysis later. And those T-shirts turned to be out, uh, turned to be logos for the Sijiu Association of New York, which is one of these Chinese benevolent associations. Uh, they're technically often organized as 501(c)(3) nonprofits, uh, but they're front groups for the Chinese consulate in New York. Um, they're part of the United Front, which is the Chinese Communist Party's, um, you know, umbrella organization for their activities to infiltrate and conduct espionage on other countries.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  So the Sijiu Association has a presence in my hometown in Dexter.

• 13:55Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Right next, you know, I can't tell you how many times I've like, chased my cocker spaniel when he got loose through the backyard of this house. And here's this, uh, you know, uh, I guess, um, you know, Communist Party paraphernalia present there. Uh, so we write a story about this. I thought it was noteworthy in part because we were less than a mile away from a US Army Reserve garrison. Uh, Maine does not have a lot of military facilities. Uh, but we do have one in Dexter and I'm familiar with this one because, uh, it was the garrison that my brother served out of. And, uh, there's probably seven other, um, transnational criminal organization affiliated properties

• 14:40Speaker 03

  encircling this particular US military facility. Um, so I thought that that was newsworthy, published a story about it. Another journalist, Philip Lenzicki, from the Daily Caller News Foundation, who I would say is the best China journalist in America, bar none, was able to, because he speaks Mandarin Cantonese and is familiar with, um, Chinese culture and language, was able to expand on my reporting from the ground and dig into. The Ciju Association. And what he found is that the executive director of the Ciju Association is a guy named Huang Weizhan, who was among the first to be arrested in 2022 in Carmel, Maine,

• 15:23Speaker 03

  about an hour from where I found those T-shirts, at a very large chicken barn that had been converted into a marijuana grow. There was 4,000 plants confiscated, three other individuals arrested. But he was photographed along with his cousin or some kind of relative. And he was the executive director of the Ciju Association.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  There are other examples like that where we know that individuals who are

• 15:57Speaker 03

  coordinating with the Chinese consulate in New York are directly tied to marijuana grows throughout Maine. And it's one of these things where it's sort of a puzzle that has to be fit together through financial records, real estate records, electrical records, physical inspections of the properties, eyewitness accounts, interviews with neighbors. But you can start to take this this property in Dexter where those shirts were, then the barn in Carmel. And you can find out that this same guy hooked up the 400 amp electricity for this property and this property and this property. And the owner of this property also owns all these properties. And if you look at it hard enough and long enough,

• 16:40Speaker 03

  you can start to see how all of them interrelate. It's not it's not a case of a cultural phenomenon where Chinese migrants to the United States all glommed on to this idea that they could come up to America and make a bunch of money growing pot. It is a coordinated and sophisticated effort. There's a playbook that they have that they developed in California, Washington State and in Oklahoma. And when Maine legalized marijuana in 2020 and formalized our adult use recreational and medicinal programs, they brought that playbook to Maine.

• 17:15Shawn Ryan?

  Shit. Shit. So and this is kind of where this is kind of where your journey starts within Chinese organized crime in Maine, correct?

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:25Shawn Ryan?

  All right. Let's do it. Let's, let me, uh, let me strap him with the nicotine here. So, so let's, let's start at the beginning. What, what got your interest in Chinese organized crime in Maine? Cause I'm, I've got family up in Maine and I don't see a lot of, I don't see a lot of Chinese, you know, or Asian population. I see a lot of Somalis, um, but I don't, I don't see a lot of Chinese.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  Cause they're not allowed to leave the house.

• 17:53Shawn Ryan?

  Say that again?

• 17:54Speaker 03

  They're not allowed to leave the house.

• 17:56Shawn Ryan?

  Who's the Chinese?

• 17:58Speaker 03

  The workers. Yeah. For the most part, they're what amounts to indentured servants. Um, the people who are seen at these properties are, are victims of trafficking. Um, and there was actually, uh, this is getting a little bit ahead, but there was an indictment handed down, uh, in the district of Massachusetts in July, in which, um, well, first and most importantly, it showed that these guys were reading my reporting on their activities in the state. But also they were smuggling, uh, people from China into Mexico across the border, flying them to New England, stealing their passports, putting them in safes, and bringing them to marijuana grows in Maine. And it was, you're, you're working at the cannabis house to work off your snake head debt.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  You're, you're gonna work here until you've paid back the money you owe us for smuggling you here.

• 18:48Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha. You know, I just, I wanna, uh, be clear, you know, I wanna do this interview, one to bring awareness to what's going on. I mean, it sounds like, you know, they're putting all kinds of chemicals and shit, marijuana, CBD, um, and then all the other stuff that we're gonna, um, dive into here. But, you know, I wanna bring awareness to that, not only, you know, hopefully, hopefully it does get scheduled as a Schedule One drug, the 70H, but also to, you know, people that are dabbling in that, that don't know what they're getting into, how addictive this shit can be and how it can. Completely ruin your life. So those are my goals, but let's dive in. So how did the Chinese organized crime in Maine pop onto your radar?

• 19:32Speaker 03

  So in August of 2022, Jenny Tare, who at the time, she's a New York Post reporter now, but at the time she was at the Daily Caller News Foundation, she published a story based on a leaked Customs and Border Protection memo that just said that there were thousands of illicit Chinese marijuana grows in the United States that were operating in concert with the Chinese Communist Party that were, they were using the proceeds of these organizations to fund human trafficking, narcotics trafficking, all kinds of other illicit activities. And the memo said that 270 or more of these locations were in Maine, and a number of

• 20:17Speaker 03

  them were also in Oklahoma. Oklahoma has a serious problem, probably worse than Maine with this issue. But as a journalist who was based in Maine, I said, geez, if there's 270 of these drug houses in Maine, I've got to be able to find them. And one of the first things I did was call a friend of mine who I grew up with, played, he played center on my high school football team, and he's a master electrician. And I knew that cultivating large amounts of cannabis involves huge amounts of electricity. And so I figured if somebody would know about this, he would know about it. He also happens to smoke a ton of pot. And so I called and said, hey, is this, is this something that's happening? Is this

• 20:59Speaker 03

  real? He was like, oh, yeah. And I could tell just from the tone of his voice that it was like, it wasn't just like, oh, yeah, there's some, there's some guys up here who are doing this. It was like, yeah, this is real.

• 21:10Shawn Ryan?

  This is common.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  This is common. And he'd been asked to spec some jobs installing 400 amp commercial grade electricity at properties where you don't need 400 amp electricity.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  And just to explain like the basics of electricity, you know, a lot of the older homes in Maine probably have like 500 amp entrances, 100 amps is common as well. If you have a home where you've got a hot tub and a bunch of mini split heat pumps and all your appliances are running on electricity, you might need 200 amps. 400 amps is commercial grade. That's like if you've got, you know, an auto workshop or some very intense electronics. That's, that's why you would need a 400 amp entrance. All of these marijuana grows have 400 amp entrances because the amount of power they need to keep the lights on, for one,

• 22:05Speaker 03

  but the lights generate heat. And so they need an abundance of mini split heat pumps, which are air conditioners that can also do heating. They're common appliances in Maine. So they need to be able to suck the heat out from the lights to maintain a perfectly stable atmosphere for their marijuana plants. So the marijuana grows all have very advanced electricity and lots of heat pumps. They're kind of easy to spot once you know what you're looking for. But the, once I was talking with my friend who's the electrician, he was telling me about these jobs where people who could barely speak English, groups of young military age Chinese men trying to get him to install enough electricity for

• 22:49Speaker 03

  properties to, you know, operate six electric stoves simultaneously. It was just stuff that didn't make sense to him. It wasn't residential electrical needs. It was just, you know, like his spidey sense went off and he just said, no, I'm not doing those jobs. But he knew enough about the different areas where someone said yes to those jobs. And he knew who said yes to those jobs. And his input was enough for me to be like, okay, we're on to something here. There's something going on and I got in touch with Jenny and eventually was able to get her to come up to Maine and she didn't publish but had been given a partial list

• 23:31Speaker 03

  of addresses because in addition to the Homeland Security memo that identified the just the raw number 270 sites, there was a list of addresses of these sites that had been flagged. I don't know how that list was created. I suspect it was just tips that had come in over time and someone had filed them away. But we were able to take the 12 or 15 addresses and do a dive into the property records to see who'd purchased them, when, and some of the other details about the tax records and that kind of thing. And we were able to visit the properties and try to get interviews, see what's going on, talk with neighbors.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  We found that every single one of them, they were very obviously marijuana growers. You had the advanced electricity, you had the heat pumps, you had individuals there who, when we encountered people who were actually there, they, 99% of the time, they can't talk to us. And that's either a decision that they're making strategically in order to avoid having to communicate, or they actually don't speak English. Usually what we would encounter is somebody would come out, take out their phone, dial a New York number, and then hand the phone, and a woman on the other end of the line who could kind of speak English would, you know, correspond with us. And we had a couple of different cover stories, you know, husband and wife shopping for a home, you know, different things like

• 24:58Speaker 03

  that. And eventually we'd ask about the marijuana and they would dummy up. But we were never able to really successfully communicate with any of these individuals or talk to them. But our conversations with the neighbors to these properties were much more fruitful. And we found that the properties are purchased. A clean-cut Chinese couple who speaks English shows up shortly after. They come to the neighbors, they give a gift of a bottle of wine, or a bottle of cognac, or in one case, a Peking duck, fresh from New York. And they introduce themselves and they say that they're fleeing COVID. They are trying to get out of the city.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  So they've purchased this place for their family in Maine, and their family's going to be staying there. And then that couple's never, never seen again. And what follows is a steady flow of military-aged Chinese men, in some cases, older Chinese individuals. The very obvious odor of marijuana, both, you know, the active, pungent, skunky flower that people are familiar with, but also the kind of decaying detritus of marijuana once it's harvested and just thrown out back into a pile. It has its own kind of decaying plant matter smell.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  And U-Haul vehicles or Sprinter vans arriving every 35 to 40 days. So, but this is, this is all legal, correct? No. This is illegal? So, in, this is a, this is important context, because in Maine, in 2020, we, in 2016, Maine voted in a referendum to legalize adult-use recreational marijuana. It took until 2020 for the lawmakers to roll out the legal framework for both our adult-use recreational program and our medicinal program. The adult-use recreational program is highly regulated, and there's seed-to-sale tracking, there's mandated testing.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  It's counterintuitive, but the medicinal program is less regulated. In either case, you are capped on the number of plants that you can grow. There are things you have to do, like locking your dumpsters, surveilling different areas. Everybody who's going to come in contact with your plants has to have a license as a sub-permittee. It's a very tightly regulated and controlled process. But at every single Chinese marijuana grow. They are in some cases a hundred, five hundred, a thousand times whatever the plant limits are. In addition to that.

• 27:36Shawn Ryan?

  A thousand times?

• 27:38Speaker 03

  We're way so.

• 27:38Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit, how big are these houses?

• 27:41Speaker 03

  Uh, they vary from double wide trailers to I've seen there's one that they tried to convert into a marijuana grow. That was an old factory in Lewiston that was, I think, uh, three hundred and fifty thousand square feet. If if they'd finished it, it would have been the largest indoor marijuana grow in North America.

• 27:59Shawn Ryan?

  So why are the Chinese so interested in? I mean, you you said there were ties back to the CCP. Why are they so interested in the marijuana business? Is it just business? Or I mean, we know about, you know, the precursors to fentanyl are all coming from China. We know about China buying up farmland all over the United States, especially around military bases. That's been covered for years now. I don't think a lot of people know about it, but it has been. We've been talking about this for years. And so, you know, what is the what is the motive? Is it just cash flow or?

• 28:32Speaker 03

  It's a very low risk activity. It's a very low risk way to generate huge amounts of cash. Um, at the congressional hearing, uh, on the the September eighteenth, they, uh, I guess there was an individual from Oklahoma who estimated that the illicit business in Oklahoma, which is dominated by Chinese players, uh, was worth a hundred and fifty billion.

• 28:58Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  Hundred and fifty billion.

• 29:01Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  And it's a cash business. It's a cash business everywhere you go, whether it's legal operators or illegal operators, because the federal prohibition prevents you from accessing traditional payment rails. So you can't swipe a Visa credit card and buy marijuana at a dispensary. You have to use the ATM that they have at the dispensary. So you're dealing with just in Oklahoma, a hundred and fifty billion dollars a year in illicit sales, all cash. In Maine, they've estimated that it's somewhere between four and five billion dollars. Personally, I think that law enforcement. A little strained of the reefer madness, overestimating the value.

• 29:43Speaker 03

  I don't think they fairly take into the equation the costs of doing business. Reinvesting in new real estate, buying chemicals, buying, you know, spools of copper wire to put together a marijuana grow. So I think that that might be a little bit on the high end, but we're talking about massive, massive amounts of cash that are then reinvested into new real estate and

• 30:10Speaker 03

  other malign activities of the CCP. Some of this stuff goes far beyond the remit of a journalist from Maine.

• 30:17Shawn Ryan?

  So is this, so why are they, okay, I just want to get to the bottom of it. You know, and so is this a business that they've generated to procure more real estate in the United States? Or are they poisoning the marijuana or, you know, it could be anything. China has so many angles.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, and yes.

• 30:39Shawn Ryan?

  What am I missing?

• 30:41Speaker 03

  So the cannabis that they're

• 30:45Speaker 03

  producing more often than not has pesticides on it, banned substances. There are 13 or 14 different pesticides that have been identified on at Chinese grows in California that are prohibited for use in the United States on anything.

• 31:01Shawn Ryan?

  And these are indoor?

• 31:03Speaker 03

  They are indoor grows in the Siskiyou Forest in Northern California. They have what are called hoop houses. We can find the YouTube video of some people who have flown drones over them, but they're like city-sized areas where they put up these hoop houses, which are greenhouses. They'll grow marijuana in there and then they'll set up a, like a 55 gallon drum. And they'll fill it with sawdust, which is a mixture of all of these different herbicides, pesticides and fungicides, many of which have been imported from China and have no legal use in the US. And they'll put a wick in them and burn them. And the smoke fills the hoop house and coats the marijuana and ensures that you don't have any product.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Loss to mold, because that's a big problem with growing marijuana is the heat humidity. You're going to get mold, you're going to lose your marijuana. So the, this is like dropping off, you know, Agent Orange or a nuclear bomb that's going to kill everything except for your marijuana. And they're doing this at a smaller level in houses in Maine as well, where they'll cut half a beer can, take these very same Mylar bags that they're finding in California. They'll find them in Maine, they'll dump them into a beer can, they'll burn them and they smoke the whole house so that they don't get any mildew or mites or whatever pest on their marijuana plants. And that marijuana is then later consumed along with whatever crazy Chinese pesticides

• 32:31Speaker 03

  have been applied to it, because there's not a lot of testing on it. And if it's exported across state lines, that's inherently illegal. So whoever takes custody of it after that, whoever sells it after that, they're already breaking the law. And there's not really going to be any recourse for a consumer who finds out that they bought illegal weed in a state where it's prohibited. And later they find out that it's got pesticides in it or something, they're probably never going to know. And this stuff has spread so far throughout smoke shops and head shops in the United States that we don't really know where it's being grown. You can't possibly know where it's being grown. The supply chain is so distributed.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  So the first thing I would say is, yes, it furthers the CCP's goals to have as much cheap crappy poisoned pot as possible on the streets as widely available as possible. So instead of being, you know, fit and, you know, patriotic and ready to join the military, you're sitting on your couch, smoking poison pot all day, playing Xbox, like you can see how that furthers the CCP's goal. But they also have established a network that is multimodal in that.

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Some of these products are distributed in the form of vape cartridges. So they're just the, they're like nicotine vapes or traditional cannabis vapes, where it's just a little canister that's got some oil in it. And that's the extracted refined 99% THC version of the product. You create that by stuffing a metal tube or a glass tube full of cannabis leaf or cannabis bud, and you blow butane gas or some other kind of gas through it, and all of the oils dissolve out into that gas, including the pesticides and fungicides, by the way. Out the bottom comes the pure THC, which is then used for gummies, vapes,

• 34:30Speaker 03

  whatever kind of product. But the end result is that you've got these little teeny weeny canisters that you can sell at hemp shops, head shops, wherever, all over the United States. And people are gonna pay to have them distributed. People are gonna pay to buy them. And they're gonna put them up through their mouths, and they're gonna suck on them, because they think they're gonna get high. And if you were a planner for the Chinese military, and you wanted to do something bad to the United States, what better network for the distribution of a chemical or biological weapon than a network that's going to self-distribute these little vials, millions of them, to 10,000 different little tobacco shops and head shops all across the United States?

• 35:13Speaker 03

  And people are gonna suck it directly into their lungs. So there's a lot of hypotheticals and potentials there, but it certainly exists. And that's the network that they've built. And in the meantime, they're accruing hundreds of billions of dollars to do whatever they want with, to support human trafficking, to support bringing things across the border, to support buying up properties in New Hampshire, to support buying up real estate next to military bases. The, I think, the question of what they're doing with all of this money, I think is for, you know, some of your old colleagues and friends to determine. The FBI, I think, should be on this.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  The United States government should be answering those questions and tracking that money. But what we've found in Maine is how they're generating the money, and the schemes that have allowed them to do it now for five years without attracting a significant degree of attention.

• 36:17Speaker 01

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• 36:53Speaker 00

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• 37:27Shawn Ryan?

  I'm super excited to announce a project that I've been working on. I partnered with Ironclad for their newest original series, Target Intelligence Psyop. It's an eight-part audio experience where we find out who is really pulling the strings. Enjoy this trailer and stay tuned to the end of the show to listen to the prologue. Buy it today at psyopschool.com. Link is in the show notes. The stakes have never been higher. Do you feel it?

• 37:58Shawn Ryan?

  That something's off?

• 38:07Shawn Ryan?

  What if none of this is real?

• 38:12Shawn Ryan?

  For decades, wars have been fought in silence. No bullets, no bombs, just influence. They're called psychological operations, psyops. What if it's all designed for you?

• 38:31Shawn Ryan?

  Find out who's really pulling the strings.

• 38:35Shawn Ryan?

  I'm Sean Ryan, and this is Target Intelligence Psyop, an Ironclad original. In this eight-part audio experience, we uncover the ghosts in the machine. Buy it today at psyopshow.com.

• 38:57Shawn Ryan?

  How are... so these are illegal... these are illegal pop farms?

• 39:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 39:02Shawn Ryan?

  How are the... how is an illegal pop farm able to get their marijuana into a dispensary that's supposedly is regulated?

• 39:14Speaker 03

  In states where marijuana is legal, we have fictional systems set up where there's a compute... there's a company that sells a computer program that's supposed to track your inventory and where it's going and where it's selling. It's very easy to manipulate it and cook the books. So you can grow more marijuana than you tell your program you're growing, or you can say that you destroyed marijuana that you didn't end up destroying, you actually just diverted it. They call that diversion and inversion. That's within a tracked side of the program. So it's very, very easy to manipulate the... what the government sees, or what the computer program that tracks your inventory sees.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  But in Maine, our medicinal program doesn't even have that tracking program. So, within the existing legal marijuana system, there are all kinds of loopholes. And the Chinese are very skilled and very adept at exploiting these loopholes. To give you a concrete example, in the beginning of Maine's experience with triad weed, there were some individuals who came up to Maine. One of them was Johnny Woo. Johnny Woo comes up to Maine, speaks great English, he rents a facility outside of our state capital, he's growing marijuana there. His medicinal marijuana license using his Massachusetts driver's license and

• 40:44Speaker 03

  purports to be complying with all of the rules. But he, using his approved marijuana card, can go around to all of these other grows and grab their illegally grown marijuana and then bring it to dispensaries and offer it to them and say, oh, no, no, no, this is legal. I grew it. See, I'm legal. This is my license. This pay no attention to the fact that all this flower looks different and it's all in different baggies and you can know just based on common sense that it didn't come from the same grow. But I've got my license. Your ass is covered. And oh, by the way, it's 50% what some other guys kind of charge you. And this is in the middle of the pandemic when the state of Maine was in this severe lockdown.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  So much economic uncertainty, people are trying to put bread on the table. And somebody's offering you half price weed that you can mark up and make a buck off of. Yeah, you're going to take them up on it and then it's laundered into the existing medicinal system. So that's just, that's one example of how the illegally grown cannabis can be laundered into the legal, regulated cannabis sales system. But the other method that they're using increasingly is through the hemp loophole. And this is a national problem that really started in 2018 with the legalization of hemp cultivation, which was led by Senator Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell at the time.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  The idea was that, you know, there's lots of hemp farmers in Kentucky and we're going to grow a bunch of hemp. And pretty soon people will be wearing, you know, T-shirt, T-shirts and sweatshirts made out of hemp. And they'll make concrete out of hemp and it'll be environmentally friendly. That never panned out. What happened instead was we gave rise to this whole new class of intoxicating hemp products. There's chemicals that you can extract from hemp and then convert into intoxicating substances. But we also have smokable hemp products that can have chemicals added to them that make them psychoactive, that turn them into drugs. But most of what we have is

• 42:54Speaker 03

  Hemp that is, we have like illegally grown weed in Maine that is brought into a state like Tennessee or Kentucky or whatever prohibition state and is then sold as hemp. And what they call it is THCA, which is just a totally fictitious invented term to describe what's in fact just actual marijuana. And actually, I have some for you. Not quite gummy bears and I wouldn't encourage you to consume it, but I bought this about 10 minutes after I got off the plane.

• 43:32Speaker 03

  This Tennessee is one of the biggest prohibition states or the strictest marijuana laws in the country.

• 43:42Shawn Ryan?

  Smells just like it.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  It's weed. It's cannabis. It's not hemp. But it's being sold as THCA. And it's being sold in a prohibition state and it was one product in 40 jars up on a wall in a random head shop. What are the chances that I just happened to pick the one head shop to stop at and I found all kinds of cannabis being grown in a state where it's supposed to be illegal. So there's that loophole, the THCA loophole, but there's also, there's, there's all kinds of various ways where tobacco shops, hemp shops and head shops are selling real cannabis that they procure from cultivation states like Maine, Michigan, California, Oklahoma, Washington State and sell illegally.

• 44:27Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm. What, I mean, so what is the difference between THCA, THCP, Delta A, Delta 10? I mean, I see, I can't remember which one, but I see, I think it's Delta A is huge in Tennessee. I mean, what, what is the differ, I mean, what is it?

• 44:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the, there's three species of cannabis plant. There's cannabis sativa and cannabis indica. Those are the most common ones. Those are the ones that are gonna get you high. Cannabis sativa is like the, the heady buzz that makes you feel like you're, you know, brilliant and you can go do a painting or something. Cannabis indica makes you feel like you're being sucked into a couch. The other form of cannabis is just hemp and it's non-psychoactive and it doesn't have THC delta nine. THC delta nine is the primary psychoactive ingredient in all cannabis. It's how, it's basically, it's the, getting back to the bath salts thing. We've developed our regulatory regime around a molecule.

• 45:28Speaker 03

  In this case, it's THC delta nine. So when we created the hemp law in 2018, we decided that anything that tested at a certain point in time as having a small enough percentage of THC delta nine was going to be treated as hemp, not illicit cannabis, not a drug. And that was going to allow for this hemp industry to flourish. So THC delta nine is the primary psychoactive ingredient, but it's one of like 150 different cannabinoids that are present in the marijuana plant. There's a bunch that are non-psychoactive, CBN, CVA, some that are helpful for sleep, some that are helpful for anti-inflammation.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  There are some genuine medicinal properties to cannabinoids that are found in the marijuana plant. CBD is a large one that I'm sure you've seen marketed all over the place as a cure-all for joint pain and sleep, whatever. But in addition to those cannabinoids, you also have delta 10 and delta 8, which I would describe as delta nine adjacent. So they're kind of like THC delta nine. They're going to give you a little bit of the experience of a high. If you're a veteran marijuana user, you're not going to recognize it as the same experience. But if you're an 18-year-old taking a puff off a vape for the first time, you might not know.

• 46:57Speaker 03

  And because they do not contain THC delta nine, they are regulated in a different way and can be available at smoke shops through different age gates. They can be available at smoke shops and non-legalization states. And one of the other ways that we regulate cannabis products in this country that just doesn't make sense is whether they're hemp-derived or cannabis-derived. So you can derive CBD from a hemp plant grown in Kentucky and through a small chemical process involving heat and acid, turn it into THC delta nine.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  And it's identical chemically to the THC delta nine that would come from a cannabis sativa plant grown in Maine, but it's regulated totally differently.

• 47:50Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 47:51Speaker 03

  Even in Kentucky and Tennessee, wherever, in Maine, totally different regulatory system. So in Maine, right now, I can go into gas stations and I can buy a beverage that's five milligrams delta nine THC hemp derived. But if I wanted to buy cannabis sativa derived beverages with five milligrams THC delta nine in them, I'd have to go to a dispensary, show my license, go through a whole different regulatory process. And the process to create those products would be totally different. The analogy I've used is it'd be like, it'd be like regulating alcohol differently depending on how it was formed. Like regulating, you know, corn whiskey in one way, but potato vodka in another

• 48:35Speaker 03

  way, because corn derived alcohol is in some, some way different than potato derived alcohol. Doesn't make sense, but that's the system that we have right now. And that's the, the loophole that has allowed some of the least ethical players to reap the biggest rewards. Because we've set up a system now where what they're effectively doing is a form of arbitrage, where they know that they can safely and for low risk, grow and cultivate in states like Maine, or California, or Oklahoma, and then take that product and instead of selling it in Maine for bargain store prices, they can bring it to a prohibition state

• 49:16Speaker 03

  and sell it through a smoke shop, or a head shop, or tobacco shop. And they're going to make more money. And the money's also going to be clean, once it comes through the Visa payment processor.

• 49:28Shawn Ryan?

  Are the Chinese involved in the hemp stuff too?

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:31Shawn Ryan?

  They are.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  Yes. Uh, the, there, it's, it's really all one, uh, uh, I guess, one, one system or one network. There's not a lot of differentiation between the, the hemp and the cannabis. There's cannabis that's being passed off as hemp. There's hemp that's being passed off as cannabis. And once they're, um, they call it, they call it blowing it out. So, once you take, um, you know, in Oklahoma, you can grow a huge field of hemp legally, harvest it and you blow it out by putting the plant biomass into a canister, passing the gas through it to do gas extraction. And then the end result is all of this oil. And there's a couple of different cannabinoids that are in that oil. Um, with hemp, the most prominent one is CBD.

• 50:15Speaker 03

  And you can convert that CBD into THC. Uh, they call, they call those products conversion products. Uh, and then that THC is indiscernible from the THC that you would get from growing cannabis at, you know, a flop house in Dexter, Maine. So they're, they're basically the same thing, but our politicians and our regulatory, regulatory system treats them like they're completely different. Like Representative Comer, just the other day, put out a statement about, uh, you know, the value of the hemp industry and how important hemp, you know, hemp farmers are the backbone of America. And, you know, I'm sure that there are a couple of guys who are growing hemp in an honest way to use it for industrial products.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  But the, the, most of the hemp is being used for consumable hemp products.

• 51:04Shawn Ryan?

  How long ago was it that you found out about the 270, was it 270 homes that the Chinese are using in Maine?

• 51:12Speaker 03

  That was in, uh, 2022.

• 51:14Shawn Ryan?

  How many are there now?

• 51:16Speaker 03

  Probably 500.

• 51:17Shawn Ryan?

  500?

• 51:19Speaker 03

  Maybe more.

• 51:20Shawn Ryan?

  More than that, so it's over.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  And it's, and it's not just, it's not just houses where they're growing. Marijuana, we found boarding houses, places that are set up for, you know, a large number of guys to eat, sleep and shit in between cycles, going out to tend to the marijuana plants.

• 51:40Shawn Ryan?

  That was in 2022?

• 51:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:42Shawn Ryan?

  Or 2022, you found 270 homes, now there's well over five.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so in 2022, that was when the memo came out, revealing the existence of these locations. And in the ensuing years, we began a process of, based on the patterns we found on the address that we obtained from the reporter who first published that leaked memo, we expanded our investigation, looking at property records, real estate records, tax records, electrical records, to identify more of these places. And then set about driving, you know, probably more than 10,000 miles around the state of Maine, to inspect these spaces, try to talk to these people, talk to their neighbors,

• 52:24Speaker 03

  and see if we could, you know, put some reality around this story that had come out. Because, you know, I've been in conservative media long enough, so I've seen these flash in the pan stories where it's like, oh, the Chinese are doing this, the Iranians are doing this, and it's like, eh, well, are they trying to like scare me, are they trying to use me in some way? And this was around the time too, when there was, there was a lot of stories coming out that were like, you know, the China spy balloon is, you know, coming over the North America, and there was some, some stuff that just seemed like they were, they were trying to push this narrative of conflict with China, so I was a little bit skeptical of it at first. So I wanted to actually get out and see for myself firsthand what was going on.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  And then through that process, we identified, without having any leaked information, the 270 sites that the Department of Homeland Security was aware of, and actually identified, I don't want to say. We actually identified more than they were aware of. And I eventually did get the Department of Homeland Security list through a source. And I was a little bit embarrassed for them because mine was way better.

• 53:34Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. So are, are, are, were these, I'm just curious, were these properties all already there? And you discovered them or are these new properties that they're buying? What I'm getting at is, you know, it's been what, three years since 2022 now? So you're saying there's over 500 of these homes, you know, in the state of Maine? So are we seeing real estate double every two years? Or are you just finding out more that that were already in existence? See what I'm saying?

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Yes, I think it's a, it's a mixture of both. I think I'm finding new ones that had already been operating. But they are at a point where they're building themselves new facilities that are more suited to what they need. They're building facilities that are larger, that are more industrial in nature and are closer to the I-95 corridor and have better security. And in part, I think that's

• 54:30Shawn Ryan?

  What kind of security?

• 54:33Speaker 03

  I mean, the gates, security cameras, motion sensors, you know, there's some, there's some, there's some that I've been to where, you know, maybe 40, 40 feet before you drive past the foot of the driveway, you pass a motion sensor and lights go on at the end of the driveway.

• 54:52Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, so we're not talking about armed?

• 54:54Speaker 03

  Uh, no, I've, I've never seen, I've never seen people carrying guns. I've heard, I've heard stories from neighbors about them being alarmed by hearing target practice and gunfire. I've never seen anyone armed with guns. I've, I've been chased off a lot of sites by angry guys driving black Toyotas. They all love black Toyotas for some reason. I don't know what it is. They, they love Toyotas. But they, by and large, don't flaunt firearms. I've heard, you know, I have some sources who have done work on these properties because once in a while it's necessary for them to interact with white contractors if they

• 55:37Speaker 03

  need propane work, for example, if they need electrical work. There are some things that they can't do themselves. They prefer to do all of their handiwork themselves because it doesn't allow, you know, eyes peeping into what might be happening there. But I've heard, you know, stories about large grows in very rural parts of the state where there are an abundance of military-age men dressed similarly, you know, not, not, and it was described to me as fatigues, close-crop hair. And one of the things like an electrician, for example, will do when they're installing 400-amp service at a barn in rural Maine, is they'll go inside and do load testing to try and make sure that everything's worked out.

• 56:20Speaker 03

  And this individual told me, you know, when he tried to go inside to do load testing, which is something he's done hundreds of times at all of the properties that he's visited, two guys, two Chinese guys grabbed him, stopped him and said, "No," and physically escorted him off the property and stuffed two $100 bills in his back pocket and said, "Coffee money, coffee money, coffee money," and pushed him off the property. And we've had, you know, a lot of stories like that of technicians being met at the driveway of facilities and told they can't enter, even though they'd been called to help service some kind of electrical need.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  There've been a lot of, I would say, alarming stories, and there's definitely a pattern of co-location with sensitive infrastructure and military facilities in Maine. But Maine doesn't have enough military facilities to really say for sure whether it's a pattern or if it's just that there are Chinese marijuana grows everywhere. Yeah, you know, I mean, have you, I mean, how many of these properties have you entered?

• 57:31Speaker 03

  Well, personally, I would never break and enter or trespass on

• 57:35Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, have you been

• 57:36Speaker 03

  private property. I have, I have sources that I'm familiar with have entered, maybe 25 or 30 of them.

• 57:45Shawn Ryan?

  Have you seen any, any type, I mean, especially the ones near a military base? Have you seen any type of communications weapon or really what kind?

• 57:53Speaker 03

  Uh, there was a facility, uh, 10 Cooley Road in Harmony, one of the most sophisticated, uh, military grows that we've seen. They built a three-story barn there. They had a piece of equipment there called the Triminator, which is a $15,000 piece of equipment that comes from a company in Las Vegas that can process just an insane amount of marijuana bud. So this

• 58:16Speaker 03

  facility was not for growing, uh, you know, a licensed amount of marijuana. They were processing way more bud. They were processing bud for surrounding facilities. And this property had been raided by, um, the sheriff, uh, just days before we arrived there. And we were able to, um, observe through the window, a computer there, um, that we later learned was like a $5,000 computer. A very sophisticated, uh, computer that they had. And hey, maybe they just love playing Diablo or computer games or something, but it wasn't, uh, uh, uh, something that the, the sheriff's department

• 58:56Speaker 03

  noticed or thought was important or decided to bag for evidence, uh, which is something that we've seen frequently. Um, there's a facility in Green Bush, Maine, where there's a, uh, shortwave radio tower that used to broadcast, uh, you know, Christian, um, content all the way to Africa. Um, that is situated in an area where, um, Chinese cartels own multiple of budding properties, including properties on this specific road. Um, I think four of which were on the Department of Homeland Security's watch list.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  And we've, you know, again, some of these stories come to me secondhand or thirdhand, but it's always in instances where the cartels find themselves needing a Maynard to come in and fix something. And in this case, there was a boiler that broke down and they needed heat. And so they needed a local to come fix their boiler. And the boiler repair technician spoke of what he just assumed were Bitcoin mining machines in their basement. Lots and lots of Bitcoin mining machines, which wouldn't make sense in Maine because electricity's so expensive. If you were to mine Bitcoin in Maine, you'd be mining it at a loss every

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  single second you had the machine turned on. But who knows what that individual saw. But I know that in the majority of cases, when there are electronics at these sites, they're generally not noticed by the members of law enforcement who are executing the raids.

• 1:00:37Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  What they're doing is they're showing up, they observe the illegal marijuana, they cut the plants down, they destroy them and they leave. They view it as traditional, old school drug operations. They're not, they're not trained or equipped to combat transnational criminal organizations. And they don't really view this as a struggle between civilizations. They don't see this as a national security threat.

• 1:01:06Shawn Ryan?

  They're not seeing the bigger picture.

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  No, and no one's told the bigger picture either, is the thing. And there's a total paralysis on the part of law enforcement to recognize that this is a phenomenon that is exclusive to Chinese guys from New York and Massachusetts who speak Cantonese, have, you know, maybe they have green cards or citizenship, but they have historical ties to China. But a lot of them are straight illegal aliens, or they'll claim asylum after they're caught at an illegal marijuana site. None of them want to be called, you know, racists or accused of profiling. And I sympathize with that and they should not be racist. But they also shouldn't blind themselves to the fact that this is

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  a transnational criminal conspiracy aided and abetted by the Chinese Communist Party. It's a huge part of the equation. If you ignore that, you're, you know, you're fighting this with, you know, both hands behind your back. And we've had, the state has had no help whatsoever from state leadership or the state police in combating these cartels. It's been almost exclusively county sheriffs and local police. And in a few instances, national DEA.

• 1:02:24Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit, nobody's on this except the locals, huh?

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  And even in many cases, not the locals.

• 1:02:30Shawn Ryan?

  Geez, do you have any idea of how much of the hemp in marijuana industry, what percentage is from CCP operations?

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  It's hard to tell because there is just so much being cultivated and consumed. I do know that America is now an exporter nation when it comes to cannabis. There are other countries, Ireland, the UK, that are complaining to federal authorities about American grown cannabis showing up in their countries. The, the volume, I mean, we're, we're probably talking in the millions of tons. Hemp more so because it's less potent. But the, the appetite for Americans for these cannabis products, it continues to stun me. Every time I think I've figured out, you know,

• 1:03:29Speaker 03

  the, what the ceiling is, I'm blown away. I think in the recent congressional testimony, someone from Oklahoma said that they, someone did the math there and calculated that just in Oklahoma, they were growing something like thirty-five or forty times what could reasonably be consumed by people in Oklahoma, just under existing licenses. So very obviously it's exporting, it's, they're violating federal law and exporting that to other states and they're selling it. It's just good old fashioned cannabis, like the product I just handed you. And they're, everyone along the way is pretending it's hemp. Guy who grows it's pretending it's hemp, the guy who traffics it's pretending it's hemp, the guy who sells it's pretending it's hemp, the guy who smokes it's pretending it's hemp.

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  Everybody's either making money or getting high along the way. And for whatever reason, the federal government, including Congress, and especially Republicans in Congress, are pretending that this isn't happening, and they're protecting the hemp loophole. And a huge part of this is there's an organization called the Hemp Roundtable, which is comprised of hemp business leaders, and they have a political action committee, and they make donations, they're a political player. Yeah. And I, at the beginning of my kind of dive into the illicit Chinese cannabis world

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  in Maine, really tried to stay away from the easy explanation that this was all about corrupt politicians and people were being bribed to look the other way. It's getting harder and harder. It's getting harder and harder to look the other way. What would you like to see happen? I've remained agnostic in terms of policy. I mean, in the, in the ideal world, you know, Anthony Fauci develops a bioweapon that just wipes out the cannabis plant, and there's no downside, there's no ill, ill, ill side effects, the cannabis plant just disappears overnight. That's not going to happen. What I, what, what's also not going to happen is a return to prohibition.

• 1:05:35Speaker 03

  I don't think anybody wants to go back to a world where, you know, somebody's spending 15 years in jail because they get caught with the amount of marijuana that, you know, I just gave to you. Like, nobody wants to go back to that. But I do think that there needs to be some kind of a national framework that recognizes the reality that we have. Because under our, we, we, we almost have a system now that You couldn't design it better if you were trying to reward the least ethical players. Because what we're rewarding now is cannabis arbitrage. So if you're setting up a business in the United States, the best possible way to do it

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  is to cultivate it in a state like Maine, where the stakes of getting caught if you're growing way over the legal limits are very low. If you get caught growing 5,000 plants and you don't have a license, or your license is for 35 plants, you might get $500 bail, slap on the wrist. If you're a Chinese illegal alien, you might get deported back to China, but probably not. You can just post your bail and disappear back into New York, but there's gonna be no penalty for it. You grow it illegally in a state where it's legal to cultivate it in some ways, bring it to a tobacco shop and sell it illegally as hemp, and you benefit from not paying

• 1:07:00Speaker 03

  fees, not paying taxes, but you also have access to the existing payment rails. Like, you know, you can use Visa, you can use your traditional bank account, you can use Square, you can use the traditional payment rails. And the money's clean once it goes through the tobacco shop. It's not, it's not, you know, drug cash money. It's, it's clean and that's the most profitable way to do it. That's the system that we've created and rewarded. And the people who are willing to break federal law by crossing state lines, by growing over the limits, by selling a product as something other than what it is, are the, you know, the people who don't necessarily have the best business ethics. And because they're willing to take advantage of this system the way it is now, they're

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  making billions of dollars. You know, not one person individually making that much money, but the people who are engaged in this enterprise are making huge amounts of money. So if you were to have at least a national framework that established rules for the road for doing this kind of thing, you could take away the advantage that the least ethical players have when it comes to exploiting this arbitrage.

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  The system currently forces the cultivation demand in the states like Maine, Oklahoma, and California to feed the appetite for the entire country. So Maine is growing way more cannabis than can ever be consumed by Mainers. Same for Oklahoma, same for California, and it's not just the Chinese. There's other cartels that are involved, and there's other just straight up American businesses that are involved. Increasingly, people in Maine are looking at the lack of consequences for the Chinese cartels and saying, fuck it, I'm gonna do the exact same thing. And if you were to have at least a bit of a national framework and legalize some form

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  of cultivation in other states, it would take some pressure off of states like Maine. And maybe it's selfish of me as a Mainer to say like, other states should also be dealing with this problem so it's not so intensely focused in my backyard, but there needs to be some kind of federal recognition for this. And in terms of the Chinese specifically, there needs to be a very deliberate targeted effort to go after the money and all of the properties. According to our research, there were at least 75 of these properties were acquired using mortgages. All of those mortgages were from the same company. The loan officers on those mortgages, two of them did those mortgages.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  One was a Chinese national, one was a Taiwanese national. Those need to be looked at because in those mortgage documents, they swore to make those houses their primary residences. Instead of making them their primary residences, they turned them into illegal small businesses, marijuana grows. That's bank fraud. Every single one of them should be facing bank fraud investigations. And yet to be published material, there are four realtors in the state of Maine who are connected to more than 300 of these properties that would go on to become Chinese marijuana grows. All four of them born, raised, educated in China. No shit. Okay. Okay.

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  But they're very integrated. One of them is a mechanical engineer who just happened to find her way to Maine and get involved in real estate. But all four, all four of them are Chinese, Chinese nationals. Some of them have obtained citizenship through marriage or have maybe some kind of a legal status. I don't know exactly what their status is, but you can pull their sale history and see the properties that they were the, um, the agent for the property buyer on and connect it to the Department of Homeland Security list, to my list, to the list of properties that have been raided. And you can see that these four real estate agents who just so happened to be born, raised and educated in China, including one who went to the Beijing Foreign Studies Institute,

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  which is just spy school for Chinese nationals. And another who went to, I think it's Zhejiang University, which is part of their economic espionage program. It's a big university, so I'm sure they do a lot of cool stuff there, too, that's totally not related to the Chinese Communist Party's desire to rule the world. But, uh, those are some avenues that I would pursue from a law enforcement perspective. You've got to squeeze the money and squeeze people at the higher levels because our approach so far has been to, uh, you know, kick the door in on a marijuana grow and arrest whoever's there and destroy their plants. And a couple of things happened after that. Uh, so you, you arrest the guy who's there.

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

  The guy who's there is probably a victim of human trafficking. He has no idea who his boss is. He probably only interacts with his boss through WeChat. He gets instructions. He's told when to, um, when a pickup's coming and, uh, maybe he's sent some money. Uh, he's told when his shipment of groceries is coming. He's maybe given some instructions about how to grow his plants or deal with, you know, pesticides, whatever. Um, but he is a victim of trafficking. He's a victim of Chinese communism. He's not the main culprit here, but our justice system is like, yeah, we got him. We got the bad guy. We found this illegal pot grower. So we put him in jail and we take his mugshot and, you know, he goes through the criminal justice system and gets a

• 1:12:37Speaker 03

  slap on the wrist and the cops and the courts and everybody pats themselves on the back and says that they did a good job. But what happens after that is the person who owns the property, who wasn't there and probably will never be there. Uh, just somehow another person turns up and starts that marijuana grow up again. And they'll go get a marijuana license and then they'll try to at least feign like they're doing it the right way. And we've, we've seen examples of this in Franklin County, Maine, like, um, western, western, I guess, the western corner of Maine. There was a house that, uh, the Franklin County Sheriff raided. Uh, we showed up there maybe a day or two later.

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  And we're surveilling the house and there's a, a truck from Grow Generation, which is a very prominent, um, grow supply company. Big box truck backed up right up into the driveway and a crew like five Chinese guys are offloading grow supplies. This is two days after the place has been raided and a bunch of plants destroyed and I called the sheriff and I was like, hey, they're, they're right back at it. Just, just so you know, like they're, I'm watching them get this thing spun up again. And he says, yeah, I know. They say they're getting a permit now, so there's nothing I can do. So once they get that permit, they're untouchable in law enforcement's eyes. Um, so the, the current approach, which is to act like you're dealing with, you know, dime store drug dealers.

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  Or, you know, like the guys in the 1980s who'd be growing a little bit of pot in their barn or something. That's not working. You've got to go out, you've got to go after the higher level and you've got to go after the money. And we're seeing glimpses of that in the form of, uh, the indictment that I mentioned earlier. Leah Foley, the US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, handed down an indictment related to, uh, illegal Chinese marijuana grows in Massachusetts and in Maine. Uh, these guys are busted living in a 1.5 million dollar house in a cushy suburb in Massachusetts. One of them even had a T-shirt with a graphic on the front of it of Chinese guys who were taking, uh,

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  US currency and putting it through a laundry machine, like actually laundering the money. So just like. A little too, too on the nose. Uh, he also had, uh, I think it was a Porsche with a hidden compartment in it that had like $250,000 stuffed in it. And $75,000 Cartier bracelets and Rolex watches and that kind of thing. And a safe filled with passports from his trafficking victims.

• 1:15:06Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Wow.

• 1:15:08Speaker 03

  Uh, and if you look through that indictment, they list a couple of-

• 1:15:13Shawn Ryan?

  It would be, another avenue would be to hit them with the, with the trafficking, which they should be doing anyways.

• 1:15:19Speaker 03

  And they will, I think, I think Leah Foley is, is planning to, but trafficking cases I've discovered very, very hard. Are very, they're very hard. There's one in, um, uh, involving Navajo Nation land. Uh, and individuals were trafficked from China, promised flower cutting jobs and they were brought over the border into a Navajo reservation land and had their phones and their wallets and everything taken away and then forced into um, marijuana growing facilities. And there's a, there's a massive case there that does hinge on human trafficking. But the indictment in Massachusetts lists some of the techniques that were being used to move money around

• 1:16:00Speaker 03

  using lawyers and real estate companies. And it refers directly to some very large banks based in, uh, and, and law firms based in Massachusetts that are just 100% CCP cutouts. Like you can just look at the website. I could show you the website and you'd be like, oh yeah, that's like CCP cutout bank or law firm. And they're listed here as helping these organizations move their money around. And those are the kind of individuals you need to go after, not the people whose, you know, fingers smell like scots. You need to go after the people who are helping the, the money move because at the end of the day, all crime, all crime. At the highest level is money laundering.

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  They need to figure out how to get that money separate from the criminal activity that generated it and use it for what its true purpose is, what they really want to do with that money. And the question, as you said, is, um, what, why, why do they want to stockpile hundreds of billions of dollars in cold hard US cash behind US borders?

• 1:17:04Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, I think I know.

• 1:17:05Speaker 03

  It's not because they're going to Disneyland, you know? It's not because they, you know, want to build a, uh, you know, something great for us and not trying to get into podcasting. I can tell you that much, nothing good.

• 1:17:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I know there's a big, um, been looking for somebody to cover, but there's a big Bitcoin scam going on with the CCP as well.

• 1:17:24Speaker 03

  And you know what?

• 1:17:24Shawn Ryan?

  It's happening right here.

• 1:17:25Speaker 03

  You know what they're doing?

• 1:17:26Shawn Ryan?

  You know, they're stockpiling all the money because.

• 1:17:29Speaker 03

  They're, they're, they're stealing used fry oil from restaurants all around here because some of the Bitcoin machines can run submersible in oil as coolant. So instead of having a fan blowing on your machines to dissipate the heat, you have it in oil. So it's, uh, sneakier.

• 1:17:48Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:17:49Speaker 03

  It's not as loud. So there are, there are, um, restaurants in the Midwest that are finding their fry oil disappearing and it's because Chinese cartels are stealing their fry oil to run submersible Bitcoin machines. And it's because you can run them, uh, in not residential areas, but they're not as loud, they don't attract as much attention. The electricity consumption is certainly through the roof, um, but they don't have the fans running 24/7. And the benefit of the Bitcoin is that it's perfectly saleable across time and space. You know, I can send, uh, I could send a billion dollars from here to Beijing in 10 minutes for $3 and nobody, nowhere can stop me from doing that.

• 1:18:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Steve, let's take a break. I want to take a look at these websites you were talking about. When we come back, we'll talk about the 708 debacle.

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:18:40Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds good.

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

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• 1:20:25Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Stephen, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to dive into 70H. But there was something that we were talking about with the Maine's Attorney General, which, or lack thereof.

• 1:20:38Speaker 03

  Well, just the lack of law enforcement in Maine. You know, I think we've, we've reached a point where...

• 1:20:44Shawn Ryan?

  No prosecuting attorneys. Is that what you were saying out there?

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we don't have a US Attorney in Maine right now.

• 1:20:49Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean you don't have a US Attorney in Maine?

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  Trump hasn't appointed a US Attorney. The Biden US Attorney, Darcy McIlwain, did a few indictments at the federal level of some of the individuals involved in the Chinese drug cartels. Really just the bare minimum, very politicized office. She did not do, she wasn't as aggressive as she could have been. She didn't act in the best interests of the state. We're talking about the governor. Something about the governor. So Darcy McIlwain was rewarded by the governor with a judgeship after she retired from the US Attorney post, which remains vacant. Trump hopefully is going to be filling that soon.

• 1:21:32Speaker 03

  And that US Attorney, I'm told, will inherit an org chart that is fairly elaborate, that shows Chinese cartel activity in the state of Maine that could be acted on in the same way that Leah Foley in Massachusetts has very rapidly, you know, rolled up some of the Chinese drug cartels there. But it's a, it's a mystery for a lot of people why Steve Robinson can go find all of these marijuana sites. I've actually like taken multiple congressional candidates. I took CBS News, taken all kinds of people to active Chinese marijuana grows and somehow the state police aren't involved.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  The governor to this day hasn't said a single word about this. Governor Janet Mills hasn't uttered a word about the vast criminal conspiracy unfolding in her backyard entirely on her watch, in large part because of a law that she signed. And oh, by the way, at her inauguration in January 2019 was the head of the Chinese consulate in New York, the highest ranking CCP official in the eastern United States. Well, that's interesting. Wang Pang or something like that. Old Wang Pang? Yeah. So you have that going on and the state police involved in just three of the 70 or 75

• 1:22:59Speaker 03

  different search warrants, very minimal involvement. They won't comment to me. The governor has not commented on this at all. Every legislative attempt to do something to deal with this problem has been shot down. So it's a big mystery. Everybody's wondering, why is this being allowed to continue to happen?

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  And we were, I was actually reviewing physical copies of real estate records related to a Chinese marijuana grow in Corinna, Maine, which is one town over from where I grew up. That's where my mom lives. It's where, you know, my grandmother used to go to church. I was looking at these records and I see at the bottom of one of these real estate transfer documents. Well, the first thing that was unusual to me about the record was that it was a gift transfer of a property in Corinna, Maine, from an individual who lives in Quincy, Massachusetts, to a person who gave an address in Guangdong Province, China. So this is nine acres in a teardown, basically a hunting camp

• 1:23:59Speaker 03

  in central Maine, that is now lawfully owned by an individual who may or may not exist in southeast China, which just so happens to be the area where the legit triad criminal activity is most intense. It was weird, right? Mm-hmm. A property transfer. What guy in China has just been thinking, you know, I want nine acres in a teardown in Corinna, Maine? But what caught my eye was at the bottom of it, there's a line for tax document preparer. And the name there was Paul Mills. And I was like, well, hold on a second, that's the governor's brother. But maybe that's a different Paul Mills, but the address matched. The address was the address for his attorney

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  office. So the governor's brother was the lawyer for a real estate transfer for a known illicit Chinese drug house, where the code enforcement officer in that area is on the record saying this is an illegal Chinese drug house. And he helped transfer it into the custody of a Chinese national living in China. And this came just days after a series of raids by multiple sheriff's departments in the area. So it almost looked like they were trying to protect this property by moving it into the official ownership of somebody who would be beyond the reach of the local police, state police, or even the FBI, because

• 1:25:24Speaker 03

  they actually provided an address in China. And further investigation found that Mr. Mills has a number of clients who are involved in the marijuana business in the state of Maine. And the governor won't comment on that. The governor won't say whether she's had any communications or conversations with her brother about it. I had a 10 minute phone call with Paul Mills and he talked about that property and did say that he was involved in it. And I couldn't remember who asked him to be involved in it. Did tell me that he didn't have anyone in his office who speaks Cantonese, which I thought was kind of funny. But it was interesting to me because I had called him just before then pretending to

• 1:26:09Speaker 03

  be someone in Massachusetts who needed a property transfer attorney in that area. He told me that he doesn't work in that area. Hmm. So he wouldn't work for me. He wouldn't do a property transfer for me in that part of the state because his office is in a different county. But for the Chinese national and the Chinese woman from Massachusetts who needed to, you know, move around, do a gift transfer for an illicit marijuana grow, he was more than happy to sign on the dotted line. Probably just a coincidence, right? I'm sure it's just a coincidence, for sure. But the more I learned about how the real estate world works and how lawyers factor

• 1:26:53Speaker 03

  in, the more I began to suspect that there was probably a different, more lucrative money-making opportunity in play here. And it gets back to what we were talking about earlier and what we just grabbed some images of, of MT Law, the law firm in Massachusetts that was named in the Leifoli's indictment. MT Law appears to be just your run-of-the-mill law firm. Their entire staff is Chinese, except for their one, you know, American-looking. One of these doesn't look like the others. Yeah, just the, the, the white gorilla there, who I'm sure attends functions on their behalf.

• 1:27:35Speaker 03

  Uh, but um, the, there's a, a technique called uh, seasoning the money that I learned about, which may be old hat for people who are familiar with money laundering and how it works. But seasoning the money involves uh, a trusted lawyer. And it's money laundering technique. It's been used by, you know, white guys going back uh, decades. You know, if you've got a, a cash heavy business like a coin op laundry or a car wash. And you've got all this cash, but you don't want to pay taxes on it. You want to make a real estate investment with it. Uh, what you do is instead of trying to uh, bring it to the bank or to a real estate agent to buy property. You bring it to your attorney and you tell your attorney to deposit it in his I O T A account.

• 1:28:20Speaker 03

  Or his um, uh, interest on lawyers, uh, there's different words for in other accounts, but in other states. But it's an account that lawyers hold money from multiple clients in a single pot. And it earns interest, uh, but it's kind of like protected under statute. So. I've got a bag of drug proceeds with $250,000 on it. I bring it to my lawyer. Maybe his name is Mr. Mills and I ask him to deposit it in his trust account. Uh, and then the following day I come in and I say, hey, can you draw a bank check out? For a quarter of a million dollars and make it out to uh, you know, real estate company X. Real estate company X can't accept a bag full of cash, but they can sure as hell accept that, that check.

• 1:29:05Speaker 03

  And the IRS is never going to know about it. The relationship is protected by attorney client privilege. And I've just effectively managed to uh, season my money through the attorney's trust account. And then pour it back into real estate. And that is a pattern that you can see laid out in the indictment. That was filed in the district of Massachusetts, where they show each of the steps that would be necessary. To season the money and then dump it back into real estate. And it helps explain how in New England, the real estate empire necessary to facilitate the Chinese drug cartel was able to expand so rapidly.

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  Because they were able to take the huge amounts of cash that they were generating from these activities. And just dump it back into real estate. And they were buying up properties in Maine, 20% over asking price for cash. And closing in, you know, 20 days. It was the dream for some elderly couple in Maine looking to move to Florida or something in the middle of the pandemic. So it's part, I think, of the answer to the question, why hasn't anything been done? But also, how did it happen? What are they doing with the money? What are the roles of attorneys in all of this? And I think that if the kind of work that Leah Foley did, or at least the indictment

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  that she was willing to file in Massachusetts, if we were able to see that happen in Maine, it would go a long ways toward dealing with the problem. But we don't have a US attorney in Maine. And that is in part because Trump hasn't appointed one yet. But there's also a tradition called the blue slip tradition where home state senators get what amounts to a veto of Senate confirmable nominees. So if the president nominates a US attorney from the state of Maine, Senator Angus King, who's a dope and a dummy, and I don't like him at all, if he objects to that individual,

• 1:31:08Speaker 03

  he can withhold his blue slip and delay it, cause hearings, controversial votes, he can gum up the works. But if there's a nominee put forward that Senator Angus King and Senator Susan Collins both approve of, then they're not going to cause problems on the blue slip front. So there's these complex negotiations happening between the senators from the state and the Trump administration. And Susan Collins, I think, is a big part of that as well because she's now the chair of the appropriations committee. She's like the third or fourth most powerful person in Washington DC. So that adds a layer of complexity to it. So there's complicated reasons why we don't have a US attorney yet. But when we do, I think you're going to see some pretty rapid action, rolling up some

• 1:31:53Speaker 03

  of these operations. And hopefully, they aim for the higher levels and go for the money, the people who are driving Porsches, not the people who are suffering in what I would consider, you know, modern day slavery. Yeah. Really. And I should say Senator Collins deserves a lot of credit for this because she's the only politician in the state of Maine who's been speaking out about this like from day one she was asking Jim Comey about it she was asking you know all of the you know the the head of the CIA under Biden under Trump from the very beginning she's been pushing this meeting with DEA officials and I think it's unusual for an elected officials

• 1:32:35Speaker 03

  talking about something to actually spur some action but I think that that has happened in Maine as a direct result of Senator Collins advocacy

• 1:32:45Shawn Ryan?

  maybe we should bring them on

• 1:32:47Speaker 03

  Senator Collins

• 1:32:49Speaker 03

  she might do it

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  she knows she knows the I've talked with her off camera she knows the issue not just like my staffer briefed me 10 seconds ago she knows the issue like it's something she cares about

• 1:33:03Shawn Ryan?

  that could be interesting you'll have to keep us updated on this let's move into 70h what is it

• 1:33:12Speaker 03

  70h is a synthetic opioid drug derived from the kratom plant the kratom plant is a coniferous plant indigenous to Southeast Asia grows throughout Indonesia primarily where is where it's harvested from and in its raw form I would say kratom is to 70h as the poppy seed is to morphine or the coca leaf is to cocaine the kratom leaf has been consumed by locals for the hundreds if not thousands of years it can make a tea that's anywhere from mildly stimulating like a cup of coffee or

• 1:33:59Speaker 03

  anxiolytic is what some of the proponents will say as in reduces anxiety AKA gets you high by itself it's relatively harmless there are plenty of people who consume it as a tea or you know chew it like chewing tobacco but

• 1:34:17Speaker 03

  It has some alkaloids in it, which like, I think nicotine is an alkaloid. Opioids are alkaloids. It's just a name for a class of chemicals that interact with your brain. It has some natural alkaloids in it that will give you those experiences. In natural kratom leaf, once it begins to decay a little bit, develops trace amounts of something called 7OH. And at some point in time, this, it was discovered that this 7OH is very potent and a complex chemical process involving harsh chemicals like pool

• 1:34:59Speaker 03

  shock and, you know, reagents and, you know, I'm not a chemistry expert, but it's a, it's a complicated process. It's like Walter White stuff. It's not, you know, you know, just mixing it together in your bathtub. Huge amounts of raw ingredients together with this chemical process and you produce a concentrated version of 7OH. And it's, it's specific to 7OH. It's not a, an extract or a concentration of kratom. So you can concentrate a tincture of kratom just by soaking it in ethanol or something and getting a more potent version of kratom. But 7OH requires a very specific chemical process to go through. So while

• 1:35:44Speaker 03

  it may begin with some kind of plant grown, natural ingredient, your end result is really purely a synthetic drug. And again, depending on who you ask and how you measure, it's many multiples more potent than morphine. And it's an opioid. It works on the same receptors in your brain. It's

• 1:36:11Speaker 03

  The dosages that someone who is a habitual fentanyl or prescription opioid user would be familiar with are hard to determine when it comes to 7OH. There's not a lot of testing. There's not a lot of, I mean, there's no regulatory oversight of this. It's not like FDA approved. There's not a lot known about it. And it's a very recent phenomenon, very recent. There are, I guess, disagreements as to how 7OH really took off and became as popular as it is now.

• 1:36:49Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I have, once again, that it could be up to 46 times stronger than morphine.

• 1:36:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:36:54Shawn Ryan?

  And that's pretty potent shit.

• 1:36:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:58Shawn Ryan?

  Very potent shit.

• 1:36:59Speaker 03

  Yes. And the same people who know that will tell you that it's not addictive.

• 1:37:07Shawn Ryan?

  They'll tell you it's.

• 1:37:09Speaker 03

  It's an all-natural, non-addictive substance that, you know, if you just, you know, skip a day taking it, you'll be fine. You won't ever become habituated to it. I think, you know, most people, if you, if you have any experience with drugs or alcohol, like, you can take something once and figure out pretty quickly that it's addictive. Like, the very first time you take a Percocet after having a wisdom tooth out, you can be like, oh yeah, this is, this is addictive. I have a feeling that 7OH is probably the same. But again, 36%, 17%, it depends on how pure the formulation is, who made it, how, and, and how you're

• 1:37:52Speaker 03

  measuring it or comparing it. But it is very, it's a, it's a hard drug. It's a opioid. It is going to give you an experience exactly like what you would get from morphine or from fentanyl. And the key thing for everybody to understand, especially parents and people who might be dabbling or curious about it, is that it's available at grocery, I mean, convenience stores, grocery stores, gas stations. Like, it took me two seconds to find the 7OH on my way to the studio. You know, I I I just looked up tobacco shops. I could have stopped at thirty of them. I'm pretty sure I could have bought those products at any of them, any of them.

• 1:38:35Speaker 03

  This is also called gas station heroin. Gas station heroin. So gas station heroin is actually

• 1:38:43Speaker 03

  a name that was first started with a drug called T- neptene. And T- neptene was a uh a antidepressant formulated in the nineteen sixties in France. And various European countries have different regulations and rules around it. Some still use it, some don't. And T- neptene was began mark uh to be marketed uh in the early, I think, twenty teens in gas stations as Neptune's fix. And it would be like almost the same size as a uh, you know, one of those little teeny weeny energy drinks. Uh, and it has sedative qualities, but also some euphoric qualities. Uh, and that's really where the term gas station heroin uh began.

• 1:39:27Speaker 03

  However, lawmakers, law enforcement eventually began to catch on to what was happening. And like just most in the most recent legislative session in Maine, there was a law to ban, a proposed law to ban T- neptene. So you've got that cycle I mentioned earlier where um the the drug users figure out what's gonna get them high, what's cheap, what's available, and they'll start to use it. Law enforcement, two to three years later, discover what's going on. And eventually, two to three years after that, it trickles to policymakers. Policymakers finally figure out a way to change it uh to change the law so that it can't happen. Uh, but by that time, either all the ill consequences from the drug have already happened, or the drug users have already moved on.

• 1:40:12Speaker 03

  Um, so now what's happened is they've moved on to products like um seven O H. Here are other forms of it.

• 1:40:19Speaker 03

  If you'll notice this one, this one's called opia.

• 1:40:23Shawn Ryan?

  Opia.

• 1:40:23Speaker 03

  Opia doesn't sound at all like they're trying to conjure the idea that it's related to opium, does it? There are some that are called perk. Uh, obviously they're trying to conjure the image that that is a Percocet. These, uh, this is another one. I bought these both from the same store. This was actually, uh, I bought those at Bros Two, which you're probably familiar with because it's right next door to Tucker's Studio in Maine. And, uh, the guy who sold those to me didn't speak a lick of English. But, uh, when he saw me pointing at the gas station heroin section, he just started laying out in front of me all the different options. And then the woman who did speak English and was maybe the general manager of the store,

• 1:41:06Speaker 03

  saw that I was, uh, I guess, uh, you know, a gas station heroin user and perked up and came over and actually tried to upsell me on the 200 milligram versions of the gas station heroin. So she knew exactly what she was doing. She knew exactly what she was trying to sell me.

• 1:41:23Shawn Ryan?

  So.

• 1:41:23Speaker 03

  She thought she was.

• 1:41:24Shawn Ryan?

  How much of this, if I wanted to experience the same highs fentanyl or heroin or, you know, insert opiate, I mean, how much of this am I going to have to take to have that same experience?

• 1:41:39Speaker 03

  It, it depends. How much fentanyl have been you been using on a daily basis?

• 1:41:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I don't, I mean, so. Let's say if you're a first time user.

• 1:41:47Speaker 03

  If you're a first time user, I don't know. I don't know. And I don't think anybody knows and it's, and it hasn't really been, um, uh, studied well. The, the best, the best advice that the people who are promulgating this as a healthy product, the best they'll say is slow, start slow.

• 1:42:06Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:42:07Speaker 03

  So it's, it's so poorly understood and understudied that we don't know those kinds of things. Uh, for someone who has been a habitual fentanyl user, maybe their dose could be higher, but these are, these are acting on the same receptors in the brain, but they're also a little bit different. So maybe your tolerance from fentanyl or heroin doesn't translate over perfectly to. 70H Narcan will revive you if you overdose on 70H.

• 1:42:38Shawn Ryan?

  Have you seen people overdose on this?

• 1:42:40Speaker 03

  I haven't seen it personally, but I'll tell you the day that I bought those. I someone sent me a story from Richmond, Virginia, Richmond.com. There's a guy who went into a head shop, just like the one I visited last night. Bought pills just like those and died in the parking lot. Took one, died in the parking and maybe the maybe he went in there with a foreign load and there were other drugs in his system. A lot of the fatalities that I'm personally aware of are comorbid with alcohol and other drugs. So they're mixing, but again, this is it. This is so new and so poorly understood. That there's no stats, no one's keeping track of this.

• 1:43:24Speaker 03

  You know, I was telling your fantastic and wildly talented producer Jeremy earlier. It reminds me of a case, a pod case I investigated for Barstool where an individual was found dead in a trailer with a hypodermic syringe next to him. He was known to be a drug user and the cops just set up, he overdosed. Case closed, it's done with, but as Kirk Minihane and I investigated this case more. What we came to believe was that the syringe was actually given to him filled with insulin by someone who wanted him dead because he had knowledge of some other crimes. The autopsy never tested for insulin. No one ever, you know, would think that that would be something that would happen.

• 1:44:08Speaker 03

  And they didn't find any meth or heroin in this guy's system. But he was a drug user and he was dead and there was a syringe and who cares? We're not going to look too close into it because he was just a, you know, as far as we're concerned, he was a garbage human being because he was addicted to drugs. So who cares to look very close? It's kind of the same thing with 70H in that it's not as simple as taking.

• 1:44:31Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know if you can necessarily blame the law enforcement for not, I mean, because there's the. You gotta give them a little bit of credit because I mean so many people are overdosing

• 1:44:41Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:44:41Shawn Ryan?

  Heroin.

• 1:44:42Speaker 03

  Yes, no, I'm not.

• 1:44:43Shawn Ryan?

  It's if we devoted all of our resources into that, then it would it would take away from, you know, other stuff that aren't self-induced deaths.

• 1:44:52Speaker 03

  100%.

• 1:44:53Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know, you know what I mean? And so, you know, I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I just don't wanna, I don't wanna blast LE right now because, because of this, because if I was a law enforcement officer, I'd probably think the same thing.

• 1:45:05Speaker 03

  Oh, same. Absolutely same. And, and I'll give them credit that when, when we made our case in the podcast, they reopened that death, which was classified as an accidental overdose and, and charged it as a homicide and the prosecutor later dropped the charges. So law enforcement 100% did their job in that instance. The, the reason why I brought that case up is because if someone were to die of an overdose of 7OH, there aren't tests available to determine, well, do they have 7OH metabolites in their bloodstream? Like, what does it metabolize as? There's this idea, I think, like, maybe the, the CSI concept is that you could take

• 1:45:49Speaker 03

  a blood sample from someone who's died and drop it in a little machine and it's gonna tell you everything they consumed for the last 24 hours. But it just doesn't work that way. Even if you're testing, like, if you were to test a sample of cannabis or one of those tabs to try to figure out, well, is it really 15 milligrams? Is it really 100 milligrams? The testing that you need to do that is very sophisticated and requires other reagents and chemicals and devices customized for that task. And it's the same with testing someone's blood to determine what level of 7OH or 7OH metabolites they had in their bloodstream at the time. So it's just such a new thing and it's so poorly understood that we don't have a good grasp on how.

• 1:46:34Speaker 03

  Many people are suffering from it. How many people are addicted to it? How many people are dying from it? But if you look at, um, there's a video that Mark Wayne Mullen did in, uh, just in July, where he's talking specifically about 7OH. He says it's a nine billion dollar marketplace. I don't know where he got that number from. But he talks about how there was somebody who was clearly close to him, who had, uh, an opioid addiction and, uh, went through recovery, got clean and then started to bear the telltale signs of not being clean. Yet they were doing urinalysis and there was no presence of opioid in their urine.

• 1:47:17Speaker 03

  They were passing their, their drug screens, but they looked like they were still using some kind of an opioid. And it was because they were using 7OH.

• 1:47:26Shawn Ryan?

  This is, I mean, we got 15 milligrams in the package. We've got 60 milligrams of tablet. We've got 25 milligrams of tablet. And no judgment here. I'm curious, you know, have you, have you tried this to see what the effects are?

• 1:47:40Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:47:41Shawn Ryan?

  Do you know anybody?

• 1:47:42Speaker 03

  No, I don't know anybody who's tried. Well, actually I'll take that back. I, there are, there was a website that used to exist, which has been taken down now called Kush.com. And there is a product that, um, they combine THC oil, uh, with 7OH in a form that's vapable. And you can buy, at the time this website existed, you could 100% legal for like 75, 75,000 or 7,500, $8,000, buy a kilo brick, looks just like, you know, hashish, uh, of, uh, 7OH infused THC oil that could be manufactured into vape pens.

• 1:48:27Speaker 03

  And you could sell those as a THC vape pen and someone could unknowingly be vaping an opioid product. And I learned about this later, but as a result of, uh, publishing the documentary with Tucker and doing some of the reporting on this topic, I have lots of parents and sources who are emailing me and asking me questions about things. And one family that came to me had a daughter who purchased a vape pen on Snapchat. Their daughter was like 17. And became hooked on the vape pen. And at the time, I thought that that was really weird because they say marijuana is not supposed to be physically addictive.

• 1:49:06Speaker 03

  I don't know that that's 100% true of some of these 99% pure marijuana vapes. This young woman became hooked on her vape pen, eventually was found unconscious and had to be Narcan'd and brought back from a vape pen. And I don't know this for sure, the vape pen ended up getting thrown away, so I couldn't get it and have it tested, but I suspect that it could be something like this, a combination of THC with 7OH. So the like, the, the people who are making gobs and gobs of money off this, they're, they're not like puritan about, no, it has to be THC, or no, it has to be 7OH, or it

• 1:49:48Speaker 03

  has to be hemp, or it has to be sativa, or it has to be indica. They'll make money off of whatever people are willing to buy to get high. And one of the, I guess, the pioneers of this 7OH industry is a guy named Vince Sanders, who has been written about extensively by, I think, the Kansas City Star. And he doesn't really make any bones about being an entrepreneur in this space. He claims that he started, uh, he started a company called CBD American Shaman, which is one of the biggest companies per selling CBD products and now 7OH products. He claims he stumbled onto CBD because he was trying to help his uncle survive lung

• 1:50:33Speaker 03

  cancer and that he used homemade CBD to cure his uncle's lung cancer. And eventually that inspired him to start a CBD company. And now he's making and selling 7OH. So a lot of the 7OH that is bought under these different brand names is actually manufactured by one central location. Sanders has bragged in recent stories about being the biggest manufacturer of 7OH in the country. And he said in a podcast that's still publicly available, that within just a few months, his 7OH business was bigger than every single CBD product that he's sold in the history of his company. Wow.

• 1:51:17Speaker 03

  And he was actually giving out free samples of 7OH with CBD orders.

• 1:51:23Speaker 03

  So you might order some CBD cream for your knee or something if it's arthritic, thinking maybe that's gonna help. And you get a little thing of lime flavored 70H, described as an all natural plant, plant-based medicine. And you try it. I mean, is there any other line of business where you give away a free sample that makes you feel really good? And then the next one you actually have to pay for, because there's some that I can think of. Uh, and he's grown it into an empire. He's been written about and right now, all of those products remain totally legal.

• 1:51:58Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, have you seen? I really wanna know, you know, who the customer is and how dangerous this is. I mean, have you seen anybody that's only on 70H? Not on fentanyl, heroin?

• 1:52:12Speaker 03

  I haven't.

• 1:52:13Shawn Ryan?

  Oxy?

• 1:52:14Speaker 03

  I haven't. And again, part of it is because we're here very early.

• 1:52:19Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:52:19Speaker 03

  Very early. I've never, I haven't seen.

• 1:52:22Shawn Ryan?

  Have you seen who's coming into the stores to buy this?

• 1:52:25Speaker 03

  No. Other than Vince Sanders on a podcast, talking about being the titan of 70H. I've never heard any other podcast or any big media talk about it. And the stories published just a few weeks ago uh, by the Kansas City Star about CBD American Shaman were some of the first that covered uh, 70H. So it's very, very early. And in Maine in particular, fentanyl is so widely available and so cheap that I don't think that people have been pushed in this direction yet.

• 1:53:00Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 1:53:00Speaker 03

  The, there are Dominican drug cartels that run very easy fentanyl markets in Maine. Um, they don't get a lot of harassment from law enforcement. Uh, for, you know, 20 bucks, you can stay high on fentanyl all day. It's very inexpensive and we give away needles for free. But as the-

• 1:53:21Shawn Ryan?

  You give away needles for free up there?

• 1:53:23Speaker 03

  Yes, we stopped doing needle exchange uh, under COVID. Uh, Governor Janet Mills suspended the one-to-one needle exchange.

• 1:53:31Shawn Ryan?

  This is crazy. You can't even buy a flavored nicotine pouch.

• 1:53:35Speaker 03

  In Maine. In Portland, yeah. In Portland. Yeah, some states. But you can get some free needles to shoot up fentanyl. Actually, I I sent a reporter undercover into the exchange in Portland, and he got needles, but he also got a boofing kit. A what? A boofing kit. What's a boofing kit? If you've so thoroughly abused your veins that you can't get fentanyl in, the boofing kit is a a non-needle syringe with some lubricant that you put in your butt.

• 1:54:11Speaker 03

  It's called. You tried that?

• 1:54:14Speaker 03

  I've not tried that, but but we we did get a boof. We did get a boofing kit in Maine. You you can't get your you can't get mint flavored tobacco pouches in some cities, but you can get free boofing kits to squirt Dominican fentanyl up your ass and. Thank God. Free needles. Thank God. But they they did away with the one-to-one needle exchange requirement. And instead, you get one box of 100 needles. And there was actually just an attempt to bring back the needle exchange requirement in the city of Lewiston that was voted down. And so we've got needles everywhere. I mean, the the exchange program worked because you like users had to collect their dirty needles and bring them back.

• 1:54:57Speaker 03

  And they were put into Sharps containers, and then they could get clean needles. And now there's just needles through all of our public spaces. And this entire program, keep in mind, was created in order to prevent the spread of bloodborne illnesses like Hep C and AIDS. And this year, Maine had its biggest ever

• 1:55:19Speaker 03

  spike of Hep C and HIV related to a cluster of individuals in Bangor who were all customers of the Needle Exchange Clinic there.

• 1:55:29Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:55:30Speaker 03

  But that's a little bit off topic, but that's why I think you haven't seen 70H take off to the extent that it will. I mean, we're on the cusp of it. This is, you know, in the undercover video that I supplied your producers with, you'll see an individual who goes into CBD American Shaman store locations and he talks with sales rep after sales rep after sales rep about products, not specifically those, but basically the same thing. Their 70H, their tablets, their drink mixes, whatever. And the sales reps are like, they're reading off a script. This is all natural. This is plant-based. You'll be able to stop taking

• 1:56:15Speaker 03

  your prescription painkillers. You'll be able to stop taking your prescription Adderall. This is healthy. Oh, you know, it's not addictive. We just recommend that you, you know, take it for two days and then take one day off and then take it for two days and then one day off. But you-

• 1:56:34Shawn Ryan?

  It says right here, kratom may be addictive.

• 1:56:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:39Shawn Ryan?

  On the package.

• 1:56:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:42Shawn Ryan?

  And they're telling people it's not addictive.

• 1:56:44Speaker 03

  And I mean, you can see it in the undercover video, the way they're marketing it.

• 1:56:47Speaker 06

  The CBB American Shaman employees you're about to see are not doctors, yet they claim this drug can treat many different ailments, none of which are on the label.

• 1:56:58Speaker 07

  Do you have something for the main thing is chronic pain?

• 1:57:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. For sure. Yeah. The alcohols are really, really great for chronic pain, isn't it?

• 1:57:07Speaker 07

  The only thing that's ever worked for my pain was after, was after my surgery, it was hydrocodone, hydrocod- hydrocodone. Was that would be like a comparable? Cause nothing ever works.

• 1:57:19Speaker 08

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. These are, um, these are very strong and they're really great for chronic pain.

• 1:57:24Speaker 09

  I'll be honest, I've used a lot of prescription though, and these are something that's cleaner and better that I'm very grateful-

• 1:57:31Speaker 07

  It kind of like replaced it?

• 1:57:32Speaker 09

  For me-

• 1:57:33Speaker 10

  A hundred percent. You know, for people I know, a hundred percent. But we're trying.

• 1:57:38Speaker 07

  I'll try, yeah, I'll try one, whatever you, whatever you recommend, for sure. Do people use it for rec, like, just at the end of the day?

• 1:57:44Speaker 10

  Yes, some people do use it instead of alcohol or instead of taking like a Xanax or whatever it may be.

• 1:57:50Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:57:51Speaker 10

  So definitely, you can definitely use it to relax and chill out and to cope with that.

• 1:57:56Speaker 07

  Nice.

• 1:57:57Speaker 11

  I have customers who've successfully switched from pharmaceutical, like opiates, to this.

• 1:58:02Speaker 07

  Oh, popular people buying it?

• 1:58:04Speaker 11

  Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, it's probably about, uh, close to half of my business.

• 1:58:53Speaker 03

  And for people who have been following, I guess, this space, it's deja vu back to the beginning of the prescription opioid epidemic, when you had, like, the Federation of State Medical Boards, which is just a nonprofit, it's not a government entity, it's a nonprofit that was created and positioned itself as the head of the medical boards and, and some medical licensure processes, but the Federation of State Medical Boards actually commissioned books, advertising and touting the safetiness of prescription opioids, and later submitted,

• 1:59:32Speaker 03

  solicited donations from some of the companies making these prescription opioids in order to spread this, this book and this pro- opioid material to different doctors offices. So it's the same exact thing is unfolding. Except for instead of doctors offices. It's happening at head shops and tobacco shops and CBD American Shaman locations. Where they're saying, oh, no, this is this is a safe. You know, natural way for you to just live better. It's a it's an anti it's an anxiolytic. It's gonna help you be a happier, more productive person. Oh, you get knee pain, just take a little bit of this natural cure all. There's no downside whatsoever.

• 2:00:12Shawn Ryan?

  So is your fear that is the is the? Fentanyl crisis, you know, as we tackle that, you know, hopefully, hopefully they're making some damage to, you know, to the fentanyl trade. I mean, are you I mean, we saw this in Florida, right? With all the pill mills.

• 2:00:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:29Shawn Ryan?

  All the pill mills popped up opiates opiates opiates oxy oxy. Then they cracked down on the pill mills. Everybody went to heroin. Is that what you is that what your fear is?

• 2:00:39Speaker 03

  Same exact dynamic.

• 2:00:40Shawn Ryan?

  We cracked down on the on the fentanyl crisis, they move into 700.

• 2:00:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's the it's the same exact dynamic. I mean, we.

• 2:00:49Shawn Ryan?

  But I want to know, you know, how much of this does somebody have to take to get the same effects? That would be interesting to know. And what are the actual effects? Will it turn you into? You know, a a a straight addict where this is all you think about all day long? Are there, you know, are there withdrawal symptoms? Can you function?

• 2:01:10Speaker 03

  I mean, in in some contexts with with kratom and I would assume 700. There have been withdrawal side effects. I don't know if they're like debilitating flu like with fentanyl and and.

• 2:01:26Speaker 03

  You know, prescription opioids. But I would assume that it's one of those things where you've got to experience it to really know. What it actually feels like. But it's so new that there's we don't have, you know, a population of people who are 700. Addicts who have gone into treatment, who can describe what that process was like. We don't have people who are in recovery specifically from 700 at this point. Who can describe what that process is like. Because again, they're new products, but it is my fear that they're like the they're. The kind of messages about where to buy, you know, the fake hemp that's actually cannabis spreads quickly in drug circles. You know, they've got like stickers outside of hemp shops

• 2:02:10Speaker 03

  that can communicate where to buy the real weed that's, you know, fake hemp. The idea about kratom or 7OH or any of these synthetic drugs, the message moves very quickly in drug-using circles. And if the price of fentanyl starts to dry up because of the success that the Trump administration has had shutting down not just the southern border, but also the super labs on the Canadian border, then it's just, it's, you know, microeconomics. The supply of fentanyl shrinks, the price goes up, and suddenly the $8 package of pills at the head shop looks much more attractive. I think that the federal government is a

• 2:02:52Speaker 03

  little bit ahead of the curb in some ways because they've begun, like I said, the FDA is asking the DEA to schedule 7OH. They're sending letters to some vape stores and tobacco stores telling them, warning them, don't sell these products. That's like a prelude to armed DEA agents kicking in your door and raiding your shop. The same goes for some of the illicit cannabis that's being sold. But really, it's like, it's like one kind of network of quasi-legal businesses that are hustling these synthetic drugs

• 2:03:34Speaker 03

  and quasi-legal drugs through the same system. And you're starting to see more and more law enforcement actions from the federal level, like all the time there's state-level raids of vape shops. There were some, there were some vape shops hit recently where it was Operation Vape Trail. This was a federal initiative shutting down some vape shops that were just selling good old-fashioned THC, and they were pretending that they were selling nicotine or CBD or something like that. And three of them happened to be operated by Chinese nationals who just so happened to operate vape shops close to US military Installations in Texas and some of these vape shops had tunnels underneath them

• 2:04:18Speaker 03

  that look like what you would see from Hamas or the Sinaloa cartel. So if you're a vape shop that needs to use the same kind of techniques and tactics as Hamas or Sinaloa, you're probably doing something that's not legal. That's not strictly above board. So I do think that the federal government is a little bit ahead of the curb when it comes to cracking down on this stuff, but waiting in the wings, like with bath salts, are new formulations of 70H because it's just a synthetic drug. It's just a molecule and they know, they know you've got this spot in your brain where the poppy, the derivatives of the poppy seed can go plug in and make you feel euphoria.

• 2:05:00Speaker 03

  And they, they made it into Percocet and OxyContin and Hydrocodone and all these different chemicals. And then they've, they've found another somewhat naturally occurring version of that alkaloid in the chemical formulations coming from the Kratom plant and they're finding new ones. I'm already aware of second and third generation versions of 70H that will hit the market as soon as 70H is cracked down on. And it's in part because the federal government's approach is to ban, you know, a molecule. So they'll make 70H illegal and then newer versions of the product will come out and the process will start again where the drug using community learns about the product.

• 2:05:42Speaker 03

  And then law enforcement starts seeing it pop up and then it gets to the, the political level and they decide that they're going to, to ban it again. And throughout this entire process, gobs and gobs and gobs of money are being made. That's whether it's the 70H thing or the legalization of marijuana in Maine. The, the lesson that I learned through what's now two years of investigative reporting is that the There we're dealing with amounts of money that normal people just can't understand. Like when you legalized marijuana in Maine, they had all these estimates about what the sales were going to be like and what the taxes were going to be like and our schools

• 2:06:25Speaker 03

  were going to be better, our roads were going to be better, our police departments were going to be better funded because of all the tax revenue coming from this. It was all a lie. None of it turned out to be true, but they radically underestimated the size of the market there. They thought it was going to be, you know, 300 million, 400 million, 500 million. It's probably like 5 billion, honest way to 10 billion because we're growing the weed to supply the demand for the rest of the country, or at least the part of the country that Oklahoma and California aren't supplying. And when you, when you, when a state legalizes like Ohio has done recently, you basically break a dam that was holding

• 2:07:10Speaker 03

  back access to billions of dollars. And the kinds of people that that attracts, whether it's Chinese cartels, or American cartels, or pharmaceutical companies, or big, big corporate players are maybe not the kind of people, not the most ethical operators. And, you know, the people will do crazy shit for $10,000. What would you do for a billion? Or, you know, it's, it's, it's a big problem that Maine was totally unprepared to grapple with. And we did not have the immune system to deal with the kind of forces that were unleashed when we legalized marijuana. And the Chinese cartels were just one of the

• 2:07:52Speaker 03

  examples willing to come in here and just totally ransack the state.

• 2:08:00Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I mean.

• 2:08:04Shawn Ryan?

  Has anybody, I mean, is there any record of anybody overdosing or fatally overdosing on this stuff? You know, I have a tweet here from Matt Gaetz that says, "How many people has 7OH killed? I can't find a single case where there wasn't some other drug like fentanyl in the system when someone has died with 7OH. Maybe I'm missing something. By comparison, Tylenol kills 550 people per year." You know, and so, I mean, this isn't to blast Matt Gaetz by any means, but you know, I mean, it does, it does bring up a relevant point, right?

• 2:08:45Shawn Ryan?

  That if there are no documented deaths just from 7OH, you know, is it that bad?

• 2:08:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think Matt raises an interesting point, but it's not because those deaths aren't happening, it's because they're not being tracked. Like, you know, if we were to do a random survey of just small-town police departments and ask them, "What's 7OH?", how many would be able to tell you what 7OH is? I would say it'd be very low, very low percentage would be able to tell you what it is. The more important thing, I think, about that tweet is who paid Matt Gaetz to ask that question?

• 2:09:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:31Speaker 03

  Why is Matt Gaetz asking about 7OH? Why is he defending the 7OH industry?

• 2:09:36Shawn Ryan?

  That was, you know, that was another, another point that I was about to bring up. I mean, who, who in, who in the government is, you know, who's lobbying for this?

• 2:09:47Speaker 03

  Well, the Kentucky senators certainly have an interest in protecting the hemp industry. So on, on that side, there is a, you know, a caucus of Republicans who are committed to keeping hemp legalized, and that means keeping the hemp loophole open. But specific to 7OH, I think it's, it's, it's less well-understood because it is so new. And again, if, like with small-town cops, if you were to poll... You know, the US Senate or the US House of Representatives and ask them what 70H is. They don't know, but there are trade associations that have formed to represent the interests

• 2:10:32Speaker 03

  of 70H producers, just like there are trade associations formed to represent the interests of hemp producers and trade associations exist for one purpose, to communicate in industries' priorities to the political sphere and oftentimes that involves financial contributions to campaign committees. You know, I don't think it's an accident that Matt randomly tweets out about 70H. You know, it seems like it's an innocuous tweet, just kind of saying like, shouldn't we be focused on, you know, fentanyl and other priorities, but you know, there's got to be, I'd be interested to hear the story behind why that message came out, just like

• 2:11:13Speaker 03

  I'd be interested to hear more about Representative Comer's recent message about the importance of the hemp industry for America, because I've looked pretty hard and I can't find hemp being used in industrial applications, but I can find plenty of examples like this of, this is a hemp product, a smokable hemp product purchased at a gas station in Lewiston, Maine, that has THCP on it and there's one lab that makes THCP and it's located in Shanghai, China, and you can go online and you can buy it in large chemical formulations and

• 2:11:54Speaker 03

  you can take your hemp plant matter and sprinkle THCP on it and if you smoke this, you'll get high, you'll be more likely to have a schizophrenic episode and tachycardia, which racing heart, but you'll get high and if you're desperate to get high, it'll work for you. This is the kind of hemp product that I'm familiar with. I haven't seen a lot of hemp rope or hemp shirts or hemp t-shirts proliferating, which is what the people advocating for the hemp industry have. Said was the purpose of advocating for it. But it's, you know, the reason why I bring up hemp in the context of the 708 conversation is because they're really the same conversation. And there'll be new ones. A year from now, there'll be a new formulation of 708. And the following year, there'll be a new kind of drug.

• 2:12:38Speaker 03

  And our regulatory system will be really slow to catch up to it. And they'll get better as the science gets better. Already, we have labs capable of producing very high-quality synthetic drugs. The more they experiment with cannabinoids and marijuana, the more they'll be able to finely tune the drugs that are available at these locations. So it's just a problem that I think society and law enforcement will have to deal with. But right now, they seem not, I don't want to say lethargic, but just like not equipped to deal with the scope of the problem. You know, like, there's a lot of people, you know, we're having a gubernatorial race in Maine now.

• 2:13:22Speaker 03

  And I've said that the law enforcement budget in the state could double easily and not even, still not be adequate to tackle the problems that we're facing from organized crime to petty crime, street crime. And this drug aspect is, is one part of it. And it's because there's so much money to be made, so much, I mean, selling a product that someone is addicted to, there's a lot of money to be made in that.

• 2:13:49Shawn Ryan?

  Is there, so I mean, you can drink it, you can vape it, you can take a pill. I mean, are there any other?

• 2:13:55Speaker 03

  Depending on how it's, depending on how it's formulated, I think it, I think it has to be a, there's, I'm not aware of an injectable form. It has to be formulated differently in order to be vapeable. And, and the only combinations of vapeable 708 I've found were in combination with, with THC.

• 2:14:18Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:19Speaker 03

  But again, these were, you know, available on websites that are still legal in some cases, shipped through the United States Postal Service, purchased, totally Legally, there are no laws that I'm aware of against 70H. There are some counties, maybe, in southern states that have developed ordinances against them. But by and large, states have yet to figure out what's going on and prohibit it. But it's happening, in Maine at least, it's happening systematically. The same family that purchased the Bros 2, where I got those tablets next to Tucker's studio,

• 2:15:04Speaker 03

  has purchased other gas stations and convenience stores in Maine. And almost every gas station and convenience store and motel in Maine north of Portland has been purchased by basically the same family. And the playbook that they run, once they purchase it, is to stop making the red hot dogs and chicken Parmesan sandwiches and pizza, and bring in the pipes and the fake hemp products and the 70H products. And, you know, it has all the hallmarks of something that's being done according to a plan.

• 2:15:43Speaker 03

  And the goal might not be to weaken the American people broadly by getting them addicted to shady shit like, you know, high potency THC or THCP or 70H. That's the effect of it, though. And the other effect of it is to make gobs and gobs of money. I just can't emphasize enough how much money is being made on this. It's a different podcast, the Freakonomics podcast, did an episode, I think maybe last year, all about marijuana. And they noted that last year was the first year where

• 2:16:22Speaker 03

  the total number of daily active marijuana users surpassed daily active alcohol users. And I think that that probably underestimates the actual trend that we're seeing, where daily active marijuana use has become not just destigmatized, but totally normalized as a form of like having a cup of coffee or taking medicine or popping a nicotine pouch. And the amount of money being made there is huge. And a lot of it is being poured into politics. And it was something that I realized.

• 2:17:00Speaker 03

  Too, too late in my reporting on this, you know, once, once I'd gone around to all of these different Chinese growhouses and documented them and had like hard proof and like tax records and all of this, I thought I was gonna publish my story and, and the cops were gonna show up and be like, okay, we're taking care of it now, done, problem over. And I'd move on to my next story and go report on like welfare fraud or tax policy or something. But that didn't happen. Nothing happened. In fact, the operation professionalized grew and got even better and got even bolder. And the, one of the few differences I noticed

• 2:17:41Speaker 03

  was that there were some Republican lobbyists and Republican politicians and non-Republicans who used to like me and want to make small talk with me at the State House, who no longer wanted to make eye contact with me and stopped picking up the phone when I called.

• 2:17:56Shawn Ryan?

  What companies are they using? There's, I have two nonprofits that they're using for, um, kinda like lobbying firms, it sounds like for some type of protection.

• 2:18:06Speaker 03

  So there's, the hemp roundtable is a conglomeration of people who represent the hemp industry and say that they're representing the industrial purposes, but there's also uh, state level associations. Um, so there's like the, uh, the Kentucky Association for Hemp or something like that. So there's a couple of those. And then there's one that I know that, um, I believe Vince Sanders is affiliated with, um, uh, called, uh, it's Hope Seven or, uh, Seven Hope. So, uh, seven O H is their logo, but they've got some of these, um, non, I don't know if they're technically filed as 501(c)(3) groups or if they're just

• 2:18:51Speaker 03

  websites or organizations, but there is a concerted PR effort being funded with some of this money to represent, uh, seven O H as a, a medical cure to the, uh, fentanyl epidemic. They want, and you know, instead of, instead of consuming the fentanyl that's being trafficked over the border or, you know, pill pressed, uh, with Chinese precursors at super labs in Canada, they want you taking their products instead. Um, and you know, I've

• 2:19:23Speaker 03

  I don't know personally, people who have gone down the kratom or 7OH path as a means of recovery from heroin or fentanyl. I've heard from other people about that being used as an approach, and it never ends with a full recovery from substances generally. It's more of a, you're, you're switching the person you're buying your substances from. You're switching substances. Is there anybody against this in government?

• 2:20:01Speaker 03

  I don't know that there's enough education. I don't know that they know. Again, you know, if you poll, poll US senators and ask them if they know about it, I doubt that they know about this. And it, and it gets back to the question that Matt Gaetz asked is how many people have died about it? Like, how many, how many bodies need to stack up before it rises to the level of, of, of concern for a United States senator? I don't know. But this, I think, I guess one of the reasons why I'm happy for the opportunity to talk with you about it is because we are at a point where we're really early with the development of this product and can tell people about it. And we don't have to be where we were

• 2:20:44Speaker 03

  with the prescription opioid epidemic, where you had millions, tens of millions of people who were, had a doctor give them a prescription, and they wound up addicted to it. And they went from taking a product that a licensed medical doctor provided to them, to out on the street looking for, you know, heroin to get their dope sickness to go away. So we're still very early to it. I would suspect that there are some politicians who are in the medical world, who would understand the inherent danger of a product that acts on your opioid receptors. Like, that's a code word for drug users, for sure, but it's also a very real, I guess,

• 2:21:31Speaker 03

  Medical reality that the substances in those 7OH tabs are going to tickle the same parts of your brain that fentanyl or morphine or Percocet would. And they're going to give, they're going to create in you that same sensation. And they'll, they'll also be, um, you know, relieved or you'll be saved from Narcan, which is designed, the opioid reversal drug, or the overdose reversal drug. So it's, it's, uh, in almost every way, except for how it's formulated and where it, uh, the raw ingredients originate from, it's identical to morphine or any other opioid.

• 2:22:13Speaker 03

  Uh, hopefully now there will be more, um, concern or at least some attention to it. Um, and I should've said, uh, Mark Wayne Mullen, the, uh, Senator from Oklahoma. Um, like he, he's familiar with it and has, you know, talked about it publicly and knows, uh, what it is. You, if you haven't had him on, I'm sure you've had him on. I haven't had him on. You haven't? He would be good to have on, on this. And especially too, because the, the Chinese drug trafficking in, uh, Oklahoma is different and probably worse than in Maine because of the geographic characteristics of Oklahoma and the way they have their licensure process set up.

• 2:22:54Speaker 03

  You just have huge greenhouses, like city-sized complexes controlled by Chinese drug cartels, where Chinese migrants are smuggled across the border. They have their passports and their phones taken and they're sent out there. They're, they're like lured there, told that they're getting flower cutting jobs or flower arranging jobs, when in reality, they're just going to be cannabis slaves. And it's a, it's a huge, huge problem in Oklahoma. And they've, they only have a medicinal program there. No adult use recreational program, just medicinal. And they, I think they've got 5,000 or 6,000 registered medicinal growers. And Oklahoma authorities have estimated that, you know, maybe 3,000 of those are suspected

• 2:23:38Speaker 03

  of ties to Chinese organized crime. Wow. And they've had Republican, um, politicians, prosecutors, officials who have been investigated or indicted for taking bribes, um, uh, from some of those cases. So Oklahoma has had a tremendous, tremendous problem with this. And we actually found a few ties to Oklahoma. We found. You know, there's some shared addresses or people we believe came from Oklahoma, but I was in Eastport, Maine at a old sardine cannery. And Eastport's like the furthest east city in Maine. You can see Campobello Island, which is where FDR used to have his summer

• 2:24:18Speaker 03

  White House. It's technically Canada. And there's this beautiful building, Sardine Cannery, that a guy named Jimmy Wong had purchased and turned into supposedly he was going to export lobsters to China and all the stuff in the ocean that Americans don't eat, but Chinese do. He was going to harvest it, freeze it, sell it, make a bunch of money. And everyone believed him. But it ended up just being a human trafficking operation and a marijuana growing operation. And we were in that facility after it had been cleaned out by the guy who owned it. And we noticed that tacked up to block out the light from coming in and ruining

• 2:25:00Speaker 03

  the marijuana plants and also to keep prying eyes out. There was like an Oklahoma State University tablecloth had been tacked up on the wall. It's like, that's not an accident. These guys aren't fans of Oklahoma, Oklahoma State University football. Like somehow, you know, vehicles from Oklahoma came to Eastport, Maine as part of the same criminal organization that was trafficking in people and exploited laborers and growing huge amounts of marijuana to sell across the United States by virtue of the hemp loophole.

• 2:25:36Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, man. What am I missing, Steve? Covered a lot of info there.

• 2:25:46Speaker 03

  We have. I don't know that. I don't know that we're missing much.

• 2:25:51Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I just wanna say, you know, like I like I had mentioned, I've had a lot of friends reach out to me about the 708 stuff, wanting me to cover it and um and uh from various people and then we found you and so I just wanna say thank you for shining a light on this and and and raising awareness of this and and uh something we should all be looking out for and it sounds like, sounds like we're pretty early on this and I I think this is gonna gain some traction, you know, on the subject, so.

• 2:26:18Speaker 03

  I I think you're not just early, I think you're the first and I think that there's going to be new developments in the story as the second generation and the third generation of those opioid products come out and what we're really gonna be dealing with is a phenomenon of of how do we as a society control the kind of mind altering substances and addictive drugs that we allow to be sold at gas stations and convenience stores uh cause right now the the regulatory barriers to um creating, marketing and spreading a product like that all across the United States are very, very low uh and it's it's when there's such a

• 2:27:03Speaker 03

  large amount of money to be made, it's um you know, there's there's really nothing uh nothing stopping them from doing this and you don't have to be wearing your tinfoil hat to see how it's in the interest of America's enemies to have everybody addicted to gas station heroin and have everybody smoking gas station weed and have everybody, you know, sucking on these little vape pens made by uh Chinese chemists in Flushing, New York and who knows what else they're they're putting in them.

• 2:27:34Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:34Speaker 03

  So we've we've allowed the proliferation of networks and even if they're just totally benign, just here to make money, it's not in America's best interest to have this. Uh but I think we both know that um you know uh. Drug trafficking networks that are backed by the Chinese Communist Party explicitly backed and connected to the Chinese Communist Party do not have America's interests in mind. And they're co-locating their facilities next to sensitive infrastructure, next to military bases, next to places that would be ideal surveillance targets, and they're doing that on purpose. And heaven forbid, you know, some kind of a conflict breaks out, or there's

• 2:28:16Speaker 03

  an escalation to the geopolitical tensions before we're able to fully wrap our arms around this. But I'm hopeful that the Trump administration, who is aware of this problem and is working to find the legal levers that can be pulled in order to control the problem and eliminate the problem, I'm hopeful that they'll be able to put an end to it for the safety of Americans and for the safety of everybody who wants to consume products. You know, I know plenty of, plenty of people who smoke weed. I know some people who run, you know, businesses that make a couple million dollars a year, and they'll smoke two or three grams of THC oil a day, which is an insane amount of THC oil to smoke.

• 2:28:59Speaker 03

  But they're running successful businesses and they're paying their taxes and they've got a bunch of employees and they're law-abiding citizens. They deserve to have a cannabis product that doesn't have 16 Chinese pesticides in it. You know, the, the people who are moving into houses is in Maine. They deserve to know that the house that they're moving into wasn't formerly a Chinese marijuana grow, where the walls are all poisoned with these pesticides. Just like you would, you know, if you crack a beer, you want to know that they're, what's in it. You want to know that there's not crazy Chinese fungicides in it. You, you deserve the same thing if you're smoking a joint legally in some state. And right now, because of the, the patchwork of laws and the large, powerful forces that

• 2:29:43Speaker 03

  benefit from this patchwork of laws, we don't have that. We have no certainty. So the, if I could say anything, it would be just, you know, if you, if you want to smoke some pot, grow it yourself. You know, whatever, just because it comes in a, in a shiny plastic package at a gas station or a convenience store, or a head shop, and the guy at the head shop is really nice and really cool. Doesn't mean a thing. Doesn't mean a thing. I will not be bringing the cannabis I purchased here on the airplane with me back to Maine because that would be a violation of federal law. But if I did bring it back there and had it tested, I'm willing to bet that it would probably test positive for at least paklobutrazole, myclobutynil, and a couple

• 2:30:27Speaker 03

  of the more common pesticides and growth hormones and other chemicals that the Chinese growers and others use on their products. And American consumers deserve not to be poisoning themselves in that way.

• 2:30:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, like I said, Steve, I appreciate it, man. Keep going. Keep going. Thank you.

• 2:30:45Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna stop. Thank you very much.

• 2:30:59Shawn Ryan?

  I'm Sean Ryan, former Navy SEAL, CIA contractor, and host of The Sean Ryan Show. Much of my life has been dedicated to seeking truth and getting answers, no matter how uncomfortable the questions are that we have to ask. But in the age of the PSYOP, that search has never been more difficult.

• 2:31:28Shawn Ryan?

  In September of 2022, the US Army's 4th PSYOP Group released a cryptic video on YouTube.

• 2:31:36Speaker 12

  There is another very important phase of warfare. It has as its target, not the body, but the mind of the enemy.

• 2:31:47Shawn Ryan?

  Between clips of troops assembling chess pieces and social unrest,

• 2:31:56Shawn Ryan?

  phrases begin to appear on screen. They ask, "Have you ever wondered who's pulling the strings?"

• 2:32:02Speaker 12

  These are the PSYWAR soldiers.

• 2:32:04Shawn Ryan?

  The series you're about to listen to is an attempt to answer that question, and an even bigger one. The global power brokers that conduct psychological operations constantly evolve. Technology like AI has evened the playing field, and now, in the era of social media, in the democratization of information, all it takes to conduct a PSYOP is a smartphone.

• 2:32:30Shawn Ryan?

  In each episode, we look at a different method of psychological operations, how they've evolved, and how they are being deployed. There's a quote that is attributed to a scientist named E.O. Wilson that says, "We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom." This is a life raft in that sea of both information and misinformation. Psy-ops are all around us. They're conducted by corporations, governments, activist groups, intelligence agencies,

• 2:33:11Shawn Ryan?

  foreign adversaries, and anyone who knows how to shape perception to get what they want. The series provides an in-depth look at how these psy-ops work from conversations with whistleblowers, experts, historians, tech innovators, and more. We look at world events that are being shaped by highly-constructed psychological operations specialists, and look at the terrifying possibilities of where this could all be headed. Along the way, you'll learn about everything from Russian troll farms, fake ghosts in

• 2:33:52Shawn Ryan?

  the jungles of Vietnam, and mind-control cults, to the CIA's involvement in Hollywood.

• 2:33:58Speaker 13

  Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks?

• 2:34:11Shawn Ryan?

  The early history of psy-ops and psychological experiments laid the foundation for what we see today in modern campaigns that seek to divide culture over polarizing issues. We look at where we are and how we got here. But ultimately, this series is a toolkit that helps you understand how you're being manipulated and how to spot the signs of a psy-op.

• 2:34:38Shawn Ryan?

  Before the Army's viral Psyop recruitment video ends, the words on screen inform viewers that war is evolving and all the world's a stage. This series is a peek behind the curtain. Welcome to the Psyop.

• 2:34:57Shawn Ryan?

  Buy it today at psyopshow.com.