Illegal Chinese Neurotoxins Are Coming to Maine’s Blackmarket Cannabis Grows: Maine Threat Brief

Maine Wire Reporter Seamus Othot contributed to this story.

The small family home at 254 Academy Road in Monmouth may appear like any other Chinese-controlled blackmarket drug house in Maine.

The windows are obscured, security cameras dot the perimeter, and a dumpster sits near the driveway for disposal of marijuana detritus. The house and attached garage are both hooked up to independent 200-amp power entrances. Multiple mini split heat-pumps – far more than a typical 2,000 square foot home would need — speckle the exterior. Then there’s the odor of marijuana and rotting plant debris, the food and drink rubbish with Chinese labels littering the property, and a lawn that hasn’t been mowed in months.

The property does not appear to be an active marijuana grow and seems uninhabited, but those facts may obscure the location’s central role in an illegal drug trafficking network operated throughout rural Maine by organized crime networks known as Chinese triads.

Neighbors to the Monmouth property say that despite being mostly quiet during the day, the property has been abuzz with spurts of activity at unusual hours since it was purchased by out-of-state buyers three years ago.

“They’re there probably between 2:00 am and 5:30 am, and they’re gone,” one neighbor said. “There’s always seven or eight cars.”

The arrival of the cars is typically followed by a flurry of Asian men dumping what appear to be vats of liquids — dehumidifiers, the neighbor guessed — and loading and unloading the vehicles with unknown cargo. The caravan of Toyotas is never present for long, but they’ve made regular return trips ever since the new owners took over, including the morning of Aug. 16, when the Maine Wire paid a visit.

A clue as to what role the property is playing in the Chinese triad’s Maine-based drug trafficking network can be found in a briefing provided to Maine law enforcement by the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) and its Eradication and Prevention of Illicit Cannabis (EPIC) program.

Officials providing that July 29 briefing flagged the Academy Road house as part of a web of properties across the country linked to the nationwide distribution of highly neurotoxic pesticides and fungicides manufactured in China and illegally imported to the United States.

In the two-hour long briefing, CalEPA investigators described how they have found themselves at the frontlines of the fight against Chinese organized crime in the Golden State, while an EPIC Task Force Commander highlighted the shocking violence and firearms crime often associated with these criminal networks.

In California, enormous outdoor marijuana grows pose severe threats to the health of California residents, as well as to the rural environments where haphazard greenhouse cities are erected, as chemical discharges can poison local flora, fauna, and drinking water.

Because simple marijuana cultivation is no longer prosecuted in the state, the California officials said all enforcement activities against illegal Chinese drug trafficking must occur under the guise of environmental crimes, which are the only felony level charges the state is interested in pursuing against Chinese triads. This approach has led the CalEPA and EPIC to confront myriad mysterious and dangerous chemicals as they have investigated hundreds of illegal cultivation sites spanning the state.

However, dangerous neurotoxins aren’t the only threats the California officials have encountered as they seek to crack down on the illegal Chinese drug traffickers.

“One thing in particular, I think that we’re seeing a lot more of is the violence,” the EPIc Task Force Commander said. “Out in LA County, there was seven people shot. It was a really violent incident. Last year there was another one in Riverside County, another one in Monterey County. There was a lot of violence related to these grows.”

“So don’t take these marijuana grows lightly,” the commander said. “Every day, I’m getting reports of AK 47s, assault weapons… We’re seeing them all the time, and they’re armed to the teeth.”

Members of the Maine State Police’s (MSP) Maine Information Analysis Center (MIAC) — essentially the NSA of the state police — as well as several sheriffs’ departments, local police officials, and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) all attended the remote briefing.

According to information shared during and after the briefing, the property in Monmouth is connected to an illegal drug and chemical distribution network spanning from China to California to New York to Maine. That network is delivering highly toxic pesticide and fungicide fumigants to the state for use at some of the more than three hundred black market drug hubs that started proliferating throughout Maine beginning in 2019.

The pesticides and fungicides in question are so toxic to humans that they’re illegal to use or manufacture in the United States, and several of the toxins found at Chinese-run marijuana grows are even illegal to use or sell in China – a country not known for being overly concerned with worker safety or protecting the environment.

American investigators only identified the chemicals after consulting with a National Guard military unit that specializes in Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The California investigators subsequently identified videos on Chinese-language social media apps and websites instructing triad operators on how to ignite the fumigants in order to protect valuable marijuana crops from common pests and mildews that can render cannabis less valuable or unsalable.

Although the Maine Wire has identified dozens of instances of pesticides present at illegal marijuana grows in Maine, the presence of illegal, Chinese-made chemicals at black market drug houses in Maine has not previously been reported.

Whether Maine law enforcement agencies or the state’s cannabis regulators have the capacity to test for these carcinogenic and potentially deadly chemicals is unclear, but commercial cannabis testers in the state told the Maine Wire that the insecticides and fungicides flagged by CalEPA are not part of their regular testing schedule.

The extent to which these dangerous chemicals may be seeping into Maine’s housing stock and environment is essentially unknowable, and law enforcement agencies have not spoken publicly about precautions officers may be taking to safeguard themselves against unwitting exposure to Chinese-made neurotoxins.

Chinese Neurotoxins Discovered in California

Chinese-made neurotoxins were first uncovered at marijuana grows in northern California in late 2023 by the CalEPA, which spearheaded the July briefing for Maine law enforcement.

The investigators were initially unaware of the precise nature of the chemicals they were encountering, as illegal growers stored the chemicals alongside food or other common household items. Chinese operators, the investigators would learn, were intentionally mislabeling harmful toxins to avoid detection.

According to CalEPA, law enforcement officials who entered illegal Chinese-run marijuana grows — even grows that appeared to be long-abandoned or had no actively growing marijuana — had begun experiencing severe allergic reactions.

Following a raid in Siskiyou County, law enforcement reported severe symptoms, including “extreme burning sensation on face; burning eyes; burning lips; severe eye irritation; lacrimation; nose/throat irritation; skin irritation; headache; numbness for 24 hours or more; eye/eyelid twitching, hyperhidrosis, and bloody nose (as a delayed symptom).”

The officials knew that unidentified and potentially hazardous chemicals were being used at the sites. That much was obvious from the dozens and dozens of haphazardly labeled chemical barrels often found around the cannabis grows.

But it wasn’t until an environmental specialist attending an investigation decided to use Google Translate on one of the Chinese-labeled bags and discovered them to be pesticides.

Although the translated packages suggested the presence of pesticides and fungicides, conventional forensic testing wasn’t readily identifying the precise composition of the chemicals, which was necessary in order to determine what could be causing officers’ symptoms.

That’s when the California EPA and other law enforcement agencies filed a request with the California National Guard’s 95th Civil Support Team, a special unit of the National Guard responsible for detecting and responding to Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs).

“Health and safety samples of suspected pesticides obtained by (Department of Toxic Substances Control – Office of Criminal Investigations) from various illicit Chinese-operated marijuana grows in the Shasta Vistas, Harry Cash, and Whitney Creek areas located in Siskiyou County” were delivered to the 95th CST lab in Hayward, CA.

The results of that testing shocked investigators, but they also helped explain the severity of the exposure reactions experienced by law enforcement officers, as well as the inability of typical lab testing to discern the nature of the chemicals. Because many of the chemicals are illegal to manufacture, sell, or use in the United States, they’re not commonly tested for.

Whereas most commercially available insecticides and fungicides in the U.S., including those approved for use on marijuana in Maine, will include one or two active ingredients, the Chinese-made fumigants included complex cocktails of more than ten separate chemicals — all of which are highly toxic to mammals and rarely used in legal settings, if ever.

That discovery led to another startling conclusion: marijuana tainted with these highly toxic chemicals was entering California’s legal marijuana markets without detection by conventional testing labs, meaning marijuana users were unwittingly consuming some of the most dangerous chemicals ever applied to a marijuana plant.

“10 samples of seized plant material and processed marijuana from illegal grows and traffic stops of (Department of Cannabis Control) licensed distributors were submitted for lab analysis and determined to be contaminated with several of the same pesticides that were identified in various illegal products of the Chinese labeled pesticide fumigants,” the briefing documents disclosed.

“It was during this time that we discovered that the cannabis testing labs are not testing for most of the pesticides identified in the Chinese labeled pesticides fumigant products,” the briefing stated.

Since the Chinese-made neurotoxins were first identified at illegal Chinese marijuana grows in Siskiyou County, the same chemicals have been found in Trinity, Alameda, San Diego, Contra Costa, San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Butte, Fresno, and Riverside counties.

A footnote on the presentation states: “Additional evidence received indicating that the Chinese-labeled pesticides are being shipped from California to the following states: Oregon, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, Maine, and New York.”

The quantity of pesticides sometimes found at these illegal Chinese grows is breathtaking.

While Maine’s illegal Chinese marijuana growing sites are mostly confined to former residential and commercial properties, the triad cannabis grows in California — thanks to the warmer climate — have cropped up in rural, uninhabited areas of state.

In those areas, the Chinese crime networks will construct city-size complexes of “hoop houses” — or large green houses — that allow for illegal marijuana growing to occur on a breathtaking scale.

California law enforcement has found improvised fumigant cans at several dozen illegal grows all over the state. The devices are made by slicing aluminum cans and steel barrels in half, filling them with wood shavings, ammonium nitrate, pesticides and fungicides, and igniting them using an ignition stick, which itself typically contains sulfur and other contaminants. The toxic smoke then fills the hoop houses, coating the cannabis plants, the surrounding area, and killing any living bug, fungus, — or mammal — in the vicinity.

“In Butte County, we found so far just one incident where they had about 300 pounds of Chinese label pesticides in the original packaging with shipping labels from China saying it was received in China,” the CalEPA official said.

The investigation into the provenance of the deadly chemicals that kept turning up at illegal marijuana grows led CalEPA and EPIC to a single address and a single individual in Alameda County, east of San Francisco.

(RELATED: Triad Weed: How Chinese Marijuana Grows Took Over Rural Maine…)

“The same type of packaging and pesticides were also found around the same time in Siskiyou County. Same city that it was received in in China. Same individual was listed as the receiver,” the CalEPA official said.

The massive quantities of the fumigants found throughout California suggests that the importation of these neurotoxic chemicals involves sophisticated international shipping logistics and well-coordinated supply chains, not to mention robust production facilities on mainland China.

“These grows are highly organized,” the EPIC Commander said. “They have a logistics stream, but they also have the money laundering stream. They’re supported by criminal organizations, criminal street gangs.”

“So don’t underestimate the violence that’s associated,” he said.

Toxic Chinese “Triad Weed” in Maine

The marijuana industry is hardly a stranger to unscrupulous growers using toxic chemicals on their plants. But the Chinese-made fumigants are far more toxic than any commercially available pesticides and fungicides marketed in the U.S. Because of their high toxicity and illegal status in the U.S., most forensic labs and cannabis labs don’t even test for the presence of these toxins.

That means marijuana treated with these highly dangerous neurotoxins could receive top marks from any cannabis testing lab in Maine even if it was contaminated with some of the most toxic pesticides and fungicides known to man.

“Since they don’t look like your typical pesticides (and since the packaging is in Chinese), it’s likely other states are unknowingly running into these toxic materials during eradication operations at illicit grows and/or regulatory inspections at licensed cannabis cultivation facilities,” said the presentation’s description.

The consequences of these chemicals potentially being used in Maine’s illegal Chinese-controlled marijuana grows are severe for Maine law enforcement. In California, authorities familiar with the poisons that are being encountered have now recommended full hazmat-suit protections for any law enforcement officers who investigate suspected Chinese marijuana grows.

“My teams will not go in and eradicate if garden is hot, we have to pull ourselves out,” the EPIC Commander said, referring to grows that are suspected to have recently been treated with Chinese-made fumigants. “We are not equipped for it.”

In Maine, officers executing search warrants at the more than 40 sites that have been raided across the state since Dec. 2023 have rarely worn advanced protective gearing, raising the possibility that Maine cops and sheriffs deputies could be unwittingly exposing themselves to foreign neurotoxins.

Marijuana users in Maine may also be unwittingly ingesting or inhaling the Chinese-made pesticides and fungicides, since they could slip undetected into legal supply chains for adult-use or medicinal cannabis.

Although the Maine Attorney General’s Office testified at the State House earlier this year that most of the illegally grown cannabis in Maine is trafficked by the Chinese criminal networks out of the state, they acknowledged that some of the product is making it to market at licensed dispensaries in Maine.

Maine’s legal cannabis laws do require testing for adult-use recreational cannabis, and many medicinal marijuana growers will test their products even though they’re not required to do so; however, the state’s current cannabis testers — like the testing facilities in California — are unequipped to detect these Chinese-made toxins.

Currently, Maine law requires most cannabis growers to have their products tested for harmful concentrations of 59 pesticides, none of which are the five illegal chemicals present in the Chinese-labeled concoctions.

The Maine Wire reached out to Maine’s certified testing facilities, inquiring about which pesticides they test for, and found that some only test for the 59 pesticides required by the state’s testing regulations, and none test for any of the five illegal pesticides.

The Maine Wire was told that the tests will not detect the illegal substances even if they are present because the testing machinery is precisely calibrated only to test for the required pesticides.

That means marijuana treated with Chinese neurotoxins could receive a stamp of approval from any of the testing labs in Maine despite being adulterated with highly toxic chemicals.

The Lingering Danger of Chinese Neurotoxins

The Chinese-made pesticides being used at illegal marijuana grows throughout the United States can have especially harmful and long-lasting effects when used in former residential or commercial buildings that the criminal networks have converted into illegal growing operations.

In some cases, California law enforcement officers reported experiencing harsh symptoms from exposure to the fumigants long after the cans had stopped burning. That’s because chemical residue from the neurotoxic compounds can last for years or even decades after a property has been fumigated.

From California to Maine, the residential houses that have been transformed into illegal marijuana grows are typically rendered unsuitable for normal living, but that hasn’t stopped owners of the properties from trying to sell the properties once they’re no longer viable as black market drug sites.

The houses are often inundated with toxic black mold, which can flourish thanks to the high humidity and high temperature of a marijuana grow, and the electrical and propane systems of the homes are usually haphazard and amateurish, raising serious concerns about fire hazards. But the presence of hard-to-detect neurotoxins that could linger within a home for years raises a new and alarming danger posed by the Chinese marijuana grows.

Unsuspecting buyers who move into the houses may never know that the home they’ve purchased will expose their families to some of the most heinous pesticide residue on the planet. Based on the information shared with Maine law enforcement, potential real estate buyers searching for properties in Maine will now also need to be concerned about neurotoxic chemical residue permeating the buildings.

“One (chemical) we just learned of last week has a 14-year half-life. We did a search warrant back in January and didn’t get test results until this week. I’m having to tell all the detectives and everyone involved that we were exposed to these chemicals,” said the head of Lancaster, California’s marijuana unit Mike Katz speaking with the Epoch Times.

“They’re endangering the families who will occupy those buildings in the future, they are lowering the value of neighboring properties and dragging the whole community down,” Katz added.

Lab tests of the hazardous Chinese-made chemicals revealed a total of 23 pesticidal and fungicidal agents, none of which are legal for use as fumigants in the United States.

Chemical analysis found that eight of the substances are classified as carcinogens by California, six are groundwater pollutants, three are toxic air contaminants, twelve attack the central nervous system, and five are entirely illegal for use in the U.S.

The chemicals that are illegal for use in the U.S. — chlorthiophos, fenobucarb, isoprocarb, procymidone, and tridemorph — have been been banned since the early 1990s when scientists began to publicize the severe threat they posed to humans or wildlife. All of these pesticides are effective against pest organisms because they disrupt the central nervous system, and this same characteristic makes them harmful to humans and wildlife.

Tridemorph, for example, has been linked to reproductive harm and can cause developmental issues in unborn children. Procymidone is a known carcinogen. Isoprocarb is potentially fatal and can have long-term effects if introduced into aquatic environments. While some of these chemicals have half-lives of just 10-20 days, others, such as tridemorph, has a half-life of more than 200 days, meaning the potential danger can last long after fumigation has occurred.

The other compounds discovered at illegal Chinese grows, which are legal in some cases for standard pesticide use but illegal as fumigants, also carry with them a slew of dangers that could affect anyone enjoying a contaminated blunt. In many cases, pesticides and fungicides may be considered safe for application on plants intended to be eaten, but completely unsafe for products that may be vaporized or smoked.

One common fungicide known to most Maine cannabis growers — Eagle 20EW (myclobutanil) — has been approved for use on lawn grass and some produce; however, when chemical remnants of the product combust, such as when smoked or vaped, the result is hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and hydrogen chloride (HCl).

Although the majority of the pesticides California investigators identified were at illegal grows, some were discovered at legal sites or detected on processed marijuana that had been packaged for sale via legal dispensaries, meaning that even buyers who only purchase cannabis from legal marijuana dispensaries could be at risk from the side effects of illegal or improperly used pesticides and fungicides.

Using the Chinese government’s official Chinese Pesticide Information Network website, and a combination of translations from Google Translate and ChatGPT, the Maine Wire found that some of the chemicals present at illegal marijuana grows are even illegal in communist China.

Of the five chemicals outright banned in the U.S., only one, procymidone, is legal in China, while the rest are also banned in the communist dictatorship.

The quantity of illegal pesticides and fungicides cropping up in California implies a robust and sophisticated logistics network capable of importing thousands of barrels of illicit chemicals from foreign sources and distributing them throughout the state. It also implies the existence large-scale production facilities on mainland China to manufacturer the chemicals — even though they’re illegal for sale in that country.

This information, combined with the role that WeChat plays in facilitating the activities of Chinese organized crime, suggests that the Chinese Communist Party is encouraging — or at least turning a blind eye to — the importation of dangerous neurotoxins into the U.S.

In other words, the CCP knows these pesticides and fungicides are neurotoxic for humans, but they’ll gladly allow them to be manufactured and shipped abroad so long as American citizens and American governments are dealing with the health and environmental fallout.

In addition to the pesticides and fungicides, the hoop house cities in California are often characterized by general disregard for the environment and local wildlife.

The Role of WeChat in Facilitating Chinese Organized Crime

In recent years, the United States government and several state governments have started sounding the alarm about potential threats posed to U.S. national security by Tiktok, a video-based social media app owned by the China-based company ByteDance.

Federal officials and white-hat cyber security analysts have warned for years that downloading Tiktok onto a cellular device effectively grants the intelligence services of the Chinese Communist Party an unlimited window into your phone, along with all of the data about your personal, financial, and business activities.

That’s part of the reason that Maine last year became one of several governments to ban the use of Tiktok on official government devices. For similar reasons, Maine recently adopted a bipartisan law to prohibit government agencies from purchasing goods and services that the Office of Information Technology identifies as originating from China.

Far less attention has been paid, however, to the role that WeChat has played and will continue to play in facilitating both the clandestine activities of CCP intelligence services and the malign activities of criminal groups operating with the implicit blessing of Communist Party officials.

However, the California officials’ investigation — as well as the Maine Wire’s own journalistic investigation — has found that WeChat functions as the nervous system of the Chinese triad groups, allowing them to communicate, coordinate, exchange information and resources, and even transmit money without any regulatory oversight from the U.S. government.

Investigators in California found that the illegal pesticides found at marijuana grows in that state have arrived after illicit sales conducted over WeChat. The pesticide bags often have QR codes on them, which link directly to WeChat pages where more can be bought, as law enforcement confirmed through an undercover purchase.

The implication is that Chinese criminal operators who obtain such illegal pesticides are able to purchase and receive deliveries of additional pesticides even if they don’t know who is importing the chemicals, who is selling them, or who is transporting them.

(RELATED: “State Sponsored Poisoning:” House Committee Confirms CCP Involvement in America’s Fentanyl Crisis…)

In this way, the WeChat network allows triad members to conduct illegal business within a “trusted” circle of co-conspirators they may never meet or know.

In addition to allowing various members of a criminal conspiracy to buy and sell goods among each other within the U.S., the WeChat app also functions as a money transfer service, allowing users to transmit as much as $30,000 per day, including some international transactions.

Thanks to WeChat, Chinese organized crime groups can communicate secretly about their operations, arrange transactions and shipments, and transfer money between U.S.-based operators as well as back to mainland China — all without any oversight from U.S. law enforcement.

Importing Chinese Neurotoxins to New England

CalEPA connected their illegal Chinese marijuana grows to similar operations in Maine, New York, and Massachusetts by analyzing the shipping labels often found on pesticide containers at illegal grows.

According to the official who briefed Maine law enforcement, the U.S. Post Office inspector general shared information suggesting that “hundreds” of packages had been sent from a residential address in San Leandro, Calif., to suspected marijuana grows in California, Oregon, and Maine.

According to records reviewed by the Maine Wire, the property in Maine suspected of receiving shipments of highly toxic fumigants is Wayne Yang’s property at 254 Academy Road in Monmouth, a Kennebec County town just outside of Augusta.

The Maine Wire visited the property earlier this month, but no one answered the door, and the house appeared uninhabited, though it did bear the recognizable signs of a Chinese marijuana grow.

According to Kennebec County real estate records, Yang purchased the Monmouth house, which sits roughly 2,000 feet from Monmouth Academy and Monmouth Memorial School, in July 2021.

Like many Maine properties that would go on to become black market marijuana grows, Yang used a special mortgage from Quontic Bank.

As with dozens of similar Quontic-financed properties, Yang’s mortgage officer for the transaction was Quontic loan officer Ying-Chan Weng, a Chinese national who immigrated to the U.S. after graduating from Zhejiang University in southern China.

Quontic specializes in providing mortgages under the Community Development Financial Institution program, a special program run by the U.S. Treasury Department that subsidizes home loans for non-U.S. citizens looking to buy American land.

“Our Foreign National loan allows non-U.S. citizens to finance their investment property with ease,” Quontic Bank states on its website. “This loan program is exclusively for borrowers who don’t live or work in the United States.”

“Whether you’re a foreign national interested in purchasing an investment property in the US or you currently live and work in the US but are not eligible to get a social security number, we may have a mortgage option that’s right for you,” the bank’s website states.

Quontic Bank’s unique product offering comes with a similarly unique advertising strategy; namely, solicitations posted to WeChat.

Several WeChat posts reviewed by the Maine Wire show that Quontic Bank loan officers, including loan officers listed on documents as originating home loans for illegal marijuana grows in Maine, have posted Chinese-language advertisements using the app.

The Maine Wire attempted to contact Yang, 32, at a phone number associated with him and his businesses. After the call was initially answered, voices could be heard in the background speaking in Chinese, but the party on the line did not respond to questions and eventually hung up the phone.

According to a former federal investigator, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, Yang’s previous address history includes a brief stint in the Stanislaus County area of California, an area known to federal authorities as a hotbed of illegal marijuana cultivation.

Experience with hoop house cultivation in northern California could have equipped Yang with the know-how — and the connections — to expand similar operations into Maine.

Although Yang’s LinkedIn page currently suggests that he is unemployed, he does have multiple degrees, including a Bachelors Degree in Music Theory he obtained at Tainan University of Technology in Taiwan and a Master of Fine Arts degree he obtained at the City University of New York.

When Yang purchased the Monmouth house, he provided a mailing address of 831 58th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11220. That address corresponds with the headquarters of “TShip Inc,” a New York company incorporated in Aug. 2020.

According to law enforcement records reviewed by the Maine Wire, the five-story mixed-use building located at that Brooklyn address is owned by Yuting Zheng and Shuai Chen.

“Based on open-source information, this address is associated with a business titled “Times Solution Firm” in addition to a business titled ‘便宜速运国际快递’ which translates to “Cheap Express International Express Delivery,” the law enforcement records state.

It’s unclear from the records whether TShip Inc and Yang are related to or involved with “Cheap Express International Express Delivery.”

The other New England property identified in the CalEPA records is the Chicopee, Mass.-based “GroHydro Supply,” a marijuana grow supply store, with signs that advertise in Chinese characters.

Located at 590 Center St, Chicopee, MA 01013, GroHydro Supply Corp. was incorporated in Mass. in June 2021 by James K. Woo, of Ware, Mass.

According to Mass. corporate records, Woo’s company was involuntarily dissolved by court order or by order of the Secretary of State in Dec. 2023.

According to documents shared by the Calif. EPA, all of this information — including details about shipments received in Massachusetts and Maine — has been transmitted to the FBI.

Maine’s Triad Weed Crisis

The black market drug site in Monmouth is one of more than 300 throughout the state of Maine thought to be operated by what the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has dubbed Asian Transnational Criminal Organizations — a.k.a. Chinese triads or Chinese mafia.

Last year, a leaked Homeland Security memo revealed the presence of the foreign drug hubs throughout Maine, but the memo also disclosed hundreds more are operating throughout the U.S. At those locations, marijuana is grown illegally — or with a fictitious veneer of legality — and distributed throughout the U.S. in violation of federal law.

Since the Maine Wire began our “Triad Weed” investigative series, law enforcement agencies in the state have executed more than 40 search warrants and arrested dozens of Chinese individuals charged with illegally cultivating and trafficking marijuana at locations throughout Maine. Those enforcement actions, however, have only scratched the surface of the clandestine criminal activities that have proliferated throughout Maine since 2019.

Multiple sources throughout the state who have previously shared information with the Maine Wire regarding illegal Chinese marijuana grows in their towns or cities have recently reported that activity has restarted at previously raided sites. Locations that went quiet when law enforcement raids were occurring on a weekly basis are now buzzing with activity. The aroma of illegally grown triad weed is once again filling the air, and several operators of black market sites are now filing paperwork with Maine’s Office of Cannabis Policy in an effort to obtain legal protections for their illegal operations.

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If you’ve been following the Maine Wire’s aggressive and in-depth reporting on Chinese organized crime in Maine, you won’t want to miss our first-ever feature length documentary, “Triad Weed: How Chinese Mafia Infiltrated Maine.”

Our documentary will take you behind the scenes of the year-long investigation to expose the foreign criminal operators who have infiltrated Maine and exploited our communities to enrich themselves and their foreign criminal networks. The movie will premiere on Friday, Sept. 20 at the Saco Drive-In Theater on Route 1 in Saco. Parking spots are limited, so get your tickets now! (Carpooling is encouraged)

Read more of Maine Wire’s “Triad Weed” Reporting