US to ban farmland sales to China as Chinese-backed marijuana grows

The United States government announced a plan to halt sales of farmland to China

and it comes as Oklahoma law enforcement deals with a rise in illegal marijuana grows in their

state, with ties all the way up to the Chinese government. That plan to ban farm sales will be

helpful to the mission of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, according to spokesman Mark Woodward

Oklahoma legalized medical marijuana in 2018. Woodward tells Straight Arrow News that after a

few years of legalization, the state saw a large influx of marijuana farms. And some of those calls

came from outside Oklahoma. Some of this started because we would start getting calls from law

enforcement in other states saying that they stopped a truck, maybe a refrigerator truck

for example, for whatever violation. And it's full of marijuana and the driver says it came off of a

marijuana farm in Oklahoma So that obviously is a problem because our law says that everything grown here has to be sold here That led the Bureau to form a full unit to investigate this issue They found law firms were encouraging people to come to Oklahoma saying the marijuana laws were very loose

The law was written in a way that even our partners in California said it was too liberal

and would never pass because it didn't have any safeguards in place

But the laws did pass. And by the end of 2022, Oklahoma saw around 8,400 pot farms, up from 3,000 just two years earlier

The law did state 75 percent of farm ownership had to belong to someone who lived in the state for at least two years

But that proved easy to get around with what's known as ghost ownership. These law firms even said, don't worry about that part

We will find somebody to put down as your 20, your 75 percent owner. You just bring your 25 percent here and pay us a fee and you can get up and going

Woodward says behind those ghost owners is a network of Chinese organized crime tied to human trafficking, sex trafficking and violence

that came to a head in November 2022 when a Chinese national shot and killed four other Chinese nationals at a farm northwest of Oklahoma City Basically a Chinese assassin showed up on the farm He was told collect the that were owed

And if they don't pay, kill everybody and we'll just replace those workers and managers

This is being controlled at its highest levels by major Chinese organized crime groups that

function all over the world, including, say, the 14K Triad, which is a very well-known

Chinese Organized Crime Group, which has open links to the Chinese state. There's a particular

boss of the 14K triad who has been sanctioned publicly by the U.S. government for his support

for the Chinese Communist Party. That's ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella, who's published a whole series detailing the links between the Chinese government and crime

here in the U.S. He says the Chinese state maintains a working relationship with Chinese

organized crime for a variety of reasons. They're also involved with U.S. officials or people

who contribute to political campaigns So there the thesis is that Chinese organized crime and the Chinese state have increasingly converged in the past 10 years and that the Chinese state uses Chinese

organized crime for activities like political influence, like funding espionage. Meanwhile, back in Oklahoma, law enforcement has spent the last few years trying to bring down all the illegal

grows. Woodward says his department has made hundreds of arrests and dropped the number of

farms in the state from 8,400 down to about 2,100. We do have ongoing investigations all over the U.S

working with our federal partners to go after the higher-ups, but those higher-ups are typically

not hanging around these farms here in Oklahoma, so it's not like we're getting the head of the

snake every time we hit a farm, but every time we hit one, we're unplugging a critical part

of the rest of that particular cell group that's operating in Oklahoma. For Straight Air News

I'm Lauren Keenan. If you want more on this story, download the Straight Arrow News app or visit san.com