Not surprising at all that state "legalization" just turns into a bonanza for criminal gangs. This will probably spread to other states if the legalization trend continues.
Chinese Gangsters Turned this California Paradise Into a Marijuana Factory
Chinese Gangsters Turned this California Paradise Into a Marijuana Factory
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Yreka, CaliforniaSiskiyou County is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It sits against the towering backdrop of Mount Shasta and is surrounded by more than a million acres of farmland and forest. But in recent years, Chinese nationals have invaded this serene Northern California paradise to build an illegal cannabis empire.
Chinese nationals, including some associated with the Chinese Communist Party, run massive illegal marijuana operations just beneath Mount Shasta. They and the county's other illegal growers rake in billions of dollars per year, and terrorize the rural community with shootings, gang violence, and trafficking. This massive criminal enterprise operates in the shadows of America's most populous state.
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LaRue leads us to an area across from the pool, where growers have set up a plywood shack and trailer. Inside, he points out the Chinese labels on imported food items, a bowl of chicken feet sitting out in the open, and piles of trash scattered around the floor. Outside the trailer are bags of toxic pesticides with Chinese labelsall banned for use in the U.S.
"As you look around, you see that really, the story is that trash doesn't leave the property, no matter what it is. And you'll see plastic everywhere," he says. "It' s either burned or buried, and it doesn't leave."
LaRue walks us past open sewage pits to a massive hoophouse, a tarp-covered greenhouse made of PVC pipe. The average parcel in Siskiyou uses these structures to raise 2,000 plants, each of which produce between one and five pounds of flower per grow cycle. In the Shasta Vista alone, per LaRue, the total amount of weed grown could top $2 billion a year.
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At the raid, we saw empty vats of chemicals scattered across the property, some of which had Chinese labels. The sheriff told us these were highly toxic pesticides, used, in theory, for tasks like bug prevention. But at least one investigator believes that illegal grows are using chemicals like these as part of a larger plot to poison Americans.
In the early years of his marijuana farm raids, LaRue often found hundreds of mylar bags of Chinese-labeled products. At first, his office assumed these were household products. It wasn't until an agent translated some labels in 2023, he said, that law-enforcement discovered that the bags littering grow sites contain toxic fumigants.
LaRue contacted CalEPA with Siskiyou's discovery of illegal pesticides. Law-enforcement officers also reported symptoms of exposure to poisonous chemicals. Authorities called in help from the National Guard unit that analyzes chemical agents to identify the pesticides. What they endured, LaRue said, should have been enough for the state to classify the Shasta Vista as a Superfund site.
The chemicals have injured multiple emergency responders. In one case, firefighters encountered pesticides at a grow site and suffered chemical burns. In another case, law enforcement personnel accidentally walked into an active fumigation on a marijuana farm. They suffered respiratory symptoms and were hospitalized.
Siskiyou County authorities have documented dozens of "mystery" chemicals at these sites, some of which are carcinogens, groundwater pollutants, and toxic air contaminantsand none of which, per LaRue, are approved for fumigation use in California.
Methomyl is one restricted compound found in pesticides in Siskiyou. Almost all methomyl products are restricted-use pesticides, according to the federal EPA, because they can cause respiratory paralysis or death. Other states have applied that label to methomyl products because of their toxicity; in Michigan, methomyl was used to kill animals like skunks, opossums, and raccoons.
These compounds just scratch the surface of what investigators have found. They've also discovered organochlorine pesticides like pentachloronitrobenzene, a soil fungicide that can cause convulsions, coma, pulmonary edema, and myoclonic jerking movements; pyrethroid insecticides like cypermethrin and lambda-cyhalothrin, which can cause coma and seizures within 20 minutes of exposure; and the pyrrole insecticide chlorfenapyr, which can cause convulsions, seizures, and cardiac arrest.
If the growers were interested in killing insects, they could go to the local Home Depot and buy a commercial insecticide, Rob Roggeveen, national coordinator at HIDTA's Marijuana Impact Group, said. His theory? Chinese masterminds may intentionally inject lethal chemicals into the plant as a form of "chemical warfare" against the United States.
"This stuff is definitely being sent here to poison the plant that then gets ingested by the consumer," Roggeveen said. "And what better way to do it than on a product that's not going to get you right away? It' s going to take time for it to fester in the body."
"It's chemical warfare at its finest," he added.
