Latest / INSPIRE STORY / #0236_Steve Robinson — What If China’s Secret Weapon Was Sold at Your Local Gas Station? National Security, Hidden Threats & Global Power

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#0236_Steve Robinson — What If China’s Secret Weapon Was Sold at Your Local Gas Station? National Security, Hidden Threats & Global Power · INSPIRE STORY

0:05
Speaker 1: Steve Robinson, welcome to the show, man.
0:08
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
0:09
Speaker 1: So I have had a ton of people reaching out
0:13
Speaker 1: to me wanting to cover this 7-0-H thing that's going on.
0:17
Speaker 1: And so we had a bunch of people we're looking
0:21
Speaker 1: at and Jeremy found you. And I think we were
0:24
Speaker 1: going to get you on earlier about something too, but
0:27
Speaker 1: I don't know much about the subject. It sounds like
0:29
Speaker 1: a very, very toxic chemical that they're putting into stuff.
0:33
Speaker 1: And so I can't wait to dive in. Sounds like
0:36
Speaker 1: you're way ahead of the government on this right now.
0:39
Speaker 2: Well, I think the government's always way behind on the
0:44
Speaker 2: new substances that the fringe of society are using to
0:49
Speaker 2: get high. I know that the FDA has recommended that
0:53
Speaker 2: 7-OH be scheduled. Um, who knows how long that process
0:57
Speaker 2: is going to take, but the idea of sketchy substances
1:02
Speaker 2: that you can buy at gas stations and convenience stores
1:04
Speaker 2: has been around for a long time. And, uh, the
1:07
Speaker 2: timeline that I've observed is, uh, you know, it's maybe
1:12
Speaker 2: a product shows up in a gas station or a
1:14
Speaker 2: convenience store and word spreads very quickly amongst the drug
1:18
Speaker 2: using community. They, they figure it out real quickly. What
1:21
Speaker 2: makes you feel good and what, simulates the feeling of
1:24
Speaker 2: whether it's cannabis or heroin, and they know where to
1:28
Speaker 2: get it. They know the stickers and the logos and
1:32
Speaker 2: the brand names that kind of subtly communicate what they're
1:34
Speaker 2: looking for. And then these things start to turn up
1:38
Speaker 2: at law enforcement raids. So local police, sheriff, state police, DEA, whatever,
1:44
Speaker 2: they'll go in for a regular fentanyl raid, heroin, or,
1:48
Speaker 2: you know, OxyContin, whatever it is. And they'll start to
1:52
Speaker 2: notice these other things are turning up and they don't
1:54
Speaker 2: really know what they are. They've got weird labels, weird names,
1:59
Speaker 2: and they kind of brush them aside. But then they
2:00
Speaker 2: start to see more of them. And then they realize
2:02
Speaker 2: that there's a pattern here. And the same people who
2:05
Speaker 2: are using maybe fentanyl or heroin or prescription opioids are
2:09
Speaker 2: also using some of these other products. And so from
2:13
Speaker 2: that point. You know, that's maybe a five-year window. And
2:17
Speaker 2: then when it trickles up to the level of state
2:19
Speaker 2: policymakers or federal policymakers or people who are at the DEA,
2:25
Speaker 2: it takes maybe another two years or three years for
2:28
Speaker 2: there to be any kind of policy formulated that's going
2:32
Speaker 2: to limit the import of these drugs. And in a
2:36
Speaker 2: lot of cases, like with the case of 7-OH, It's
2:40
Speaker 2: incredibly difficult to regulate it because it's hard to test for.
2:45
Speaker 2: You don't really have a test right now. If someone
2:48
Speaker 2: dies in a parking lot and they have an autopsy,
2:52
Speaker 2: they're not immediately going to test for 7-OH. I don't
2:56
Speaker 2: even know if they have the capability to look for
2:59
Speaker 2: the metabolites in their bloodstream to say, like, oh, this
3:01
Speaker 2: person might have died from 7-OH. In most cases, their
3:05
Speaker 2: deaths will probably just be attributed to a regular opioid overdose.
3:10
Speaker 2: 7-OH is, I think, most comparable to bath salts.
3:17
Speaker 1: Oh man, that shit was nasty. I haven't heard about
3:20
Speaker 1: that in a couple of years, but.
3:21
Speaker 2: They successfully regulated it out of existence, but it took
3:25
Speaker 2: a while. And the similarity between 7-OH and bath salts
3:32
Speaker 2: is that It's just, it's a molecule, like basalts was
3:36
Speaker 2: just a molecule. And so regulators beginning in Florida and
3:39
Speaker 2: some other states would say, okay, this molecule is now illegal.
3:43
Speaker 2: And so the chemists in China and in the United
3:47
Speaker 2: States and in Mexico, they would just figure out a
3:49
Speaker 2: way to add another hydrogen atom to that chemical. And
3:52
Speaker 2: all of a sudden you've got a new molecule and
3:54
Speaker 2: that's legal. And it gives you the same experience, but
3:58
Speaker 2: because it's a little bit more complex, it's harder for
4:00
Speaker 2: your body to metabolize still gets you high, but it's
4:04
Speaker 2: worse for your body. And people start using that. And
4:08
Speaker 2: then they figure out, okay, well, they've got a new
4:10
Speaker 2: formulation for bath salts. And so they make that illegal.
4:13
Speaker 2: And then the chemists go back and add another hydrogen
4:15
Speaker 2: atom and so on and so forth. So it's like a,
4:18
Speaker 2: it's a war of escalation between the regulators and the
4:22
Speaker 2: people who are making drugs illegal and the chemists who
4:24
Speaker 2: are turning out new substances to make people high. Um,
4:28
Speaker 2: you know, fast enough so that people end up on
4:29
Speaker 2: a freeway, like, gnawing some guy's face off because they ate, like,
4:33
Speaker 2: eighth-generation bath salts.
4:34
Speaker 1: Is this seven... We're gonna get more into this towards
4:37
Speaker 1: the end of the interview. We've got a journey to
4:39
Speaker 1: get there.
4:39
Speaker 2: For sure, for sure. I think it took me, it
4:41
Speaker 2: was circumspect. My arrival at 7-0-H was a little circumspect
4:47
Speaker 2: through the investigation of the illicit Chinese marijuana that was
4:52
Speaker 2: happening in Maine. But it's ultimately derived from a.
4:58
Speaker 2: A tree that grows in Southeast Asia, in Indonesia, and
5:02
Speaker 2: it's harvested, the tree is harvested, there's this elaborate chemical
5:07
Speaker 2: process that it goes through, and so they call it
5:10
Speaker 2: natural because it begins with a plant, but it's really
5:12
Speaker 2: a lab-made synthetic drug that is more potent than morphine,
5:17
Speaker 2: depending on how you measure it.
5:19
Speaker 3: Damn.
5:20
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think I've read 46 times. Yeah.
5:24
Speaker 2: And again, it depends on how you measure it, but
5:25
Speaker 2: it is an opioid. It's a legal opioid, just like
5:30
Speaker 2: Percocet or Oxycontin, and you can buy it at gas
5:34
Speaker 2: stations and convenience stores all across the United States. In fact,
5:38
Speaker 2: I landed here and it took me 10 minutes to
5:42
Speaker 2: find a place near your studio where I was able
5:44
Speaker 2: to find some gas station heroin.
5:51
Speaker 1: This is a drink mix?
5:53
Speaker 2: It's a drink mix, wonderfully flavored. Yeah, wonderfully flavored, uh,
5:58
Speaker 2: lemon and watermelon. Not like they're targeting that at kids
6:01
Speaker 2: at all.
6:02
Speaker 1: 15 milligrams of pure 7-LH. Says it's lab tested. Should
6:07
Speaker 1: we try it?
6:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, lab tested. I don't know where the lab is.
6:09
Speaker 2: You can scan that barcode and it probably comes back
6:11
Speaker 2: to some fake certificate of analysis generated on, you know,
6:15
Speaker 2: a large language model. Who knows where the lab is?
6:19
Speaker 2: But Senator Mark Wayne Mullen recently gave a press conference
6:24
Speaker 2: and I know he's had some personal experience with losing
6:30
Speaker 2: someone he loves to overdose, to opioid overdose, opioid addiction,
6:35
Speaker 2: and talked about this. And he estimated, based on information
6:38
Speaker 2: he'd received, that this is already a $ 9 billion industry.
6:43
Speaker 1: Wow.
6:45
Speaker 2: Just 7-H.
6:46
Speaker 1: $ 9 billion.
6:46
Speaker 2: $ 9 billion industry.
6:48
Speaker 1: Is this stuff as bad as bath salt? I mean,
6:50
Speaker 1: I remember I came here from Florida.
6:53
Speaker 2: You remember the face gnawing.
6:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, the face gnawing. You'd be driving down the road,
6:57
Speaker 1: somebody would be humping a palm tree, humping a parking curb.
7:02
Speaker 1: We'll put some B-roll up of this stuff. I mean,
7:04
Speaker 1: it is like the real Walking Dead. I mean, it
7:09
Speaker 1: is crazy.
7:12
Speaker 2: Are you on drugs? Tell me what's wrong.
7:18
Speaker 4: What's wrong?
7:29
Speaker 1: All right, Steve, before we get too far into it,
7:35
Speaker 1: let me give you an intro here. Everybody starts off
7:37
Speaker 1: with an intro. So Steve Robinson. Editor-in-chief of The Main Wire,
7:42
Speaker 1: New England's fastest-growing digital media outlet dedicated to exposing political
7:47
Speaker 1: corruption and organized crime. Former producer of The Howie Carr Show,
7:52
Speaker 1: and he helped handle Barstool Sports' Kirk.
7:56
Speaker 1: Can't say that name. Minahan. Minahan Show, along with the
8:00
Speaker 1: true crime podcast, The Case. The journalist who uncovered a
8:03
Speaker 1: massive Chinese mafia network stretching from rural Maine all the
8:07
Speaker 1: way to southeast China. exclusively detailed how these criminals exploited U.S.
8:12
Speaker 1: Treasury subsidized loans to snatch up over 70 properties, putting
8:18
Speaker 1: the spotlight on vulnerabilities in our own system. Your work
8:21
Speaker 1: has been cited in congressional reports and featured on major outlets,
8:26
Speaker 1: resulting in over 60 hard-hitting articles, property raids, and arrests.
8:31
Speaker 1: Creator of the documentary High Crimes, the Chinese Mafia's Takeover
8:35
Speaker 1: of Rural America. And like I said, You know, I
8:38
Speaker 1: think you are way ahead of the government on this stuff,
8:41
Speaker 1: 7-OH and gas station heroin. And as of September 2025,
8:48
Speaker 1: the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has not yet scheduled 7-OH,
8:55
Speaker 1: but is in the process of currently scheduling it. Did
9:00
Speaker 1: you say it's Schedule 1? Schedule 1, yeah. So that's good.
9:05
Speaker 1: At least... At least somebody's on this shit. But all right,
9:10
Speaker 1: just a couple more things to crank out here. Everybody
9:13
Speaker 1: gets a gift.
9:14
Speaker 2: Oh, fantastic.
9:15
Speaker 1: Sorry, I don't have any 708s for you. But I
9:18
Speaker 1: do have some gummy bears.
9:19
Speaker 2: Thank you very much.
9:20
Speaker 1: The Jones League gummy bears made in the USA, legal
9:23
Speaker 1: in all 50 states. It's just candy. Beautiful. And then
9:29
Speaker 1: I have a Patreon account. It's a subscription network that
9:33
Speaker 1: we've turned into quite the community here. And so- They're
9:37
Speaker 1: the reason that I get to sit here with you today.
9:38
Speaker 1: And so one of the things I do is I
9:41
Speaker 1: offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest
9:45
Speaker 1: a question. This is from Kevin O'Malley. Is there any
9:48
Speaker 1: indication that Chinese nationals involved in organized crime are acting
9:52
Speaker 1: at the directive of the Chinese government?
9:55
Speaker 2: Yes.
9:55
Speaker 1: Yes. How so?
9:58
Speaker 2: Uh, so... law enforcement sources that we've communicated with time
10:05
Speaker 2: and again have drawn direct bright lines between the organized
10:09
Speaker 2: crime activities in Maine and New York, California, Oklahoma, straight
10:15
Speaker 2: to the Chinese government. that's not satisfactory for me. But
10:19
Speaker 2: some law enforcement or government source says, oh, this is
10:22
Speaker 2: connected to the CCP. What I prefer to rely on
10:26
Speaker 2: is my own reporting and things that I've uncovered and
10:29
Speaker 2: things that I've worked with other journalists to uncover. And
10:33
Speaker 2: to give you a specific example, I grew up in
10:37
Speaker 2: a town called Dexter. It's right in the center of
10:40
Speaker 2: the state of Maine, used to be home to Dexter Shoes.
10:44
Speaker 2: And at a property that is maybe a five-minute walk
10:47
Speaker 2: from my childhood home. This property was purchased by some
10:52
Speaker 2: Chinese individuals from the Flushing, New York area around 2021
10:58
Speaker 2: and converted into a drug house, a marijuana house. And we,
11:05
Speaker 2: as part of our investigation into the Chinese drug cartel
11:08
Speaker 2: activity in Maine, had identified as many of these properties
11:12
Speaker 2: as we possibly could and then began driving all around
11:15
Speaker 2: the state, visiting them, trying to interview the people who
11:18
Speaker 2: were there, if there were people there, trying to interview
11:20
Speaker 2: the neighbors and learn what we could. While we were
11:23
Speaker 2: visiting this particular site on Highland Avenue, we found there
11:28
Speaker 2: were two abandoned vehicles there. One was an abandoned Ford
11:32
Speaker 2: Express van that looked like it had been converted to
11:35
Speaker 2: carry either the maximum number of laborers or maybe the
11:39
Speaker 2: maximum number of trash bags full of cannabis. The other
11:44
Speaker 2: was a very nice BMW car. Dexter is a poor town.
11:48
Speaker 2: A BMW sticks out. You know, that vehicle's probably worth
11:52
Speaker 2: more than the median income of most people in that town.
11:56
Speaker 2: And as I observed the vehicle, there were two T-shirts,
12:02
Speaker 2: bright red T-shirts strapped over the front driver's seat and
12:05
Speaker 2: the passenger's seat, which is weird. Who does that? And
12:09
Speaker 2: as I looked closer at them, they had Chinese script
12:14
Speaker 2: and Chinese logos on them. And I photographed them, saved
12:18
Speaker 2: them for analysis later. And those t-shirts turned to be out,
12:22
Speaker 2: turned to be logos for the Siju Association of New York,
12:26
Speaker 2: which is one of these Chinese benevolent associations. They're technically
12:30
Speaker 2: often organized as 501c3 nonprofits, but they're front groups for
12:35
Speaker 2: the Chinese consulate in New York. They're part of the
12:38
Speaker 2: United Front, which is the Chinese Communist Party's, um, you know,
12:44
Speaker 2: umbrella organization for their activities to infiltrate and conduct espionage
12:50
Speaker 2: on other countries. So, the Xizhu Association has a presence
12:54
Speaker 2: in my hometown in Dexter. Right next, you know, I
12:57
Speaker 2: can't tell you how many times I've, like, chased my
13:00
Speaker 2: cocker spaniel when he got loose through the backyard of
13:02
Speaker 2: this house. And here's this, you know, I guess, um...
13:08
Speaker 2: you know, Communist Party paraphernalia present there. Uh, so, we
13:13
Speaker 2: write a story about this. I thought it was noteworthy
13:16
Speaker 2: in part because we were less than a mile away
13:18
Speaker 2: from a U.S. Army Reserve garrison. Uh, Maine does not
13:23
Speaker 2: have a lot of military facilities. Uh, but we do
13:26
Speaker 2: have one in Dexter, and I'm familiar with this one because, uh,
13:30
Speaker 2: it was the garrison that my brother served out of. And, uh,
13:33
Speaker 2: there's probably seven other, um, transnational criminal organization-affiliated properties encircling
13:41
Speaker 2: this particular U.S. military facility. So I thought that that
13:45
Speaker 2: was newsworthy, published a story about it. Another journalist, Philip
13:49
Speaker 2: Lenzicki from the Daily Caller News Foundation, who I would
13:52
Speaker 2: say is the best China journalist in America, bar none,
13:56
Speaker 2: was able to, because he speaks Mandarin Cantonese and is
14:00
Speaker 2: familiar with Chinese culture and language, was able to expand
14:05
Speaker 2: on my reporting from the ground and dig into the
14:09
Speaker 2: Siju Association. And what he found is that the executive
14:12
Speaker 2: director of the Siju Association is a guy named Huang Weizhan,
14:17
Speaker 2: who was among the first to be arrested in 2022
14:22
Speaker 2: in Carmel, Maine, about an hour from where I found
14:26
Speaker 2: those t-shirts at a very large chicken barn that had
14:29
Speaker 2: been converted into a marijuana grove. There was 4,000 plants confiscated,
14:35
Speaker 2: three other individuals arrested, but he was photographed along with
14:39
Speaker 2: his cousin or some kind of relative, and he was
14:42
Speaker 2: the executive director of the Siju Association. There are other
14:50
Speaker 2: examples like that where we know that individuals who are
14:58
Speaker 2: coordinating with the Chinese consulate in New York are directly
15:02
Speaker 2: tied to marijuana grows throughout Maine. And it's one of
15:07
Speaker 2: these things where it's sort of a puzzle that has
15:10
Speaker 2: to be fit together through financial records, real estate records,
15:13
Speaker 2: electrical records, physical inspections of the properties, eyewitness accounts, interviews
15:20
Speaker 2: with neighbors, but you can start to take this property
15:24
Speaker 2: in Dexter where those shirts were, then the barn in Carmel,
15:28
Speaker 2: and you can find out that this same guy hooked
15:30
Speaker 2: up the 400 amp electricity for this property and this
15:33
Speaker 2: property and this property, and the owner of this property
15:35
Speaker 2: also owns all these properties. And if you look at
15:38
Speaker 2: it hard enough and long enough, you can start to
15:41
Speaker 2: see how all of them interrelate. It's not a case
15:46
Speaker 2: of a cultural phenomenon where Chinese migrants to the United
15:51
Speaker 2: States all glommed on to this idea that they could
15:53
Speaker 2: come up to America and make a bunch of money
15:55
Speaker 2: growing pot. It is a coordinated and sophisticated effort There's
16:00
Speaker 2: a playbook that they have that they developed in California,
16:04
Speaker 2: Washington State, and in Oklahoma. And when Maine legalized marijuana
16:08
Speaker 2: in 2020 and formalized our adult use recreational and medicinal programs,
16:14
Speaker 2: they brought that playbook to Maine.
16:17
Speaker 1: Shit. Shit. And this is kind of where your journey
16:21
Speaker 1: starts within Chinese organized crime in Maine, correct? Yes. All right.
16:27
Speaker 1: Let's do it. Let me strap in with the nicotine here.
16:32
Speaker 1: So let's start at the beginning. What got your interest
16:36
Speaker 1: in Chinese organized crime in Maine? Because I've got family
16:40
Speaker 1: up in Maine, and I don't see a lot of
16:45
Speaker 1: Chinese or Asian population. I see a lot of Somalis,
16:50
Speaker 1: but I don't see a lot of Chinese. Because they're
16:52
Speaker 1: not allowed to leave the house. Say that again? They're
16:55
Speaker 1: not allowed to leave the house. Who's? The Chinese?
16:58
Speaker 2: The workers, yeah. For the most part, they're what amounts
17:01
Speaker 2: to indentured servants. The people who are seen at these
17:06
Speaker 2: properties are victims of trafficking. And there was actually, this
17:12
Speaker 2: is getting a little bit ahead, but there was an
17:14
Speaker 2: indictment handed down in the District of Massachusetts in July
17:18
Speaker 2: in which, well, first and most importantly, it showed that
17:22
Speaker 2: these guys were reading my reporting on their activities in
17:25
Speaker 2: the state, but also... They were smuggling people from China
17:30
Speaker 2: into Mexico, across the border, flying them to New England,
17:34
Speaker 2: stealing their passports, putting them in safes, and bringing them
17:37
Speaker 2: to marijuana grows in Maine. And it was, you're working
17:41
Speaker 2: at the cannabis house to work off your snakehead debt.
17:44
Speaker 2: You're going to work here until you've paid back the
17:47
Speaker 2: money you owe us for smuggling you here.
17:49
Speaker 1: Gotcha. You know, I just, I want to be clear,
17:52
Speaker 1: you know, I'm a I want to do this interview, one,
17:54
Speaker 1: to bring awareness to what's going on. I mean, it
17:56
Speaker 1: sounds like, you know, there's putting all kinds of chemicals
17:58
Speaker 1: and shit, marijuana, CBD, and then all the other stuff
18:04
Speaker 1: that we're going to dive into here. But, you know,
18:06
Speaker 1: I want to bring awareness to that, not only, you know,
18:09
Speaker 1: hopefully it does get scheduled as a Schedule 1 drug,
18:13
Speaker 1: the 70H, but also to, you know, people that are
18:16
Speaker 1: dabbling in that, that don't know what they're getting into,
18:19
Speaker 1: how addictive this shit can be and how it can
18:22
Speaker 1: completely ruin your life. So those are my goals. But
18:26
Speaker 1: let's dive in. So how did the Chinese organized crime
18:30
Speaker 1: in Maine pop onto your radar?
18:33
Speaker 2: So in August of 2022, Jenny Tehr, who at the time,
18:38
Speaker 2: she's a New York Post reporter now, but at the
18:42
Speaker 2: time she was at the Daily Caller News Foundation, she
18:44
Speaker 2: published a story based on a leaked Customs and Border
18:48
Speaker 2: Protection memo that just said that there were thousands of
18:52
Speaker 2: illicit Chinese marijuana grows in the United States that were
18:57
Speaker 2: operating in concert with the Chinese Communist Party, that were
19:03
Speaker 2: using the proceeds of these organizations to fund human trafficking,
19:08
Speaker 2: narcotics trafficking, all kinds of other illicit activities. And the
19:12
Speaker 2: memo said that 270 or more of these locations were
19:16
Speaker 2: in Maine. And a number of them were also in Oklahoma.
19:19
Speaker 2: Oklahoma has a serious problem, probably worse than Maine with
19:23
Speaker 2: this issue. But as a journalist who was based in Maine,
19:27
Speaker 2: I said, geez, if there's 270 of these drug houses
19:32
Speaker 2: in Maine, I've got to be able to find them.
19:35
Speaker 2: And one of the first things I did was call
19:37
Speaker 2: a friend of mine who I grew up with. He
19:41
Speaker 2: played center on my high school football team. And he's
19:45
Speaker 2: a master electrician. And I knew that Cultivating large amounts
19:48
Speaker 2: of cannabis involves huge amounts of electricity. And so I
19:52
Speaker 2: figured if somebody would know about this, he would know
19:54
Speaker 2: about it. He also happens to smoke a ton of pot.
19:57
Speaker 2: And so I called and said, hey, is this something
19:59
Speaker 2: that's happening? Is this real? He was like, oh, yeah.
20:03
Speaker 2: And I could tell just from the tone of his
20:04
Speaker 2: voice that it was like It wasn't just like, oh yeah,
20:07
Speaker 2: there's some guys up here who are doing this. It
20:09
Speaker 2: was like, yeah, this is real.
20:11
Speaker 1: This is common.
20:12
Speaker 2: This is common. And he'd been asked to spec some
20:15
Speaker 2: jobs installing 400 amp commercial grade electricity at properties where
20:21
Speaker 2: you don't need 400 amp electricity. And just to explain
20:25
Speaker 2: like the basics of electricity, you know, a lot of
20:28
Speaker 2: the older homes in Maine probably have like 500 amp entrances.
20:32
Speaker 2: 100 amps is.
20:34
Speaker 1: Common as well.
20:35
Speaker 2: If you have a home where you've got a hot
20:38
Speaker 2: tub and a bunch of mini split heat pumps and
20:41
Speaker 2: all your appliances are running on electricity, you might need
20:44
Speaker 2: 200 amps. 400 amps is commercial grade. That's like if
20:47
Speaker 2: you've got, you know, an auto workshop or some very
20:52
Speaker 2: intense electronics. That's why you would need a 400 amp entrance.
20:56
Speaker 2: All of these marijuana grows have 400 amp entrances because
21:00
Speaker 2: the amount of power they need to keep the lights
21:04
Speaker 2: on for one, but the lights generate heat. And so
21:07
Speaker 2: they need an abundance of mini split heat pumps, which
21:12
Speaker 2: are air conditioners that can also do heating. They're common
21:17
Speaker 2: appliances in Maine. So they need to be able to
21:20
Speaker 2: suck the heat out from the lights to maintain a
21:23
Speaker 2: perfectly stable atmosphere for their marijuana plants. So the marijuana
21:28
Speaker 2: grows all have very advanced electricity and lots of heat pumps.
21:31
Speaker 2: They're kind of easy to spot once you know what
21:33
Speaker 2: you're looking for. But once I was talking with my
21:37
Speaker 2: friend who's the electrician, he was telling me about these
21:39
Speaker 2: jobs where people who could barely speak English, groups of
21:43
Speaker 2: young military-aged Chinese men trying to get him to install
21:48
Speaker 2: enough electricity for properties to operate six electric stoves simultaneously.
21:56
Speaker 2: It was just stuff that didn't make sense to him.
21:58
Speaker 2: It wasn't residential electrical needs. It was just that, you know,
22:02
Speaker 2: like his spidey sense went off and he just said, no,
22:05
Speaker 2: I'm not doing those jobs. But he knew enough about
22:08
Speaker 2: the different areas where someone said yes to those jobs
22:11
Speaker 2: and he knew who said yes to those jobs. And
22:15
Speaker 2: his input was enough for me to be like, okay,
22:17
Speaker 2: we're onto something here. There's something going on. And I
22:21
Speaker 2: got in touch with Jenny and eventually was able to
22:24
Speaker 2: get her to come up to Maine And she didn't publish,
22:28
Speaker 2: but had been given a partial list of addresses. Because
22:33
Speaker 2: in addition to the Homeland Security memo that identified just
22:37
Speaker 2: the raw number, 270 sites, there was a list of
22:41
Speaker 2: addresses of these sites that had been flagged. I don't
22:44
Speaker 2: know how that list was created. I suspect it was
22:48
Speaker 2: just tips that had come in over time, and someone
22:51
Speaker 2: had filed them away. But we were able to take
22:56
Speaker 2: the 12 or 15 addresses and do a dive into
23:00
Speaker 2: the property records to see who'd purchased them, when, and
23:05
Speaker 2: some of the other details about the tax records and
23:07
Speaker 2: that kind of thing. And we were able to visit
23:09
Speaker 2: the properties and try to get interviews, see what's going on,
23:12
Speaker 2: talk with neighbors. And we found that every single one
23:15
Speaker 2: of them, they were very obviously marijuana grows. You had
23:18
Speaker 2: the advanced electricity, you had the heat pumps, you had
23:21
Speaker 2: individuals there who, when we... encountered people who were actually there, they,
23:26
Speaker 2: 99% of the time, they can't talk to us. And
23:31
Speaker 2: that's either a decision that they're making strategically in order
23:34
Speaker 2: to avoid having to communicate, or they actually don't speak English.
23:39
Speaker 2: Usually what we would encounter is somebody would come out,
23:41
Speaker 2: take out their phone, dial a New York number, and
23:44
Speaker 2: then hand the phone, and a woman on the other
23:46
Speaker 2: end of the line who could kind of speak English
23:48
Speaker 2: would correspond with us. And we had a couple of
23:52
Speaker 2: different cover stories, you know, husband and wife shopping for
23:57
Speaker 2: a home, you know, different things like that. And eventually
24:00
Speaker 2: we'd ask about the marijuana and they would dummy up.
24:03
Speaker 2: But we were never able to really successfully communicate with
24:06
Speaker 2: any of these individuals or talk to them. But our
24:10
Speaker 2: conversations with the neighbors to these properties were much more fruitful.
24:14
Speaker 2: And we found that the properties are purchased, a clean cut,
24:21
Speaker 2: A Chinese couple who speaks English shows up shortly after.
24:26
Speaker 2: They come to the neighbors. They give a gift of
24:28
Speaker 2: a bottle of wine or a bottle of cognac or,
24:31
Speaker 2: in one case, a Peking duck fresh from New York.
24:36
Speaker 2: And they introduce themselves and they say that they're fleeing COVID.
24:41
Speaker 2: They are trying to get out of the city. So
24:43
Speaker 2: they've purchased this place for their family in Maine and
24:46
Speaker 2: their family's going to be staying there. And then that
24:49
Speaker 2: couple's never seen again. And what follows is a steady
24:54
Speaker 2: flow of military-aged Chinese men, in some cases, older Chinese individuals,
25:01
Speaker 2: the very obvious odor of marijuana, both the active, pungent,
25:06
Speaker 2: skunky flower that people are familiar with, but also the
25:10
Speaker 2: kind of decaying detritus of marijuana once it's harvested and
25:15
Speaker 2: just thrown out back into a pile. It has its
25:18
Speaker 2: own kind of decaying plant matter smell. And U-Haul vehicles
25:24
Speaker 2: or sprinter vans arriving every 35 to 40 days.
25:29
Speaker 1: So, but this is all legal, correct?
25:32
Speaker 4: No.
25:33
Speaker 1: This is illegal.
25:34
Speaker 2: So, this is important context because in Maine, In 2020, we,
25:40
Speaker 2: in 2016, Maine voted in a referendum to legalize adult
25:43
Speaker 2: use recreational marijuana. It took until 2020 for the lawmakers
25:47
Speaker 2: to roll out the legal framework for both our adult
25:51
Speaker 2: use recreational program and our medicinal program. The adult use
25:56
Speaker 2: recreational program is highly regulated and there's seed to sale tracking.
26:02
Speaker 2: There's mandated testing. It's counterintuitive, but the medicinal program is
26:07
Speaker 2: less regulated. In either case, you are capped on the
26:11
Speaker 2: number of plants that you can grow. There are things
26:14
Speaker 2: you have to do, like locking your dumpsters, surveilling different areas.
26:18
Speaker 2: Everybody who's going to come in contact with your plants
26:20
Speaker 2: has to have a license as a sub-permittee. It's a
26:23
Speaker 2: very tightly regulated and controlled process. But at every single
26:28
Speaker 2: Chinese marijuana grow, they are, in some cases, 100, 500, 1,000
26:31
Speaker 2: times whatever the plant limits are. In addition to that.
26:36
Speaker 1: A thousand times?
26:39
Speaker 2: Holy shit.
26:40
Speaker 1: How big are these houses?
26:42
Speaker 2: Uh, they vary from double-wide trailers to... I've seen... There's
26:46
Speaker 2: one that they tried to convert into a marijuana grow
26:49
Speaker 2: that was an old factory in Lewiston that was, I think, 350,000
26:54
Speaker 2: square feet. If they'd finished it, it would've been the
26:57
Speaker 2: largest indoor marijuana grow in North America.
26:59
Speaker 1: So, why are the Chinese so interested in... I mean,
27:02
Speaker 1: you said there were ties back to the CCP. Why
27:05
Speaker 1: are they so interested in the marijuana business? Is it
27:09
Speaker 1: just business? Or, I mean, we know about, you know,
27:13
Speaker 1: the precursors to fentanyl are all coming from China. We
27:16
Speaker 1: know about China buying up farmland all over the United States,
27:19
Speaker 1: especially around military bases. That's been covered for years now.
27:23
Speaker 1: I don't think a lot of people know about it,
27:25
Speaker 1: but we've been talking about this for years. And so,
27:29
Speaker 1: you know, what is the motive? Is it just cash flow?
27:33
Speaker 2: It's a very low-risk business. activity, it's a very low
27:36
Speaker 2: risk way to generate huge amounts of cash. At the
27:41
Speaker 2: congressional hearing on the September 18th, I guess there was
27:49
Speaker 2: an individual from Oklahoma who estimated that the illicit business
27:52
Speaker 2: in Oklahoma, which is dominated by Chinese players, was worth
27:57
Speaker 2: $ 150 billion. Holy shit. $ 150 billion.
27:59
Speaker 1: Wow.
28:02
Speaker 2: And it's a cash business everywhere you go, whether it's
28:06
Speaker 2: legal operators or illegal operators, because the federal prohibition prevents
28:12
Speaker 2: you from accessing traditional payment rails. So you can't swipe
28:16
Speaker 2: a Visa credit card and buy marijuana at a dispensary.
28:20
Speaker 2: You have to use the ATM that they have at
28:22
Speaker 2: the dispensary. So you're dealing with, just in Oklahoma, $ 150
28:26
Speaker 2: billion a year in illicit sales, all cash. In Maine,
28:31
Speaker 2: they've estimated that it's somewhere between four and five billion dollars. Personally,
28:35
Speaker 2: I think that law enforcement has a little strain of
28:39
Speaker 2: the reefer madness overestimating the value. I don't think they
28:45
Speaker 2: fairly take into the equation the costs of doing business,
28:50
Speaker 2: reinvesting in new real estate, buying chemicals, buying, you know,
28:54
Speaker 2: spools of copper wire to put together a marijuana grow.
28:58
Speaker 2: So I think that that might be a little bit
28:59
Speaker 2: on the high end, but we're talking about massive, massive
29:03
Speaker 2: amounts of cash that are then reinvested into new real
29:07
Speaker 2: estate and other malign activities of the CCP. Some of
29:14
Speaker 2: this stuff goes far beyond the remit of a journalist
29:17
Speaker 2: from Maine.
29:18
Speaker 1: So why are they... Okay, I just want to get
29:22
Speaker 1: to the bottom of it. And so is this a
29:26
Speaker 1: business that they've generated to procure more real estate in
29:31
Speaker 1: the United States? Or are they poisoning the marijuana? Or,
29:36
Speaker 1: you know, it could be anything. China has so many angles.
29:39
Speaker 2: Yes, yes.
29:39
Speaker 1: And yes. What am I missing?
29:41
Speaker 2: So the cannabis that they're producing, more often than not,
29:48
Speaker 2: has pesticides on it, banned substances. There are 13 or
29:53
Speaker 2: 14 different pesticides that have been identified on at Chinese
29:57
Speaker 2: grows in California that are prohibited for use in the
30:00
Speaker 2: United States on anything.
30:02
Speaker 1: And these are indoor?
30:04
Speaker 2: They are indoor grows in the Siskiyou forest in Northern California.
30:08
Speaker 2: They have what are called hoop houses. We can find
30:11
Speaker 2: the YouTube video of some people who have flown drones
30:14
Speaker 2: over them, but they're like city-size areas where they put
30:17
Speaker 2: up these hoop houses, which are greenhouses. They'll grow marijuana
30:21
Speaker 2: in there, and then they'll set up like a 55-gallon
30:24
Speaker 2: drum and they'll fill it with sawdust, which is a
30:28
Speaker 2: mixture of all of these different herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides,
30:33
Speaker 2: many of which have been imported from China and have
30:36
Speaker 2: no legal use in the US. And they'll put a
30:41
Speaker 2: wick in them and burn them. And the smoke fills
30:43
Speaker 2: the hoop house and coats the marijuana and ensures that
30:47
Speaker 2: you don't have any product loss to mold, because that's
30:50
Speaker 2: a big problem with growing marijuana is the heat, humidity,
30:52
Speaker 2: you're gonna get mold, you're gonna lose your marijuana. So
30:56
Speaker 2: this is like dropping off, you know, Agent Orange or
30:58
Speaker 2: a nuclear bomb that's gonna kill everything except for your marijuana.
31:03
Speaker 2: And they're doing this at a smaller level in houses
31:05
Speaker 2: in Maine as well, where they'll cut half a beer can,
31:08
Speaker 2: take these very same mylar bags that they're finding in California,
31:13
Speaker 2: they'll find them in Maine, they'll dump them into a
31:15
Speaker 2: beer can, they'll burn them, and they smoke the whole
31:18
Speaker 2: house so that they don't get any mildew or mites
31:22
Speaker 2: or whatever pest on their marijuana plants. And that marijuana
31:27
Speaker 2: is then later consumed along with whatever crazy Chinese pesticides
31:32
Speaker 2: have been applied to it because there's not a lot
31:34
Speaker 2: of testing on it. And if it's exported across state lines,
31:37
Speaker 2: that's inherently illegal. So whoever takes custody of it after that,
31:42
Speaker 2: whoever sells it after that, they're already breaking the law.
31:47
Speaker 2: And there's not really going to be any recourse for
31:51
Speaker 2: a consumer who finds out that they bought illegal weed
31:55
Speaker 2: in a state where it's prohibited, and later they find
31:57
Speaker 2: out that it's got pesticides in it or something. They're
32:00
Speaker 2: probably never going to know. And this stuff has spread
32:03
Speaker 2: so far throughout smoke shops and head shops in the
32:06
Speaker 2: United States that we don't really know where it's being grown.
32:10
Speaker 2: You can't possibly know where it's being grown. The supply
32:14
Speaker 2: chain is so distributed. So the first thing I would
32:16
Speaker 2: say is, yes, it furthers the CCP's goals to have
32:21
Speaker 2: as much cheap poisoned pot as possible on the streets,
32:25
Speaker 2: as widely available as possible. So instead of being, you know,
32:29
Speaker 2: fit and, you know, patriotic and ready to join the military,
32:33
Speaker 2: you're sitting on your couch smoking poisoned pot all day
32:36
Speaker 2: playing Xbox. Like, you can see how that furthers the
32:39
Speaker 2: CCP's goal. But they also have established a network that
32:44
Speaker 2: is multimodal in that some of these products are distributed
32:49
Speaker 2: in the form of vape cartridges. So they're like nicotine
32:55
Speaker 2: vapes or traditional cannabis vapes, where it's just a little
33:00
Speaker 2: canister that's got some oil in it. And that's the extracted,
33:04
Speaker 2: refined 99% THC version of the product. You create that
33:09
Speaker 2: by stuffing a metal tube or a glass tube full
33:12
Speaker 2: of cannabis leaf or cannabis bud, and you blow butane
33:16
Speaker 2: gas or some other kind of gas through it, and
33:18
Speaker 2: all of the oils dissolve out into that gas. including
33:22
Speaker 2: the pesticides and fungicides, by the way, out the bottom
33:25
Speaker 2: comes the pure THC, which is then used for gummies, vapes,
33:31
Speaker 2: whatever kind of product. But the end result is that
33:34
Speaker 2: you've got these little teeny weeny canisters that you can
33:37
Speaker 2: sell at hemp shops, head shops, wherever, all over the
33:41
Speaker 2: United States. And people are going to pay to have
33:44
Speaker 2: them distributed. People are going to pay to buy them
33:46
Speaker 2: and they're going to put them up to their mouths
33:48
Speaker 2: and they're going to suck on them because they think
33:49
Speaker 2: they're going to get high. And if you were a
33:53
Speaker 2: planner for the Chinese military, and you wanted to do
33:57
Speaker 2: something bad to the United States, what better network for
34:00
Speaker 2: the distribution of a chemical or biological weapon than a
34:04
Speaker 2: network that's going to self-distribute these little vials, millions of them,
34:10
Speaker 2: to 10,000 different little tobacco shops and head shops all
34:12
Speaker 2: across the United States, and people are gonna suck it
34:15
Speaker 2: directly into their lungs. So there's a lot of hypotheticals
34:18
Speaker 2: and potentials there, But it certainly exists, and that's the
34:22
Speaker 2: network that they've built. And in the meantime, they're accruing
34:26
Speaker 2: hundreds of billions of dollars to do whatever they want with,
34:29
Speaker 2: to support human trafficking, to support bringing things across the border,
34:34
Speaker 2: to support buying up properties in New Hampshire, to support
34:37
Speaker 2: buying up real estate next to military bases. I think
34:43
Speaker 2: the question of what they're doing with all of this money,
34:47
Speaker 2: I think is for people you know, some of your
34:50
Speaker 2: old colleagues and friends to determine. The FBI, I think,
34:55
Speaker 2: should be on this. The United States government should be
34:59
Speaker 2: answering those questions and tracking that money. But what we
35:02
Speaker 2: found in Maine is how they're generating the money and
35:07
Speaker 2: the schemes that have allowed them to do it now
35:10
Speaker 2: for five years without attracting a significant degree of attention.
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Speaker 1: Buy it today at psyopshow.com. How are, so these are
39:02
Speaker 1: illegal products. These are illegal pop farms.
39:04
Speaker 3: Yes.
39:05
Speaker 1: How is an illegal pop farm able to get their
39:11
Speaker 1: marijuana into a dispensary that supposedly is regulated?
39:17
Speaker 2: In states where marijuana is legal, we have a fictional
39:23
Speaker 2: system set up where there's a company that sells a
39:27
Speaker 2: computer program that's supposed to track your inventory and where
39:32
Speaker 2: it's going and where it's selling. It's very easy to
39:34
Speaker 2: manipulate it and cook the books. So you can grow
39:38
Speaker 2: more marijuana than you tell your program you're growing. Or
39:42
Speaker 2: you can say that you destroyed marijuana that you didn't
39:45
Speaker 2: end up destroying. You actually just diverted it. They call
39:48
Speaker 2: that diversion and inversion. That's within a tracked side of
39:53
Speaker 2: the program. So it's very, very easy to manipulate what
39:58
Speaker 2: the government sees or what the computer program that tracks
40:01
Speaker 2: your inventory sees. But in Maine, our medicinal program doesn't
40:05
Speaker 2: even have that tracking program. So within the existing legal
40:12
Speaker 2: marijuana system, there are all kinds of loopholes. And the
40:15
Speaker 2: Chinese are very skilled and very adept at exploiting these loopholes.
40:21
Speaker 2: To give you a concrete example, in the beginning of
40:26
Speaker 2: Maine's experience with triad weed, there were some individuals who
40:31
Speaker 2: came up to Maine. One of them was Johnny Wu.
40:35
Speaker 2: Johnny Wu comes up to Maine, speaks great English. He
40:38
Speaker 2: rents a facility outside of our state capital. He's growing
40:41
Speaker 2: marijuana there. He gets his medicinal marijuana license using his
40:44
Speaker 2: Massachusetts driver's license and purports to be complying with all
40:49
Speaker 2: the rules. But he, using his approved marijuana card, can
40:56
Speaker 2: go around to all of these other grows and grab
41:00
Speaker 2: their illegally grown marijuana and then bring it to dispensaries
41:04
Speaker 2: and offer it to them and say, oh, no, no, no,
41:06
Speaker 2: this is legal. I grew it. See, I'm legal. This
41:10
Speaker 2: is my licenses. Pay no attention to the fact that
41:12
Speaker 2: all this flower looks different, and it's all in different baggies,
41:16
Speaker 2: and you can know just based on common sense that
41:18
Speaker 2: it didn't come from the same grow, but I've got
41:21
Speaker 2: my license, your ass is covered, and oh, by the way,
41:24
Speaker 2: it's 50% what some other guy's gonna charge you. And
41:28
Speaker 2: this is in the middle of the pandemic when the
41:30
Speaker 2: state of Maine was in this severe lockdown, so much
41:33
Speaker 2: economic uncertainty, people are trying to put bread on the table,
41:37
Speaker 2: and somebody's offering you half-priced weed that you can mark
41:40
Speaker 2: up and make a buck off of, yeah, you're gonna
41:42
Speaker 2: take them up on it. And then it's laundered into
41:45
Speaker 2: the existing medicinal system. So that's one example of how
41:49
Speaker 2: the illegally grown cannabis can be laundered into the legal
41:55
Speaker 2: regulated cannabis sales system. But the other method that they're
41:59
Speaker 2: using increasingly is through the hemp loophole. And this is
42:03
Speaker 2: a national problem that really started in 2018 with the
42:09
Speaker 2: legalization of hemp cultivation, which was led by Senator Rand
42:12
Speaker 2: Paul and, uh, Mitch McConnell at the time. Uh, the
42:16
Speaker 2: idea was that, uh, you know, there's lots of hemp
42:19
Speaker 2: farmers in Kentucky, and we're gonna grow a bunch of hemp,
42:21
Speaker 2: and pretty soon, people will be wearing, you know, T-shirt,
42:24
Speaker 2: T-shirts and sweatshirts made out of hemp, and they'll make
42:27
Speaker 2: concrete out of hemp, and it'll be environmentally friendly. That
42:30
Speaker 2: never panned out. What happened instead was, we gave rise
42:34
Speaker 2: to this whole new class of intoxicating hemp products. There's
42:39
Speaker 2: chemicals that you can extract from hemp and then convert
42:42
Speaker 2: into intoxicating substances, but we also have smokable hemp products
42:48
Speaker 2: that can have chemicals added to them that make them psychoactive,
42:53
Speaker 2: that turn them into drugs. But most of what we
42:56
Speaker 2: have is hemp that is, we have like illegally grown
43:01
Speaker 2: weed in Maine that is brought into a state like
43:05
Speaker 2: Tennessee or Kentucky or whatever prohibition state, and is then
43:11
Speaker 2: sold as hemp. And what they call it is THCA,
43:15
Speaker 2: which is just a totally fictitious, invented term to describe
43:20
Speaker 2: what's in fact just actual marijuana. And actually, I have
43:25
Speaker 2: some for you. Not quite gummy bears, and I wouldn't
43:28
Speaker 2: encourage you to consume it, I bought this about 10
43:31
Speaker 2: minutes after I got off the plane.
43:35
Speaker 1: This.
43:36
Speaker 2: Tennessee is one of the biggest prohibition states or the
43:40
Speaker 2: strictest marijuana laws in the country.
43:45
Speaker 1: Smells just like it. It's weed. It's cannabis.
43:48
Speaker 2: It's not hemp. But it's being sold as THCA and
43:53
Speaker 2: it's being sold in a prohibition state. And it was
43:56
Speaker 2: one product. in 40 jars up on a wall in
44:00
Speaker 2: a random head shop. What are the chances that I
44:03
Speaker 2: just happened to pick the one head shop to stop at?
44:05
Speaker 2: And I found all kinds of cannabis being grown in
44:07
Speaker 2: a state where it's supposed to be illegal. So there's
44:11
Speaker 2: that loophole, the THCA loophole, but there's also, there's all
44:15
Speaker 2: kinds of various ways where tobacco shops, hemp shops, and
44:18
Speaker 2: head shops are selling real cannabis that they procure from
44:23
Speaker 2: cultivation states like Maine, Michigan, California, Oklahoma, Washington State, and
44:29
Speaker 2: sell illegally.
44:30
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. I mean, so what is the difference between THCA, THCP, Delta-8, Delta-10?
44:40
Speaker 1: I mean, I see, I can't remember which one, but
44:42
Speaker 1: I think it's Delta-8 is huge in Tennessee. I mean,
44:46
Speaker 1: what is the difference? I mean, what is it?
44:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, so there's three species of cannabis plant. There's cannabis
44:55
Speaker 2: sativa and cannabis indica. Those are the most common ones.
44:58
Speaker 2: Those are the ones that are going to get you high.
45:01
Speaker 2: Cannabis sativa is like the heady buzz that makes you
45:03
Speaker 2: feel like you're brilliant and you can go do a
45:06
Speaker 2: painting or something. Cannabis indica makes you feel like you're
45:08
Speaker 2: being sucked into a couch. The other form of cannabis
45:12
Speaker 2: is just hemp and it's non-psychoactive and it doesn't have
45:16
Speaker 2: THC delta-9. THC delta-9 is the primary psychoactive ingredient in
45:22
Speaker 2: all cannabis. It's basically, getting back to the bath salts thing,
45:28
Speaker 2: we've developed our regulatory regime around a molecule. In this case,
45:32
Speaker 2: it's THC Delta-9. So when we created the hemp law
45:38
Speaker 2: in 2018, we decided that anything that tested at a
45:41
Speaker 2: certain point in time as having a small enough percentage
45:45
Speaker 2: of THC Delta-9 was going to be treated as hemp,
45:48
Speaker 2: not illicit cannabis, not a drug. And that was gonna
45:52
Speaker 2: allow for this hemp industry to flourish. So THC Delta-9
45:57
Speaker 2: is the primary psychoactive ingredient, but it's one of like
46:00
Speaker 2: 150 different cannabinoids that are present in the marijuana plant.
46:05
Speaker 2: There's a bunch that are non-psychoactive, CBN, CVA, some that
46:11
Speaker 2: are helpful for sleep, some that are helpful for anti-inflammation.
46:15
Speaker 2: There are some genuine medicinal properties to cannabinoids. that are
46:19
Speaker 2: found in the marijuana plant. CBD is a large one
46:22
Speaker 2: that I'm sure you've seen marketed all over the place
46:25
Speaker 2: as a cure-all for joint pain and sleep, whatever. But
46:30
Speaker 2: in addition to those cannabinoids, you also have Delta 10
46:34
Speaker 2: and Delta 8, which I would describe as Delta 9 adjacent.
46:39
Speaker 2: So they're kind of like THC Delta 9. They're going
46:44
Speaker 2: to give you a little bit of the experience of
46:47
Speaker 2: a high, If you're a veteran marijuana user, you're not
46:51
Speaker 2: going to recognize it as the same experience. But if
46:54
Speaker 2: you're an 18-year-old taking a puff off a vape for
46:57
Speaker 2: the first time, you might not know. And because they
47:01
Speaker 2: do not contain THC Delta-9, they are regulated in a
47:06
Speaker 2: different way and can be available at smoke shops through
47:10
Speaker 2: different age gates. They can be available at smoke shops
47:14
Speaker 2: and non-legalization states. And one of the other ways that
47:20
Speaker 2: we regulate cannabis products in this country that just doesn't
47:24
Speaker 2: make sense is whether they're hemp derived or cannabis derived.
47:29
Speaker 2: So you can derive CBD from a hemp plant grown
47:35
Speaker 2: in Kentucky and through a small chemical process involving heat
47:39
Speaker 2: and acid, turn it into THC Delta-9. And it's identical
47:45
Speaker 2: chemically to the THC Delta-9 that would come from a
47:48
Speaker 2: cannabis sativa plant grown in Maine, but it's regulated totally differently.
47:53
Speaker 1: Interesting.
47:54
Speaker 2: Even in Kentucky and Tennessee, wherever, in Maine, totally different
48:00
Speaker 2: regulatory system. So in Maine right now, I can go
48:03
Speaker 2: into gas stations and I can buy a beverage that's
48:06
Speaker 2: five milligrams Delta-9 THC, hemp derived. But if I wanted
48:11
Speaker 2: to buy cannabis sativa derived, with five milligrams THC Delta-9
48:17
Speaker 2: in them. I'd have to go to a dispensary, show
48:19
Speaker 2: my license, go through a whole different regulatory process. And
48:23
Speaker 2: the process to create those products would be totally different.
48:26
Speaker 2: The analogy I've used is it'd be like, it'd be
48:29
Speaker 2: like regulating alcohol differently depending on how it was formed.
48:33
Speaker 2: Like regulating, you know, corn whiskey in one way, but
48:37
Speaker 2: potato vodka in another way, because corn-derived alcohol is in
48:41
Speaker 2: some way different than potato-derived alcohol. Doesn't make sense, but
48:45
Speaker 2: that's the system that we have right now. And that's
48:48
Speaker 2: the loophole that has allowed some of the least ethical
48:54
Speaker 2: players to reap the biggest rewards. Because we've set up
48:58
Speaker 2: a system now where what they're effectively doing is a
49:02
Speaker 2: form of arbitrage, where they know that they can safely
49:05
Speaker 2: and for low risk grow and cultivate in states like
49:09
Speaker 2: Maine or California or Oklahoma, and then take that product
49:13
Speaker 2: and instead of selling it in Maine for bargain store prices,
49:17
Speaker 2: they can bring it to a prohibition state and sell
49:19
Speaker 2: it through a smoke shop or a head shop or
49:22
Speaker 2: a tobacco shop, and they're gonna make more money, and
49:26
Speaker 2: the money's also gonna be clean once it comes through
49:29
Speaker 2: the Visa payment processor.
49:31
Speaker 1: Are the Chinese involved in the hemp stuff too? Yes.
49:34
Speaker 1: They are? Yes.
49:35
Speaker 2: Uh, they're... it's really all one, I guess, one system
49:42
Speaker 2: or one network. There's not a lot of differentiation between
49:46
Speaker 2: the hemp and the cannabis. There's cannabis that's being passed
49:49
Speaker 2: off as hemp. There's hemp that's being passed off as cannabis.
49:52
Speaker 2: And once they're, they call it blowing it out. So
49:57
Speaker 2: once you take, you know, in Oklahoma, you can grow
49:59
Speaker 2: a huge field of hemp legally. harvest it and you
50:03
Speaker 2: blow it out by putting the plant biomass into a
50:06
Speaker 2: canister passing the gas through it to do gas extraction
50:10
Speaker 2: and then the end result is all this oil and
50:12
Speaker 2: there's a couple of different cannabinoids that are in that
50:15
Speaker 2: oil with hemp the most prominent one is CBD and
50:19
Speaker 2: you can convert that CBD into THC they call they
50:23
Speaker 2: call those products conversion products and then that THC is
50:29
Speaker 2: indiscernible from the THC that you would get from growing
50:32
Speaker 2: cannabis at, you know, a flop house in Dexter, Maine.
50:35
Speaker 2: So they're, they're basically the same thing, but our politicians
50:39
Speaker 2: and our regulatory regulatory system treats them like they're completely different.
50:44
Speaker 2: Like representative Comer just the other day put out a
50:46
Speaker 2: statement about, uh, you know, the value of the hemp
50:49
Speaker 2: industry and how important hemp, you know, hemp farmers are
50:52
Speaker 2: the backbone of America. And, I'm sure that there are
50:55
Speaker 2: a couple of guys who are growing hemp in an
50:58
Speaker 2: honest way to use it for industrial products, but most
51:03
Speaker 2: of the hemp is being used for consumable hemp products.
51:07
Speaker 1: How long ago was it that you found out about
51:10
Speaker 1: the 270 homes that the Chinese are using in Maine?
51:11
Speaker 1: That was in 2022. How many are there now? Probably 500. 500?
51:14
Speaker 2: Maybe more.
51:23
Speaker 1: So it's over.
51:24
Speaker 2: And it's not just houses where they're growing.
51:29
Speaker 1: Marijuana.
51:29
Speaker 2: We found boarding houses, places that are set up for,
51:34
Speaker 2: you know, a large number of guys to eat, sleep,
51:38
Speaker 2: and shit in between cycles going out to tend to
51:42
Speaker 2: the marijuana plants.
51:43
Speaker 1: That was in 2022?
51:43
Speaker 4: Yeah.
51:43
Speaker 1: Or 2022, you found 270 homes. Now there's well over 500.
51:45
Speaker 2: Yeah, so in 2022, That was when the memo came
51:52
Speaker 2: out revealing the existence of these locations. And in the
51:57
Speaker 2: ensuing years, we began a process of, based on the
52:01
Speaker 2: patterns we found on the address that we obtained from
52:03
Speaker 2: the reporter who first published that leaked memo, we expanded
52:07
Speaker 2: our investigation, looking at property records, real estate records, tax records,
52:13
Speaker 2: electrical records, to identify more of these places, and then
52:17
Speaker 2: set about driving, you know, probably more than 10,000 miles
52:21
Speaker 2: around the state of Maine to inspect these spaces, try
52:24
Speaker 2: to talk to these people, talk to their neighbors, and
52:27
Speaker 2: see if we could, uh, you know, put some reality
52:33
Speaker 2: around this story that had come out. Because, you know,
52:36
Speaker 2: I've been in conservative media long enough, so I've seen
52:38
Speaker 2: these flash-of-the-pan stories where it's like, oh, the Chinese are
52:41
Speaker 2: doing this, the Iranians are doing this, and it's like, eh, well,
52:44
Speaker 2: are they trying to, like, scare me? Are they trying
52:46
Speaker 2: to use me in some way? And this was around
52:49
Speaker 2: the time, too, when there was a lot of stories
52:51
Speaker 2: coming out that were like, you know, the China spy
52:53
Speaker 2: balloon is coming over North America, and there was some
52:59
Speaker 2: stuff that just seemed like they were trying to push
53:01
Speaker 2: this narrative of conflict with China. So I was a
53:04
Speaker 2: little bit skeptical of it at first. So I wanted
53:06
Speaker 2: to actually get out and see for myself firsthand what
53:09
Speaker 2: was going on. And then through that process, we identified,
53:13
Speaker 2: without having any leaked information, the 270 sites that the
53:18
Speaker 2: Department of Homeland Security was aware of and actually identified,
53:22
Speaker 2: I wanna say, we actually identified more than they were
53:27
Speaker 2: aware of. And I eventually did get the Department of
53:31
Speaker 2: Homeland Security list through a source. And I was a
53:35
Speaker 2: little bit embarrassed for them because mine was way better.
53:37
Speaker 1: Wow. So were these, I'm just curious, were these properties
53:43
Speaker 1: already there and you discovered them or are these new
53:47
Speaker 1: properties that they're buying? What I'm getting at is, you know,
53:50
Speaker 1: it's been what, three years since 2022 now. So you're
53:54
Speaker 1: saying there's over 500 of these homes, you know, in
53:56
Speaker 1: the state of Maine. So are we seeing real estate
53:58
Speaker 1: double every two years or are you just finding out
54:01
Speaker 1: more that were already in existence? Do you see what
54:05
Speaker 1: I'm saying? Yes.
54:06
Speaker 2: I think it's a mixture of both. I think I'm
54:09
Speaker 2: finding new ones that had already been operating, but they
54:13
Speaker 2: are at a point where they're building themselves new facilities
54:17
Speaker 2: that are more suited to what they need. They're building
54:22
Speaker 2: facilities that are larger, that are more industrial in nature
54:27
Speaker 2: and are closer to the I-95 corridor and have better security.
54:32
Speaker 1: And in part, I think that's- What kind of security?
54:36
Speaker 2: I mean, gates, security cameras, motion sensors. There's some that
54:44
Speaker 2: I've been to where maybe 40 feet before you drive
54:50
Speaker 2: past the foot of the driveway, you pass a motion
54:53
Speaker 2: sensor and lights go on at the end of the driveway.
54:55
Speaker 1: Okay, so we're not talking about an armed human security.
54:59
Speaker 2: No, I've never seen people carrying guns. I've heard stories
55:04
Speaker 2: from neighbors about them being alarmed by, hearing target practice
55:08
Speaker 2: and gunfire. I've never seen anyone armed with guns. I've
55:12
Speaker 2: been chased off a lot of sites by angry guys
55:15
Speaker 2: driving black Toyotas. They all love black Toyotas for some reason.
55:19
Speaker 2: I don't know what it is. They love Toyotas. But they,
55:25
Speaker 2: by and large, don't flaunt firearms. I have some sources
55:33
Speaker 2: who have done work on these properties because Once in
55:36
Speaker 2: a while, it's necessary for them to interact with white
55:39
Speaker 2: contractors if they need propane work, for example, if they
55:42
Speaker 2: need electrical work. There are some things that they can't
55:44
Speaker 2: do themselves. They prefer to do all of their handiwork
55:47
Speaker 2: themselves because it doesn't allow, you know, eyes peeping into
55:52
Speaker 2: what might be happening there. But I've heard, you know,
55:55
Speaker 2: stories about large grows in very rural parts of the
55:59
Speaker 2: state where there are an abundance of military-age men dressed similarly.
56:06
Speaker 2: It was described to me as fatigues, close crop hair.
56:11
Speaker 2: And one of the things like an electrician, for example,
56:15
Speaker 2: will do when they're installing 400 amp service at a
56:17
Speaker 2: barn in rural Maine, is they'll go inside and do
56:20
Speaker 2: load testing to try and make sure that everything's worked out.
56:23
Speaker 2: And this individual told me when he tried to go
56:28
Speaker 2: inside to do load testing, which is something he's done
56:31
Speaker 2: hundreds of times at all of the properties that he's visited,
56:35
Speaker 2: two guys, two Chinese guys grabbed him, stopped him and
56:38
Speaker 2: said no, and physically escorted him off the property and
56:41
Speaker 2: stuffed two $ 100 bills in his back pocket and said,
56:44
Speaker 2: coffee money, coffee money, coffee money, and pushed him off
56:47
Speaker 2: the property. And we've had, you know, a lot of
56:51
Speaker 2: stories like that of technicians being met at the driveway
56:55
Speaker 2: of facilities and told they can't enter, even though they'd
56:58
Speaker 2: been called to help service some kind of electrical need. Um, uh,
57:04
Speaker 2: there've been a lot of, I would say, alarming stories,
57:07
Speaker 2: and there's definitely a pattern of co-location with sensitive infrastructure and, um,
57:14
Speaker 2: military facilities in Maine. But Maine doesn't have enough military
57:19
Speaker 2: facilities to really say for sure whether it's a pattern
57:23
Speaker 2: or if it's just that there are Chinese marijuana grows everywhere.
57:27
Speaker 1: Uh... Yeah, you know, I mean, have you... How many
57:30
Speaker 1: of these properties have you entered?
57:35
Speaker 2: Well, personally, I would never break and enter a trespass
57:38
Speaker 2: on private property. I have sources that I'm familiar with
57:44
Speaker 2: have entered maybe 25 or 30 of them.
57:48
Speaker 1: Have you seen any type, I mean, especially the ones
57:50
Speaker 1: near a military base, have you seen any type of communications? Yes.
57:54
Speaker 2: Really?
57:55
Speaker 1: What kind?
57:56
Speaker 2: There was a facility, 10 Cooley Road in Harmony, one
57:59
Speaker 2: of the most sophisticated military groves that we've seen. They
58:03
Speaker 2: built a three-story barn there. They had a piece of
58:06
Speaker 2: equipment there called the Triminator, which is a $ 15, 000 piece
58:10
Speaker 2: of equipment that comes from a company in Las Vegas
58:13
Speaker 2: that can process just an insane amount of marijuana bud.
58:17
Speaker 2: So this facility was not for growing, you know, a
58:22
Speaker 2: licensed amount of marijuana. They were processing way more bud.
58:25
Speaker 2: They were processing bud for surrounding facilities. And this property
58:29
Speaker 2: had been raided by the sheriff just days before we
58:33
Speaker 2: arrived there. And we were able to observe through the
58:37
Speaker 2: window a computer there that we later learned was like
58:43
Speaker 2: a $ 5, 000 computer, a very sophisticated computer that they had.
58:49
Speaker 2: And hey, maybe they just loved playing Diablo or computer
58:52
Speaker 2: games or something, but it wasn't something that the sheriff's
58:58
Speaker 2: department noticed or thought was important or decided to bag
59:03
Speaker 2: for evidence. which is something that we've seen frequently. There's
59:07
Speaker 2: a facility in Greenbush, Maine, where there's a shortwave radio
59:12
Speaker 2: tower that used to broadcast, you know, Christian content all
59:18
Speaker 2: the way to Africa that is situated in an area
59:22
Speaker 2: where Chinese cartels own multiple abutting properties. including properties on
59:29
Speaker 2: this specific road, I think four of which were on
59:32
Speaker 2: the Department of Homeland Security's watch list. And we've, you know, again,
59:39
Speaker 2: some of these stories come to me secondhand or thirdhand,
59:44
Speaker 2: but it's always in instances where the cartels find themselves
59:49
Speaker 2: needing a Mainer to come in and fix something. And
59:53
Speaker 2: in this case, there was a boiler that broke down
59:57
Speaker 2: and they needed heat. And so they needed a local
1:00:00
Speaker 2: to come fix their boiler. And the boiler repair technician
1:00:03
Speaker 2: spoke of what he just assumed were Bitcoin mining machines
1:00:09
Speaker 2: in their basement. Lots and lots of Bitcoin mining machines.
1:00:14
Speaker 2: Which wouldn't make sense in Maine because electricity is so expensive.
1:00:16
Speaker 2: If you were to mine Bitcoin in Maine, you'd be
1:00:19
Speaker 2: mining it at a loss every single second you had
1:00:21
Speaker 2: the machine turned on. But who knows what that individual saw.
1:00:26
Speaker 2: But I know that in the majority of cases when
1:00:31
Speaker 2: there are electronics at these sites, they're generally not noticed
1:00:36
Speaker 2: by the members of law enforcement who are executing the raids.
1:00:41
Speaker 2: What they're doing is they're showing up, they observe the
1:00:43
Speaker 2: illegal marijuana, they cut the plants down, they destroy them
1:00:46
Speaker 2: and they leave. Um, they view it as traditional old
1:00:50
Speaker 2: school drug operations. They're not, um... They're not trained or
1:00:56
Speaker 2: equipped to combat transnational criminal organizations, and they don't really
1:01:00
Speaker 2: view this as a struggle between civilizations. They don't see
1:01:06
Speaker 2: this as a national security threat. They're not seeing the
1:01:10
Speaker 2: bigger picture. No, and no one's told the bigger picture either,
1:01:13
Speaker 2: is the thing. And there's a total paralysis on the
1:01:17
Speaker 2: part of law enforcement to recognize that this is a
1:01:22
Speaker 2: phenomenon that is exclusive to Chinese guys from New York
1:01:26
Speaker 2: and Massachusetts who speak Cantonese, have, you know, maybe they
1:01:30
Speaker 2: have green cards or citizenship, but they have historical ties
1:01:33
Speaker 2: to China, but a lot of them are straight illegal aliens,
1:01:37
Speaker 2: or they'll claim asylum after they're caught at an illegal
1:01:40
Speaker 2: marijuana site. None of them want to be called, you know,
1:01:44
Speaker 2: racists or accused of profiling. And I sympathize with that
1:01:48
Speaker 2: and they should not be racist, but they also shouldn't
1:01:52
Speaker 2: blind themselves to the fact that this is a transnational
1:01:56
Speaker 2: criminal conspiracy aided and abetted by the Chinese Communist Party.
1:02:01
Speaker 2: It's a huge part of the equation. If you ignore that,
1:02:04
Speaker 2: you're fighting this with both hands behind your back. And
1:02:08
Speaker 2: we've had, the state has had no help whatsoever from
1:02:13
Speaker 2: state leadership or the state police in combating these cartels.
1:02:19
Speaker 2: It's been almost exclusively county sheriffs and local police, and
1:02:24
Speaker 2: in a few instances, national DEA.
1:02:27
Speaker 1: Oh, shit. Nobody's on this except the locals, huh?
1:02:30
Speaker 2: And even, in many cases, not the locals.
1:02:33
Speaker 1: Jeez, do you have any idea of how much of
1:02:36
Speaker 1: the hemp in marijuana industry, what percentage is from CCP operations?
1:02:48
Speaker 2: It's hard to tell because there is just so much
1:02:51
Speaker 2: being cultivated and consumed. I do know that America is
1:02:55
Speaker 2: now an exporter nation when it comes to cannabis. There
1:03:00
Speaker 2: are other countries, Ireland, the UK, that are complaining to
1:03:04
Speaker 2: federal authorities about American-grown cannabis showing up in their countries.
1:03:10
Speaker 2: The volume, I mean, we're probably talking in the millions
1:03:14
Speaker 2: of tons of Hemp more so, because it's less potent.
1:03:19
Speaker 2: But the appetite for Americans for these cannabis products, it
1:03:27
Speaker 2: continues to stun me. Every time I think I've figured out,
1:03:32
Speaker 2: you know, what the ceiling is, I'm blown away. I
1:03:36
Speaker 2: think in the recent congressional testimony, someone from Oklahoma said
1:03:39
Speaker 2: that they... Someone did the math there and calculated that
1:03:42
Speaker 2: just in Oklahoma, they were growing something like 35 or
1:03:46
Speaker 2: 40 times what could reasonably be consumed by people in Oklahoma,
1:03:52
Speaker 2: just under existing licenses. So very obviously, it's exporting. They're
1:03:56
Speaker 2: violating federal law and exporting that to other states, and
1:04:00
Speaker 2: they're selling it. It's just good old-fashioned cannabis, like the
1:04:03
Speaker 2: product I just handed you, and everyone along the way
1:04:06
Speaker 2: is pretending it's hemp. The guy who grows it's pretending
1:04:09
Speaker 2: it's hemp. The guy who traffics it's pretending it's hemp.
1:04:12
Speaker 2: The guy who sells it's pretending it's hemp. The guy
1:04:14
Speaker 2: who smokes it's pretending it's hemp. Everybody's either making money
1:04:17
Speaker 2: or getting.
1:04:17
Speaker 1: High along the way.
1:04:19
Speaker 2: And for whatever reason, the federal government, including Congress, and
1:04:24
Speaker 2: especially Republicans in Congress, are pretending that this isn't happening.
1:04:30
Speaker 2: And they're protecting the hemp loophole. And a huge part
1:04:34
Speaker 2: of this is there's an organization called the Hemp Roundtable,
1:04:37
Speaker 2: which is comprised of hemp business leaders. And they have
1:04:41
Speaker 2: a political action committee and they make donations. They're a
1:04:45
Speaker 2: political player. And I've, at the beginning of my kind
1:04:51
Speaker 2: of dive into the illicit Chinese cannabis world in Maine,
1:04:56
Speaker 2: really tried to stay away from the easy explanation that
1:05:02
Speaker 2: this was all about corrupt politicians and people were being
1:05:05
Speaker 2: bribed to look the other way. It's getting harder and harder.
1:05:09
Speaker 2: It's getting harder and harder.
1:05:10
Speaker 1: To look at. What would you like to see happen?
1:05:14
Speaker 2: I've remained agnostic in terms of policy. I mean, in
1:05:18
Speaker 2: the ideal world, you know, Anthony Fauci develops a bioweapon
1:05:23
Speaker 2: that just wipes out the cannabis plant. And there's no downside.
1:05:26
Speaker 2: There's no ill side effects. The cannabis plant just disappears overnight.
1:05:31
Speaker 2: That's not going to happen. What I... What's also not
1:05:35
Speaker 2: gonna happen is a return to prohibition. I don't think
1:05:38
Speaker 2: anybody wants to go back to a world where, you know,
1:05:42
Speaker 2: somebody's spending 15 years in jail because they get caught
1:05:45
Speaker 2: with the amount of marijuana that, you know, I just
1:05:48
Speaker 2: gave to you. Like, nobody wants to go back to that.
1:05:51
Speaker 2: But I do think that there needs to be some
1:05:53
Speaker 2: kind of a national framework that recognizes the reality that
1:05:58
Speaker 2: we have. Because under our... We almost have a system
1:06:02
Speaker 2: now that, You couldn't design it better if you were
1:06:06
Speaker 2: trying to reward the least ethical players, because what we're
1:06:10
Speaker 2: rewarding now is cannabis arbitrage. So if you're setting up
1:06:14
Speaker 2: a business in the United States, the best possible way
1:06:18
Speaker 2: to do it is to cultivate it in a state
1:06:21
Speaker 2: like Maine, where the stakes of getting caught if you're
1:06:24
Speaker 2: growing way over the legal limits are very low. If
1:06:29
Speaker 2: you get caught growing 5,000 plants and you don't have
1:06:33
Speaker 2: a license or your license is for 35 plants, you
1:06:36
Speaker 2: might get $ 500 bail, slap on the wrist. If you're
1:06:40
Speaker 2: a Chinese illegal alien, you might get deported back to China,
1:06:44
Speaker 2: but probably not. You can just post your bail and
1:06:47
Speaker 2: disappear back into New York, but there's gonna be no
1:06:49
Speaker 2: penalty for it. You grow it illegally in a state
1:06:53
Speaker 2: where it's legal to cultivate it in some ways, bring
1:06:57
Speaker 2: it to a tobacco shop, and sell it illegally as hemp.
1:07:01
Speaker 2: And you benefit from not paying fees, not paying taxes,
1:07:05
Speaker 2: but you also have access to the existing payment rails. Like,
1:07:09
Speaker 2: you know, you can use Visa, you can use your
1:07:10
Speaker 2: traditional bank account, you can use Square, you can use
1:07:13
Speaker 2: the traditional payment rails. And the money's clean once it
1:07:16
Speaker 2: goes through the tobacco shop. It's not, you know, drug
1:07:21
Speaker 2: cash money. It's clean and that's the most profitable way
1:07:25
Speaker 2: to do it. That's the system that we've created and rewarded.
1:07:31
Speaker 2: And the people who are willing to break federal law
1:07:33
Speaker 2: by crossing state lines, by growing over the limits, by
1:07:37
Speaker 2: selling a product as something other than what it is,
1:07:40
Speaker 2: are the people who don't necessarily have the best business ethics.
1:07:44
Speaker 2: And because they're willing to take advantage of this system
1:07:46
Speaker 2: the way it is now, they're making billions of dollars.
1:07:51
Speaker 2: Not one person individually making that much money, but the
1:07:53
Speaker 2: people who are engaged in this enterprise are making huge
1:07:56
Speaker 2: amounts of money. So if you were to have at
1:07:58
Speaker 2: least a national framework that established rules for the road
1:08:05
Speaker 2: for doing this kind of thing, you could take away
1:08:09
Speaker 2: the advantage that the least ethical players have when it
1:08:13
Speaker 2: comes to exploiting this arbitrage. The system currently forces the
1:08:20
Speaker 2: cultivation demand into states like Maine, Oklahoma, and California to
1:08:26
Speaker 2: feed the appetite for the entire country. So, Maine is
1:08:30
Speaker 2: growing way more cannabis than can ever be consumed by Mainers.
1:08:34
Speaker 2: Same for Oklahoma, same for California. And it's not just
1:08:38
Speaker 2: the Chinese. There's other cartels that are involved. And there's
1:08:41
Speaker 2: other just straight-up American businesses that are involved. Increasingly, people
1:08:46
Speaker 2: in Maine are looking at the lack of consequences for
1:08:49
Speaker 2: the Chinese cartels and saying, fuck it, I'm gonna do
1:08:52
Speaker 2: the exact same thing. if you were to have at
1:08:56
Speaker 2: least a bit of a national framework and legalize that,
1:09:00
Speaker 2: some form of cultivation in other states, it would take
1:09:03
Speaker 2: some pressure off of states like Maine. And maybe it's
1:09:06
Speaker 2: selfish of me as a Mainer to say, like, other
1:09:10
Speaker 2: states should also be dealing with this problem so it's
1:09:12
Speaker 2: not so intensely focused in my backyard, but there needs
1:09:16
Speaker 2: to be some kind of federal recognition for this. And
1:09:19
Speaker 2: in terms of the Chinese specifically, there needs to be
1:09:24
Speaker 2: a very deliberate targeted effort to go after the money
1:09:27
Speaker 2: and all of the properties. According to our research, there
1:09:30
Speaker 2: were at least 75 of these properties were acquired using mortgages.
1:09:36
Speaker 2: All of those mortgages were from the same company. The
1:09:39
Speaker 2: loan officers on those mortgages, two of them did those mortgages.
1:09:44
Speaker 2: One was a Chinese national, one was a Taiwanese national.
1:09:48
Speaker 2: Those need to be looked at because in those mortgage documents,
1:09:51
Speaker 2: they swore to make those houses their primary residences. Instead
1:09:56
Speaker 2: of making them their primary residences, they turned them into
1:09:59
Speaker 2: illegal small businesses. Marijuana grows. That's bank fraud. Every single
1:10:03
Speaker 2: one of them should be facing bank fraud investigations. And
1:10:07
Speaker 2: yet to be published material, there are four realtors in
1:10:11
Speaker 2: the state of Maine who are connected to more than
1:10:17
Speaker 2: 300 of these properties that would go on to become
1:10:20
Speaker 2: Chinese marijuana grows. All four of them born, raised, educated
1:10:24
Speaker 2: in China.
1:10:25
Speaker 1: Oh, shit. Okay.
1:10:28
Speaker 2: Okay. But they're very integrated. One of them's a mechanical
1:10:32
Speaker 2: engineer who just happened to find her way to Maine
1:10:35
Speaker 2: and get involved in real estate. But all four of
1:10:38
Speaker 2: them are Chinese nationals. Some of them have obtained citizenship
1:10:43
Speaker 2: through marriage, or have maybe some kind of a legal status.
1:10:47
Speaker 2: They don't know exactly what their status is, but you
1:10:50
Speaker 2: can pull their sale history and see the properties that
1:10:53
Speaker 2: they were the agent for the property buyer on and
1:10:58
Speaker 2: connect it to the Department of Homeland Security list, to
1:11:01
Speaker 2: my list, to the list of properties that have been raided.
1:11:04
Speaker 2: And you can see that these four real estate agents
1:11:07
Speaker 2: who just so happened to be born, raised and educated
1:11:09
Speaker 2: in China, including one who went to the Beijing Foreign
1:11:13
Speaker 2: Studies Institute, which is just spy school for Chinese nationals,
1:11:18
Speaker 2: and another who went to, I think it's Zhejiang University,
1:11:23
Speaker 2: which is part of their economic espionage program. It's a
1:11:25
Speaker 2: big university, so I'm sure they do a lot of
1:11:27
Speaker 2: cool stuff there too that's totally not related to the
1:11:30
Speaker 2: Chinese Communist Party's desire to rule the world. But those
1:11:35
Speaker 2: are some avenues that I would pursue from a law
1:11:36
Speaker 2: enforcement perspective. Uh, you've got to, uh, squeeze the money
1:11:41
Speaker 2: and squeeze people at the higher levels because our approach
1:11:45
Speaker 2: so far has been to, uh, you know, kick the
1:11:49
Speaker 2: door in on a marijuana grow and arrest whoever's there
1:11:52
Speaker 2: and destroy their plants. And a couple things happened after that. Uh,
1:11:56
Speaker 2: so you arrest the guy who's there. The guy who's
1:11:59
Speaker 2: there is probably a victim of human trafficking. He has
1:12:02
Speaker 2: no idea who his boss is. He probably only interacts
1:12:05
Speaker 2: with his boss through WeChat. He gets instructions. He's told
1:12:09
Speaker 2: when a pickup's coming and maybe he's sent some money.
1:12:15
Speaker 2: He's told when his shipment of groceries is coming. He's
1:12:18
Speaker 2: maybe given some instructions about how to grow his plants
1:12:20
Speaker 2: or deal with pesticides, whatever. But he is a victim
1:12:26
Speaker 2: of trafficking. He's a victim of Chinese communism. He's not
1:12:30
Speaker 2: the main culprit here. But our justice system is like, yeah,
1:12:33
Speaker 2: we got him. We got the bad guy. We found
1:12:34
Speaker 2: this illegal pot grower. So we put him in jail
1:12:36
Speaker 2: and we take his mugshot and, you know, he goes
1:12:39
Speaker 2: through the criminal justice system and gets a slap on
1:12:41
Speaker 2: the wrist and the cops and the courts and everybody
1:12:44
Speaker 2: pats themselves on the back and says that they did
1:12:46
Speaker 2: a good job. But what happens after that is the
1:12:49
Speaker 2: person who owns the property, who wasn't there and probably
1:12:52
Speaker 2: will never be there, just somehow another person turns up
1:12:56
Speaker 2: and starts that marijuana girl up again and they'll go
1:12:59
Speaker 2: get a marijuana license. And then they'll try to at
1:13:03
Speaker 2: least fiend like they're doing it the right way. And we've,
1:13:07
Speaker 2: we've seen examples of this in Franklin County, Maine, like, um, Western, Western, uh,
1:13:14
Speaker 2: I guess the Western corner of Maine, there was a
1:13:16
Speaker 2: house that, uh, the Franklin County sheriff raided. Uh, we
1:13:20
Speaker 2: showed up there maybe a day or two later and
1:13:22
Speaker 2: we're surveilling the house and there's a truck from Grow Generation,
1:13:26
Speaker 2: which is a very prominent, um, grow supply company, big
1:13:31
Speaker 2: box truck backed up right up into the driveway. And
1:13:34
Speaker 2: a crew of like five Chinese guys are offloading growth supplies.
1:13:37
Speaker 2: This is two days after the place has been raided
1:13:39
Speaker 2: and a bunch of plants destroyed. And I called the
1:13:42
Speaker 2: sheriff and I was like, hey, they're right back at it.
1:13:45
Speaker 2: Just so you know, I'm watching them get this thing
1:13:49
Speaker 2: spun up again. And he says, yeah, I know. They
1:13:50
Speaker 2: say they're getting a permit now, so there's nothing I
1:13:52
Speaker 2: can do. So once they get that permit, they're untouchable
1:13:56
Speaker 2: in law enforcement's eyes. So the current approach, which is
1:13:59
Speaker 2: to act like you're dealing with dime store drug dealers
1:14:04
Speaker 2: or the guys in the 1980s who'd be growing a
1:14:07
Speaker 2: little bit of pot in their barn or something, that's
1:14:10
Speaker 2: not working. You've got to go after the higher level
1:14:14
Speaker 2: and you've got to go after the money. And we're
1:14:16
Speaker 2: seeing glimpses of that in the form of the indictment
1:14:20
Speaker 2: that I mentioned earlier. Leah Foley, the US Attorney for
1:14:24
Speaker 2: the District of Massachusetts, handed down an indictment related to
1:14:28
Speaker 2: illegal Chinese marijuana grows in Massachusetts and in Maine. These
1:14:32
Speaker 2: guys are busted living in a $ 1. 5 million house in
1:14:35
Speaker 2: a cushy suburb in Massachusetts. One of them even had
1:14:38
Speaker 2: a T-shirt with a graphic on the front of it
1:14:41
Speaker 2: of Chinese guys who were taking U.S. currency and putting
1:14:46
Speaker 2: it through a laundry machine, like actually laundering the money.
1:14:50
Speaker 2: So just like a little too on the nose. He
1:14:54
Speaker 2: also had, I think it was a Porsche with a
1:14:57
Speaker 2: hidden compartment in it that had like $ 250, 000 stuffed in it.
1:15:02
Speaker 2: and $ 75, 000 Cartier bracelets and Rolex watches and that kind
1:15:05
Speaker 2: of thing. And a safe filled with passports from his
1:15:08
Speaker 2: trafficking victims.
1:15:09
Speaker 1: Interesting.
1:15:10
Speaker 4: Wow.
1:15:12
Speaker 2: And if you look through that indictment, they list a
1:15:16
Speaker 2: couple of.
1:15:16
Speaker 1: It would be... Another avenue would be to hit him
1:15:19
Speaker 1: with the trafficking, which they should be doing anyways.
1:15:22
Speaker 2: And they will, I think. I think Leah Foley is
1:15:25
Speaker 2: planning to. But trafficking cases, I've discovered, very, very hard.
1:15:29
Speaker 2: are very hard. There's one involving Navajo Nation land. Individuals
1:15:36
Speaker 2: were trafficked from China, promised flower cutting jobs, and they
1:15:40
Speaker 2: were brought over the border into a Navajo reservation land
1:15:43
Speaker 2: and had their phones and their wallets and everything taken
1:15:45
Speaker 2: away and then forced into marijuana growing facilities. And there's
1:15:51
Speaker 2: a massive case there that does hinge on human trafficking.
1:15:55
Speaker 2: But the indictment in Massachusetts lists some of the techniques
1:16:01
Speaker 2: that were being used to move money around using lawyers
1:16:05
Speaker 2: and real estate companies. And it refers directly to some
1:16:09
Speaker 2: very large banks and law firms based in Massachusetts that
1:16:15
Speaker 2: are just 100% CCP cutouts. You can just look at
1:16:18
Speaker 2: the website. I could show you the website and you'd
1:16:20
Speaker 2: be like, oh yeah, that's like CCP cutout bank or
1:16:22
Speaker 2: law firm. And they're listed here. as helping these organizations
1:16:27
Speaker 2: move their money around. And those are the kind of
1:16:30
Speaker 2: individuals you need to go after. Not the people whose,
1:16:33
Speaker 2: you know, fingers smell like skunks. You need to go
1:16:35
Speaker 2: after the people who are helping the money move. Because
1:16:38
Speaker 2: at the end of the day, all crime, all crime
1:16:41
Speaker 2: at the highest level is money laundering. They need to
1:16:45
Speaker 2: figure out how to get that money separate from the
1:16:48
Speaker 2: criminal activity that generated it and use it for what
1:16:52
Speaker 2: its true purpose is, what they really want to do
1:16:54
Speaker 2: with that money. And the question, as you said.
1:16:56
Speaker 1: Is.
1:16:57
Speaker 2: Why do they want to stockpile hundreds of billions of
1:17:02
Speaker 2: dollars in cold, hard U.S. cash behind U.S. borders? It's
1:17:08
Speaker 2: not because they're going to Disneyland. It's not because they
1:17:11
Speaker 2: want to build something great for us. They're not trying
1:17:16
Speaker 2: to get into podcasting, I can tell you that much.
1:17:18
Speaker 2: It's nothing good.
1:17:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I know there's a big... been looking
1:17:22
Speaker 1: for somebody to cover, but there's a big Bitcoin scam
1:17:25
Speaker 1: going on with the CCP as well. And you know
1:17:27
Speaker 1: what's happening right here? You know what they're doing? You know,
1:17:29
Speaker 1: they're stockpiling all the money because.
1:17:32
Speaker 2: They're stealing used fry oil from restaurants all around here
1:17:39
Speaker 2: because some of the Bitcoin machines can run submersible in
1:17:44
Speaker 2: oil as coolant. So instead of having a fan blowing
1:17:46
Speaker 2: on your machines to dissipate the heat, you have it
1:17:49
Speaker 2: in oil. So it's sneakier.
1:17:52
Speaker 1: It's not as loud.
1:17:53
Speaker 2: So there are restaurants in the Midwest that are finding
1:17:58
Speaker 2: their fry oil disappearing. And it's because Chinese cartels are
1:18:02
Speaker 2: stealing their fry oil to run submersible Bitcoin machines. And
1:18:06
Speaker 2: it's because you can run them in not residential areas,
1:18:11
Speaker 2: but they're not as loud. They don't attract as much attention.
1:18:14
Speaker 2: The electricity consumption is certainly through the roof, but they
1:18:17
Speaker 2: don't have the fans running 24-7. And the benefit of
1:18:20
Speaker 2: the Bitcoin is that it's perfectly saleable across time and space.
1:18:24
Speaker 2: You know, I can send a billion dollars from here
1:18:28
Speaker 2: to Beijing in 10 minutes for $ 3, and nobody nowhere
1:18:32
Speaker 2: can stop me from doing that.
1:18:34
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, Stephen, let's take a break. I want to
1:18:37
Speaker 1: take a look at these websites you were talking about.
1:18:39
Speaker 1: When we come back, we'll talk about the 7-0-H debacle. Yep.
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Speaker 1: the break. We're getting ready to dive into 7-0-H. But
1:22:27
Speaker 1: there was something that we were talking about with the
1:22:30
Speaker 1: Maine's attorney general, which, or lack thereof.
1:22:34
Speaker 2: Well, just the lack of law enforcement in Maine. You know,
1:22:37
Speaker 2: I think we've reached a point where.
1:22:39
Speaker 1: No prosecuting attorneys. Is that what you were saying out there?
1:22:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we don't have a U.S. attorney in Maine
1:22:44
Speaker 2: right now.
1:22:45
Speaker 1: What do you mean you don't have a U.S. attorney
1:22:47
Speaker 1: in Maine?
1:22:48
Speaker 2: Trump hasn't appointed a U.S. attorney.
1:22:50
Speaker 1: The Biden U.S.
1:22:51
Speaker 2: Attorney, Darcy McIlwain, did a few indictments at the federal
1:22:56
Speaker 2: level of some of the individuals involved in the Chinese
1:22:59
Speaker 2: drug cartels. Really just the bare minimum. Very politicized office.
1:23:06
Speaker 2: She did not do, she wasn't as aggressive as she
1:23:10
Speaker 2: could have been. She didn't act in the best interests
1:23:12
Speaker 2: of the state.
1:23:13
Speaker 1: We're talking about the governor. Something about the governor.
1:23:16
Speaker 2: So, Darcy McAway was rewarded by the governor with a
1:23:20
Speaker 2: judgeship after she retired from the U.S. Attorney Post, which
1:23:23
Speaker 2: remains vacant. Trump, hopefully, is going to be filling that soon.
1:23:28
Speaker 2: And that U.S. Attorney, I'm told, will inherit an org
1:23:31
Speaker 2: chart that is fairly elaborate, that shows Chinese cartel activity
1:23:36
Speaker 2: in the state of Maine that could be acted on
1:23:38
Speaker 2: in the same way that Leah Foley in Massachusetts has
1:23:42
Speaker 2: very rapidly, you know, rolled up some of the Chinese
1:23:45
Speaker 2: drug cartels there. But it's a mystery for a lot
1:23:50
Speaker 2: of people why Steve Robinson can go find all of
1:23:55
Speaker 2: these marijuana sites. I've actually, like, taken multiple congressional candidates.
1:24:00
Speaker 2: I took CBS News. I've taken all kinds of people
1:24:03
Speaker 2: to active Chinese marijuana grows and somehow the state police
1:24:09
Speaker 2: aren't involved. The governor, to this day, hasn't said a
1:24:12
Speaker 2: single word about this. Governor Janet Mills hasn't uttered a
1:24:16
Speaker 2: word about the vast criminal conspiracy unfolding in her backyard,
1:24:21
Speaker 2: entirely on her watch, in large part because of a
1:24:25
Speaker 2: law that she signed. And, oh, by the way, at
1:24:28
Speaker 2: her inauguration in January 2019, was the head of the
1:24:34
Speaker 2: Chinese consulate in New York. The highest ranking CCP official
1:24:38
Speaker 2: in the Eastern United States.
1:24:40
Speaker 1: Well, that's interesting.
1:24:40
Speaker 2: They use the name of Wangping or something like that.
1:24:43
Speaker 1: Old Wangping? Yeah.
1:24:47
Speaker 2: Uh, so you have that going on. And the state
1:24:49
Speaker 2: police involved in just three, uh, of the 70 or
1:24:54
Speaker 2: 75 different search warrants. Very minimal involvement. They won't comment
1:24:58
Speaker 2: to me. The governor has not commented on this at all. Uh,
1:25:01
Speaker 2: every legislative attempt to do something to deal with this
1:25:04
Speaker 2: problem has been shot down. So it's a big mystery.
1:25:07
Speaker 2: Everybody's wondering why is this being allowed to continue to happen?
1:25:13
Speaker 2: And we were, I was actually reviewing physical copies of
1:25:17
Speaker 2: real estate records related to a Chinese marijuana grow in Corinna, Maine,
1:25:22
Speaker 2: which is one, one town over from where I grew up.
1:25:25
Speaker 2: That's where my mom lives. It's where, uh, you know,
1:25:28
Speaker 2: my grandmother used to go to church. I was looking
1:25:30
Speaker 2: at these records and I see at the bottom of
1:25:33
Speaker 2: one of these real estate transfer documents, um, Well, the
1:25:36
Speaker 2: first thing that was unusual to me about the record
1:25:38
Speaker 2: was that it was a gift transfer of a property
1:25:41
Speaker 2: in Corinna, Maine, from an individual who lives in Quincy, Massachusetts,
1:25:45
Speaker 2: to a person who gave an address in Guangdong Province, China. So,
1:25:50
Speaker 2: this is nine acres in a teardown, basically a hunting
1:25:55
Speaker 2: camp in central Maine, that is now lawfully owned by
1:25:58
Speaker 2: an individual who may or may not exist in Southeast China.
1:26:03
Speaker 2: which just so happens to be the area where the
1:26:06
Speaker 2: legit triad criminal activity is the most intense. It was weird, right?
1:26:12
Speaker 2: A property transfer. What guy in China has just been thinking,
1:26:16
Speaker 2: you know, I want nine acres and a teardown in Corinna, Maine?
1:26:19
Speaker 2: But what caught my eye was at the bottom of it.
1:26:22
Speaker 2: There's a line for tax document preparer. And the name
1:26:27
Speaker 2: there was Paul Mills. And I was like, well, that's
1:26:30
Speaker 2: the governor's brother. But maybe that's a different Paul Mills,
1:26:34
Speaker 2: but the address matched. The address was the address for
1:26:36
Speaker 2: his attorney office. So, the governor's brother was the lawyer
1:26:42
Speaker 2: for a real estate transfer for a known illicit Chinese
1:26:48
Speaker 2: drug house, where the code enforcement officer in that area
1:26:51
Speaker 2: is on the record saying this is an illegal Chinese
1:26:54
Speaker 2: drug house. And he helped transfer it into the custody
1:26:58
Speaker 2: of a Chinese national living in China. And this came
1:27:02
Speaker 2: just days after a series of raids by multiple sheriff's
1:27:06
Speaker 2: departments in the area. So it almost looked like they
1:27:09
Speaker 2: were trying to protect this property by moving it into
1:27:13
Speaker 2: the official ownership of somebody who would be beyond the
1:27:16
Speaker 2: reach of the local police, state police, or even the FBI,
1:27:19
Speaker 2: because they actually provided an address in China. And further
1:27:24
Speaker 2: investigation found that Mr. Mills has a number of clients
1:27:28
Speaker 2: who are involved in the marijuana business in the state
1:27:31
Speaker 2: of Maine. And the governor won't comment on that. The
1:27:36
Speaker 2: governor won't say whether she's had any communications or conversations
1:27:40
Speaker 2: with her brother about it. I had a 10-minute phone
1:27:43
Speaker 2: call with Paul Mills, and he talked about that property
1:27:47
Speaker 2: and did say that he was involved in it and
1:27:50
Speaker 2: couldn't remember who asked him to be involved in it.
1:27:54
Speaker 2: did tell me that he didn't have anyone in his
1:27:56
Speaker 2: office who speaks Cantonese, which I thought was kind of funny.
1:27:59
Speaker 2: But it was interesting to me because I had called
1:28:02
Speaker 2: him just before then, pretending to be someone in Massachusetts
1:28:07
Speaker 2: who needed a property transfer attorney in that area. And
1:28:10
Speaker 2: he told me that he doesn't work in that area.
1:28:13
Speaker 2: So he wouldn't work for me. He wouldn't do a
1:28:15
Speaker 2: property transfer for me in that part of the state
1:28:17
Speaker 2: because his office is in a different county. But for
1:28:22
Speaker 2: the Chinese national and the Chinese woman from Massachusetts who
1:28:26
Speaker 2: needed to, you know, move around, do a gift transfer
1:28:30
Speaker 2: for an illicit marijuana grow, he was more than happy
1:28:33
Speaker 2: to sign on the dotted line.
1:28:34
Speaker 1: Probably just a coincidence, right?
1:28:36
Speaker 2: I'm sure it's just a coincidence, for sure. But the
1:28:42
Speaker 2: more I learned about how the real estate world works
1:28:46
Speaker 2: and how lawyers factor in, the more I began to
1:28:51
Speaker 2: suspect that there was probably a different, more lucrative money-making
1:28:56
Speaker 2: opportunity And it gets back to what we were talking
1:29:00
Speaker 2: about earlier and what we just grabbed some images of,
1:29:02
Speaker 2: of MT Law, the law firm in Massachusetts that was
1:29:07
Speaker 2: named in the Leofoli's indictment. MT Law appears to be
1:29:13
Speaker 2: just your run-of-the-mill law firm. Their entire staff is Chinese,
1:29:18
Speaker 2: except for their one You know, American looking.
1:29:21
Speaker 1: One of these doesn't look like the others.
1:29:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, just the white gorilla there. Who I'm sure attends
1:29:29
Speaker 2: functions on their behalf. But there's a technique called seasoning
1:29:36
Speaker 2: the money that I learned about, which may be old
1:29:39
Speaker 2: hat for people who are familiar with money laundering and
1:29:42
Speaker 2: how it works. But seasoning the money involves a trusted
1:29:47
Speaker 2: lawyer And it's a money laundering technique. It's been used
1:29:51
Speaker 2: by white guys going back decades. If you've got a
1:29:56
Speaker 2: cash-heavy business like a coin-op laundry or a car wash,
1:30:00
Speaker 2: and you've got all this cash, but you don't want
1:30:01
Speaker 2: to pay taxes on it, you want to make a
1:30:03
Speaker 2: real estate investment with it, what you do is instead
1:30:06
Speaker 2: of trying to bring it to the bank or to
1:30:08
Speaker 2: a real estate agent to buy property, you bring it
1:30:11
Speaker 2: to your attorney and you tell your attorney to deposit
1:30:14
Speaker 2: it in his IOLTA account or his... interest on lawyers.
1:30:20
Speaker 2: There's different words for it in other states, but it's
1:30:23
Speaker 2: an account that lawyers hold money from multiple clients in
1:30:27
Speaker 2: a single pot, and it earns interest, but it's kind
1:30:30
Speaker 2: of like protected under statute. So I've got a bag
1:30:34
Speaker 2: of drug proceeds with $ 250, 000 on it. I bring it
1:30:37
Speaker 2: to my lawyer. Maybe his name is Mr. Mills, and
1:30:40
Speaker 2: I ask him to deposit it in his trust account.
1:30:43
Speaker 2: And then the following day, I come in and I say, hey,
1:30:46
Speaker 2: can you draw a bank check out for a quarter
1:30:49
Speaker 2: of a million dollars and make it out to real
1:30:52
Speaker 2: estate company X? Real estate company X can't accept a
1:30:56
Speaker 2: bag full of cash, but they can sure as hell
1:30:59
Speaker 2: accept that check. And the IRS is never going to
1:31:03
Speaker 2: know about it. The relationship is protected by attorney-client privilege.
1:31:08
Speaker 2: And I've just effectively managed to season my money through
1:31:12
Speaker 2: the attorney's trust account, and then pour it back into
1:31:15
Speaker 2: real estate. And that is a pattern that you can
1:31:20
Speaker 2: see laid out in the indictment that was filed in
1:31:23
Speaker 2: the District of Massachusetts, where they show each of the
1:31:26
Speaker 2: steps that would be necessary to season the money and
1:31:30
Speaker 2: then dump it back into real estate. And it helps
1:31:32
Speaker 2: explain how in New England, the real estate empire necessary
1:31:37
Speaker 2: to facilitate the Chinese drug cartel was able to expand
1:31:40
Speaker 2: so rapidly. Because they were able to take the huge
1:31:44
Speaker 2: amounts of cash that they were generating from these activities
1:31:47
Speaker 2: and just dump it back into real estate. And they
1:31:50
Speaker 2: were buying up properties in Maine 20% over asking price
1:31:54
Speaker 2: for cash and closing in, you know, 20 days. It
1:31:58
Speaker 2: was the dream for some elderly couple in Maine looking to,
1:32:01
Speaker 2: you know, move to Florida or something in the middle
1:32:03
Speaker 2: of the pandemic. So it's part, I think, of the
1:32:08
Speaker 2: answer to the question, why hasn't anything been done? But also,
1:32:13
Speaker 2: you know, how did it happen? What are they doing
1:32:15
Speaker 2: with the money? What are the roles of attorneys in
1:32:18
Speaker 2: all of this? And I think that if the kind
1:32:20
Speaker 2: of work that Leah Foley did, or at least the
1:32:24
Speaker 2: indictment that she was willing to file in Massachusetts, if
1:32:27
Speaker 2: we were able to see that happen in Maine, it
1:32:30
Speaker 2: would go a long ways toward dealing with the problem,
1:32:32
Speaker 2: but we don't have a U.S. attorney in Maine. And
1:32:35
Speaker 2: that is in part because Trump hasn't appointed one yet,
1:32:39
Speaker 2: but there's also a tradition called the blue slip tradition
1:32:42
Speaker 2: where home state senators get what amounts to a veto
1:32:47
Speaker 2: of Senate confirmable nominees. So if the president nominates a U.S.
1:32:54
Speaker 2: attorney from the state of Maine, Senator Angus King, who's
1:32:58
Speaker 2: a dope and a dummy, and I don't like him
1:33:00
Speaker 2: at all, if he objects to that individual, he can
1:33:04
Speaker 2: withhold his blue slip and delay it, cause hearings, controversial votes.
1:33:10
Speaker 2: He can gum up the works. But if there's a
1:33:13
Speaker 2: nominee put forward that Senator Angus King and Senator Susan
1:33:17
Speaker 2: Collins both approve of, then they're not going to cause
1:33:20
Speaker 2: problems on the blue slip front. So there's these complex
1:33:23
Speaker 2: negotiations happening between the senators from the state and the
1:33:27
Speaker 2: Trump administration. And Susan Collins, I think, is a big
1:33:31
Speaker 2: Part of that as well, because she's now the chair
1:33:33
Speaker 2: of the Appropriations Committee. She's like the third or fourth
1:33:35
Speaker 2: most powerful person in Washington, D.C. So that adds a
1:33:38
Speaker 2: layer of complexity to it. So there's complicated reasons why
1:33:42
Speaker 2: we don't have a U.S. attorney yet. But when we do,
1:33:46
Speaker 2: I think you're going to see some pretty rapid action
1:33:48
Speaker 2: rolling up some of these operations. And hopefully they aim
1:33:53
Speaker 2: for the higher levels and go for the money, the
1:33:57
Speaker 2: people who are driving Porsches, not the people who are
1:34:01
Speaker 2: suffering in what I would consider, you know, modern-day slavery, really.
1:34:06
Speaker 2: And I should say, Senator Collins deserves a lot of
1:34:08
Speaker 2: credit for this because she's the only politician in the
1:34:11
Speaker 2: state of Maine who's been speaking out about this. Like,
1:34:13
Speaker 2: from day one, she was asking Jim Comey about it.
1:34:16
Speaker 2: She was asking, you know, all of the, you know,
1:34:19
Speaker 2: the head of the CIA, under Biden, under Trump. From
1:34:23
Speaker 2: the very beginning, she's been pushing this, meeting with DEA officials.
1:34:27
Speaker 1: And I think.
1:34:28
Speaker 2: It's unusual for an elected official's talking about something to
1:34:32
Speaker 2: actually spur some action, but I think that that has
1:34:34
Speaker 2: happened in Maine as a direct result of Senator Collins' advocacy.
1:34:39
Speaker 1: Hmm. Maybe we should bring them on.
1:34:42
Speaker 2: Senator Collins? Mm-hmm. She might do it.
1:34:46
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. She's smart.
1:34:49
Speaker 2: She knows the... I've talked with her off-camera. She knows
1:34:52
Speaker 2: the issue, not just, like, my staffer briefed me 10
1:34:55
Speaker 2: seconds ago. She knows the issue, like, It's something she
1:34:58
Speaker 2: cares about.
1:34:59
Speaker 1: That could be interesting. You'll have to keep us updated
1:35:01
Speaker 1: on this. Let's move into 7-OH. What is it?
1:35:06
Speaker 2: 7-OH is a synthetic opioid drug derived from the kratom plant.
1:35:13
Speaker 2: The kratom plant is a coniferous plant indigenous to Southeast Asia.
1:35:19
Speaker 2: Grows throughout Indonesia. Primarily is where it's harvested from.
1:35:25
Speaker 1: Uh, and.
1:35:27
Speaker 2: In its raw form, I would say kratom is to
1:35:33
Speaker 2: 70H as the poppy seed is to morphine or the
1:35:37
Speaker 2: coca leaf is to cocaine. The kratom leaf has been
1:35:42
Speaker 2: consumed by locals for hundreds if not thousands of years.
1:35:46
Speaker 2: It can make a tea that's anywhere from mildly stimulating
1:35:50
Speaker 2: like a cup of coffee Or anxiolytic is what some
1:35:56
Speaker 2: of the proponents will say, as in reduces anxiety, aka
1:35:59
Speaker 2: gets you high. By itself, it's relatively harmless. There are
1:36:04
Speaker 2: plenty of people who consume it as a tea or
1:36:09
Speaker 2: chew it like chewing tobacco. But it has some alkaloids
1:36:16
Speaker 2: in it. which like I think nicotine is an alkaloid,
1:36:21
Speaker 2: opioids are alkaloids, it's just a name for a class
1:36:23
Speaker 2: of chemicals that interact with your brain. It has some
1:36:26
Speaker 2: natural alkaloids in it that will give you those experiences.
1:36:32
Speaker 2: In natural kratom leaf, once it begins to decay a
1:36:36
Speaker 2: little bit, develops trace amounts of something called 7-OH. And
1:36:41
Speaker 2: at some point in time, it was discovered that this
1:36:45
Speaker 2: 7-OH is, very potent and a complex chemical process involving
1:36:53
Speaker 2: harsh chemicals like pool shock and, you know, reagents. And,
1:36:58
Speaker 2: you know, I'm not a chemistry expert, but it's a
1:37:01
Speaker 2: complicated process. It's like Walter White stuff. It's not, you know,
1:37:07
Speaker 2: just mixing it together in your bathtub. Huge amounts of
1:37:10
Speaker 2: raw ingredients together with this chemical process, and you produce
1:37:15
Speaker 2: a concentrated, version of 7-OH. And it's specific to 7-OH.
1:37:23
Speaker 2: It's not an extract or a concentration of kratom. So
1:37:27
Speaker 2: you can concentrate a tincture of kratom just by soaking
1:37:31
Speaker 2: it in ethanol or something and getting a more potent
1:37:34
Speaker 2: version of kratom. But 7-OH requires a very specific chemical
1:37:38
Speaker 2: process to go through. So while it may begin with
1:37:41
Speaker 2: some kind of plant-grown natural ingredient, your end result is
1:37:46
Speaker 2: really purely a synthetic drug. And again, depending on who
1:37:53
Speaker 2: you ask and how you measure, it's many multiples more
1:37:58
Speaker 2: potent than morphine. And it's an opioid. It works on
1:38:01
Speaker 2: the same receptors in your brain. It's the dosages that
1:38:09
Speaker 2: someone who is a habitual fentanyl or prescription opioid user
1:38:15
Speaker 2: would be familiar with are hard to determine when it
1:38:18
Speaker 2: comes to 7-OH. There's not a lot of testing. There's
1:38:22
Speaker 2: not a lot of regular... I mean, there's no regulatory
1:38:25
Speaker 2: oversight of this. Um, it's not like FDA approved. There's
1:38:29
Speaker 2: not a lot, uh, uh, known about it. And it's
1:38:32
Speaker 2: a very recent phenomenon, very recent. Um, there are, I guess,
1:38:37
Speaker 2: disagreements as to how 7-OH really took off and became
1:38:43
Speaker 2: as popular as it is now.
1:38:44
Speaker 1: I mean, I have, once again, that it could be
1:38:47
Speaker 1: up to 46 times stronger than morphine. Yes. That's pretty
1:38:51
Speaker 1: potent shit. Yeah. Very potent shit. Yes.
1:38:56
Speaker 2: And the same people who know that will tell you
1:39:01
Speaker 2: that it's not addictive.
1:39:03
Speaker 1: They'll tell you it's not addictive.
1:39:05
Speaker 2: It's an all-natural, non-addictive substance that, you know, if you
1:39:11
Speaker 2: just skip a day taking it, you'll be fine. You
1:39:15
Speaker 2: won't ever become habituated to it. I think Most people,
1:39:19
Speaker 2: if you have any experience with drugs or alcohol, you
1:39:24
Speaker 2: can take something once and figure out pretty quickly that
1:39:27
Speaker 2: it's addictive. The very first time you take a Percocet
1:39:29
Speaker 2: after having a wisdom tooth out, you can be like,
1:39:31
Speaker 2: oh yeah, this is addictive. I have a feeling that
1:39:35
Speaker 2: 7-OH is probably the same. But again, 36%, 17%, it
1:39:39
Speaker 2: depends on how pure the formulation is, who made.
1:39:41
Speaker 1: It, how.
1:39:46
Speaker 2: And how you're measuring it or comparing it. But it
1:39:50
Speaker 2: is very, it's a hard drug. It's a opioid. It
1:39:55
Speaker 2: is going to give you an experience exactly like what
1:39:57
Speaker 2: you would get from morphine or from fentanyl. And the
1:40:01
Speaker 2: key thing for everybody to understand, especially parents and people
1:40:07
Speaker 2: who might be dabbling or curious about it, is that
1:40:09
Speaker 2: it's available at grocery, I mean, convenience stores, grocery stores,
1:40:14
Speaker 2: gas stations, like, It took me two seconds to find
1:40:18
Speaker 2: the 7-0-H on my way to the studio. You know,
1:40:23
Speaker 2: I just looked up tobacco shops. I could have stopped
1:40:25
Speaker 2: at 30 of them. I'm pretty sure I could have
1:40:27
Speaker 2: bought those products at any of them. Any of them.
1:40:32
Speaker 1: This is also called gas station heroin.
1:40:34
Speaker 2: Gas station heroin. So, gas station heroin is actually a
1:40:38
Speaker 2: name that was first started with a drug called TNeptine.
1:40:43
Speaker 2: And TNeptine was a... uh, a antidepressant formulated in the
1:40:48
Speaker 2: 1960s in France, and various European countries have different regulations
1:40:53
Speaker 2: and rules around it. Some still use it, some don't.
1:40:56
Speaker 2: And t-Neptine was, began mark, uh, to be marketed, uh,
1:41:01
Speaker 2: in the early, I think, 2010s in gas stations as
1:41:05
Speaker 2: Neptune's Fix. And it would be, like, almost the same
1:41:09
Speaker 2: size as a, uh, you know, one of those little
1:41:11
Speaker 2: teeny-weeny energy drinks. And it has sedative qualities, but also
1:41:16
Speaker 2: some euphoric qualities. And that's really where the term gas
1:41:20
Speaker 2: station heroin began. However, lawmakers, law enforcement eventually began to
1:41:27
Speaker 2: catch on to what was happening. And like just in
1:41:30
Speaker 2: the most recent legislative session in Maine, there was a
1:41:33
Speaker 2: law to ban, a proposed law to ban TNF-10. So
1:41:36
Speaker 2: you've got that cycle I mentioned earlier where the drug
1:41:40
Speaker 2: users figure out what's going to get them high, what's cheap,
1:41:43
Speaker 2: what's available, and they'll start to use it. Law enforcement,
1:41:47
Speaker 2: two to three years later, discover what's going on. And eventually,
1:41:51
Speaker 2: two to three years after that, it trickles to policymakers.
1:41:54
Speaker 2: Policymakers finally figure out a way to change it, to
1:41:58
Speaker 2: change the law so that it can't happen. But by
1:42:00
Speaker 2: that time, either all the ill consequences from the drug
1:42:04
Speaker 2: have already happened or the drug users have already moved on.
1:42:08
Speaker 2: So now what's happened is they've moved on to products
1:42:10
Speaker 2: like Here are other forms of it. If you'll notice
1:42:15
Speaker 2: this one, this one's called Opia.
1:42:19
Speaker 1: Opia.
1:42:19
Speaker 2: Opia doesn't sound at all like they're trying to conjure
1:42:22
Speaker 2: the idea that it's related to opium, does it? There
1:42:24
Speaker 2: are some that are called Perk. Obviously, they're trying to
1:42:29
Speaker 2: conjure the image that that is Percocet. This is another one.
1:42:34
Speaker 2: I bought these both from the same store. This was actually,
1:42:38
Speaker 2: I bought those at Bros 2. which you're probably familiar with,
1:42:42
Speaker 2: because it's right next door to Tucker's studio in Maine.
1:42:46
Speaker 2: And the guy who sold those to me didn't speak
1:42:48
Speaker 2: a lick of English. But when he saw me pointing
1:42:52
Speaker 2: at the gas station heroin section, he just started laying
1:42:55
Speaker 2: out in front of me all the different options. And
1:42:58
Speaker 2: then the woman who did speak English and was maybe
1:43:00
Speaker 2: the general manager of the store saw that I was,
1:43:03
Speaker 2: I guess, you know, a gas station heroin user and
1:43:07
Speaker 2: perked up and came over. and actually tried to upsell
1:43:09
Speaker 2: me on the 200 milligram versions of the gas station heroin. So,
1:43:14
Speaker 2: she knew exactly what she was doing. She knew exactly
1:43:17
Speaker 2: what she was trying to sell me.
1:43:19
Speaker 1: So, how much of this, if I wanted to experience
1:43:24
Speaker 1: the same high as fentanyl or heroin or, you know,
1:43:27
Speaker 1: insert opiate, I mean, how much of this am I
1:43:30
Speaker 1: gonna have to take to have that same experience?
1:43:35
Speaker 2: It depends. How much fentanyl have you been using on
1:43:38
Speaker 2: a daily basis?
1:43:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't, I mean, so... Well, let's say if
1:43:42
Speaker 1: you're a first-time user.
1:43:43
Speaker 2: If you're a first-time user, I don't know. I don't know,
1:43:45
Speaker 2: and I don't think anybody knows, and it hasn't really
1:43:48
Speaker 2: been studied well. The best advice that the people who
1:43:55
Speaker 2: are promulgating this as a healthy product, the best they'll
1:43:59
Speaker 2: say is start slow.
1:44:01
Speaker 1: Okay.
1:44:01
Speaker 2: So it's... so poorly understood and understudied that we don't
1:44:08
Speaker 2: know those kinds of things. For someone who has been
1:44:13
Speaker 2: a habitual fentanyl user, maybe their dose could be higher,
1:44:17
Speaker 2: but these are acting on the same receptors in the brain,
1:44:20
Speaker 2: but they're also a little bit different. So maybe your
1:44:23
Speaker 2: tolerance from fentanyl or heroin doesn't translate over perfectly to 7-OH.
1:44:29
Speaker 2: Narcan will revive you if you overdose on 7-OH.
1:44:33
Speaker 1: Have you seen people overdose on this?
1:44:36
Speaker 2: I haven't seen it personally, but I'll tell you the
1:44:38
Speaker 2: day that I bought those, someone sent me a story
1:44:44
Speaker 2: from Richmond, Virginia, Richmond.com. There was a guy who went
1:44:48
Speaker 2: into a head shop, just like the one I visited
1:44:51
Speaker 2: last night, bought pills just like those and died in
1:44:55
Speaker 2: the parking lot. Took one, died in the parking lot.
1:44:58
Speaker 2: And maybe the Maybe he went in there with a
1:45:00
Speaker 2: foreign load and there were other drugs in his system.
1:45:03
Speaker 2: A lot of the fatalities that I'm personally aware of
1:45:06
Speaker 2: are comorbid with alcohol and other drugs, so they're mixing.
1:45:11
Speaker 2: But again, this is so new and so poorly understood
1:45:15
Speaker 2: that there's no stats, no one's keeping track of this.
1:45:19
Speaker 2: You know, I was telling your fantastic and wildly talented
1:45:25
Speaker 2: producer Jeremy earlier, it reminds me of a case A
1:45:29
Speaker 2: pod case I investigated for Barstool where an individual was
1:45:33
Speaker 2: found dead in a trailer with a hypodermic syringe next
1:45:36
Speaker 2: to him. He was known to be a drug user.
1:45:39
Speaker 2: And the cops just said, oh, he overdosed, case closed,
1:45:42
Speaker 2: it's done with. But as Kirk Minahan and I investigated
1:45:46
Speaker 2: this case more, what we came to believe was that
1:45:49
Speaker 2: the syringe was actually given to him filled with insulin
1:45:52
Speaker 2: by someone who wanted him dead because he had knowledge
1:45:55
Speaker 2: of some other crimes. The autopsy never tested for insulin.
1:46:00
Speaker 2: No one ever, you know, would think that that would
1:46:02
Speaker 2: be something that would happen. And they didn't find any
1:46:07
Speaker 2: meth or heroin in this guy's system, but he was
1:46:10
Speaker 2: a drug user and he was dead and there was
1:46:11
Speaker 2: a syringe and who cares? We're not going to look
1:46:14
Speaker 2: too close into it because he was just a, you know,
1:46:16
Speaker 2: as far as we're concerned, he was a garbage human
1:46:18
Speaker 2: being because he was addicted to drugs. So who cares
1:46:20
Speaker 2: to look very close? It's kind of the same thing
1:46:23
Speaker 2: with 70H in that It's not as simple as taking.
1:46:27
Speaker 1: I don't know if you can necessarily blame the law
1:46:29
Speaker 1: enforcement for not... I mean, because there's... You got to
1:46:34
Speaker 1: give them a little bit of credit because, I mean,
1:46:35
Speaker 1: so many people are overdosing on heroin. Yes.
1:46:38
Speaker 2: No, I'm not.
1:46:39
Speaker 1: If we devoted all of our resources into that, then
1:46:42
Speaker 1: it would take away from, you know, other stuff that
1:46:45
Speaker 1: aren't self-induced deaths.
1:46:48
Speaker 2: 100%. You know what I mean?
1:46:49
Speaker 1: And so, you know, I don't want to.
1:46:53
Speaker 1: I just don't want to blast Ellie right now because
1:46:57
Speaker 1: of this. Because if I was a law enforcement officer,
1:47:00
Speaker 1: I'd probably think the same thing.
1:47:01
Speaker 2: Oh, same. Absolutely same. And I'll give them credit that
1:47:06
Speaker 2: when we made our case in the podcast, they reopened
1:47:09
Speaker 2: that death, which was classified as an accidental overdose and
1:47:14
Speaker 2: charged it as a homicide. And the prosecutor later dropped
1:47:17
Speaker 2: the charges. So law enforcement 100% did their job in
1:47:21
Speaker 2: that instance. The reason why I brought that case up
1:47:24
Speaker 2: is because if someone were to die of an overdose
1:47:28
Speaker 2: of 7-OH, there aren't tests available to determine, well, do
1:47:33
Speaker 2: they have 7-OH metabolites in their bloodstream? Like, what does
1:47:37
Speaker 2: it metabolize as? There's this idea, I think, like, maybe
1:47:40
Speaker 2: the CSI concept is that you could take a blood
1:47:45
Speaker 2: sample from someone who's died and drop it in a
1:47:47
Speaker 2: little machine, and it's gonna tell you everything they consumed
1:47:50
Speaker 2: for the last 24 hours. But it just doesn't work
1:47:52
Speaker 2: that way. Even if you're testing, like if you were
1:47:55
Speaker 2: to test a sample of cannabis or one of those
1:47:58
Speaker 2: tabs to try to figure out, well, is it really
1:48:01
Speaker 2: 15 milligrams? Is it really 100 milligrams? The testing that
1:48:04
Speaker 2: you need to do that is very sophisticated and requires
1:48:08
Speaker 2: other reagents and chemicals and devices customized for that task.
1:48:14
Speaker 2: And it's the same with testing someone's blood to determine
1:48:17
Speaker 2: what level of seven or 7-OH metabolites they had in
1:48:22
Speaker 2: their bloodstream at the time. So, it's just such a
1:48:24
Speaker 2: new thing, and it's so poorly understood that we don't
1:48:26
Speaker 2: have a good grasp on, um, how many people are
1:48:31
Speaker 2: suffering from it, how many people are addicted to it,
1:48:33
Speaker 2: how many people are dying from it. But if you
1:48:35
Speaker 2: look at, um, There's a video that Mark Wayne Mullen
1:48:39
Speaker 2: did just in July where he's talking specifically about 7OH.
1:48:45
Speaker 2: He says it's a $ 9 billion marketplace. I don't know
1:48:49
Speaker 2: where he got that number from, but he talks about
1:48:52
Speaker 2: how there was somebody who was clearly close to him
1:48:55
Speaker 2: who had an opioid addiction and went through recovery, got clean.
1:49:02
Speaker 2: and then started to bear the telltale signs of not
1:49:07
Speaker 2: being clean. Yet, they were doing urinalysis, and there was
1:49:10
Speaker 2: no presence of opioid in their urine. They were passing
1:49:14
Speaker 2: their drug screens, but they looked like they were still
1:49:17
Speaker 2: using some kind of an opioid, and it was because
1:49:20
Speaker 2: they were using 70H.
1:49:21
Speaker 1: This is, I mean, we got 15 milligrams in the package.
1:49:26
Speaker 1: We've got 60 milligrams of tablet. We've got 25 milligrams
1:49:29
Speaker 1: of tablet. No judgment here. I'm curious, you know, have
1:49:33
Speaker 1: you tried this to see what the effects are?
1:49:35
Speaker 3: No.
1:49:37
Speaker 1: Do you know anybody?
1:49:38
Speaker 2: No, I don't know anybody who's tried it. Well, actually,
1:49:41
Speaker 2: I'll take that back. There was a website that used
1:49:45
Speaker 2: to exist, which has been taken down now, called kush.com.
1:49:49
Speaker 2: And there is a product that they combine THC oil
1:49:56
Speaker 2: with 7-OH in a form that's vapable. And you can buy,
1:50:01
Speaker 2: at the time this website existed, you could 100% legal
1:50:06
Speaker 2: for like $ 7, 500, $ 8, 000 by a kilo brick, looks just
1:50:13
Speaker 2: like hashish, of 7-OH infused THC oil that could be
1:50:21
Speaker 2: manufactured into vape pens. And you could sell those as
1:50:25
Speaker 2: a THC vape pen and someone could unknowingly be vaping
1:50:29
Speaker 2: an opioid product. And I learned about this later, but
1:50:33
Speaker 2: as a result of publishing the documentary with Tucker and
1:50:37
Speaker 2: doing some of the reporting on this topic, I have
1:50:40
Speaker 2: lots of parents and sources who are emailing me and
1:50:42
Speaker 2: asking me questions about things. And one family that came
1:50:45
Speaker 2: to me had a daughter who purchased a vape pen
1:50:48
Speaker 2: on Snapchat. Their daughter was like 17 and became hooked
1:50:54
Speaker 2: on the vape pen. And at the time, I thought
1:50:56
Speaker 2: that that was really weird because they say marijuana's not
1:51:00
Speaker 2: supposed to be physically, uh, addictive. I don't know that
1:51:03
Speaker 2: that's 100% true of some of these 99% pure marijuana vapes.
1:51:09
Speaker 1: Uh.
1:51:10
Speaker 2: This young woman became hooked on her vape pen, eventually
1:51:14
Speaker 2: was found unconscious, and had to be Narcanned and brought
1:51:17
Speaker 2: back from a vape pen. And I don't know this
1:51:20
Speaker 2: for sure, the vape pen ended up getting thrown away
1:51:23
Speaker 2: so I couldn't get it and have it tested, but
1:51:26
Speaker 2: I suspect that it could be something like this, a
1:51:30
Speaker 2: combination of THC with 7-OH. So the people who are
1:51:35
Speaker 2: making gobs and gobs of money off this, they're not
1:51:39
Speaker 2: like Puritan about, no, it has to be THC or no,
1:51:43
Speaker 2: it has to be 7-OH or it has to be
1:51:44
Speaker 2: hemp or it has to be sativa or it has
1:51:46
Speaker 2: to be indica. They'll make money off of whatever people
1:51:50
Speaker 2: are willing to buy to get high. And one of the,
1:51:54
Speaker 2: I guess, the pioneers of this 7-0-H industry is a
1:51:58
Speaker 2: guy named Vince Sanders, who has been written about extensively by,
1:52:04
Speaker 2: I think, the Kansas City Star. And he doesn't really
1:52:09
Speaker 2: make any bones about being an entrepreneur in this space.
1:52:13
Speaker 2: He claims that he started... He started a company called
1:52:17
Speaker 2: CBD American Shaman, which is one of the biggest companies
1:52:20
Speaker 2: selling CBD products and now 708 products. He claims he
1:52:25
Speaker 2: stumbled onto CBD because he was trying to help his
1:52:28
Speaker 2: uncle survive lung cancer and that he used homemade CBD
1:52:32
Speaker 2: to cure his uncle's lung cancer. And eventually that inspired
1:52:36
Speaker 2: him to start a CBD company. And now he's making
1:52:39
Speaker 2: and selling 708 products. So a lot of the 70H
1:52:42
Speaker 2: that is bought under these different brand names is actually
1:52:44
Speaker 2: manufactured by one central location. Sanders has bragged in recent
1:52:52
Speaker 2: stories about being the biggest manufacturer of 70H in the country.
1:52:57
Speaker 2: And he said in a podcast that's still publicly available
1:53:01
Speaker 2: that within just a few months, his 70H business was
1:53:06
Speaker 2: bigger than every single CBD product that he's sold. in
1:53:10
Speaker 2: the history of his company.
1:53:11
Speaker 1: Wow.
1:53:12
Speaker 2: And he was actually giving out free samples of 7-OH
1:53:17
Speaker 2: with CBD orders. So you might order some CBD cream
1:53:21
Speaker 2: for your knee or something if it's arthritic, thinking maybe
1:53:24
Speaker 2: that's gonna help. And you get a little thing of
1:53:28
Speaker 2: lime-flavored 7-OH described as an all-natural plant-based medicine, and you
1:53:34
Speaker 2: try it. I mean, is there any other line of
1:53:37
Speaker 2: business where you give away a free sample that makes
1:53:39
Speaker 2: you feel really good? And then the next one you
1:53:41
Speaker 2: actually have to pay for because there's some that I
1:53:43
Speaker 2: can think of. And he's grown it into an empire.
1:53:48
Speaker 2: He's been written about. And right now, all of those
1:53:51
Speaker 2: products remain totally legal.
1:53:54
Speaker 1: I mean, have you seen, I really want to know,
1:53:57
Speaker 1: you know, who the customer is and how dangerous this is. So,
1:54:01
Speaker 1: I mean, have you seen anybody that's only on 7-OH,
1:54:06
Speaker 1: not on fentanyl, heroin, Oxy.
1:54:10
Speaker 2: I haven't, and again, part of it is because we're
1:54:13
Speaker 2: here very early.
1:54:15
Speaker 1: Very early.
1:54:16
Speaker 2: I've never seen, I haven't seen... Have you seen who's.
1:54:18
Speaker 1: Coming into the stores to buy this? No.
1:54:21
Speaker 2: Other than Vince Sanders on a podcast talking about being
1:54:27
Speaker 2: the titan of 7-0-H. I've never heard any other podcast
1:54:31
Speaker 2: or any big media talk about it. And the stories
1:54:33
Speaker 2: published just a few weeks ago by the Kansas City
1:54:36
Speaker 2: Star about CBD American Shaman were some of the first
1:54:39
Speaker 2: that covered 7-OH. So it's very, very early. And in
1:54:44
Speaker 2: Maine in particular, fentanyl is so widely available and so
1:54:50
Speaker 2: cheap that I don't think that people have been pushed
1:54:54
Speaker 2: in this direction yet.
1:54:55
Speaker 1: There are.
1:54:58
Speaker 2: Drug cartels that run very easy fentanyl markets in Maine. Um,
1:55:03
Speaker 2: they don't get a lot of harassment from law enforcement. Uh, for,
1:55:08
Speaker 2: you know, 20 bucks, you can stay high on fentanyl
1:55:11
Speaker 2: all day. It's very inexpensive. And we give away needles
1:55:14
Speaker 2: for free. But as the.
1:55:16
Speaker 1: Give away needles for free up there?
1:55:19
Speaker 2: Yes, we stopped doing needle exchange, uh, under COVID. Uh,
1:55:23
Speaker 2: Governor Janet Mills suspended the one-to-one needle exchange.
1:55:26
Speaker 1: This is crazy. You can't even buy a flavored nicotine
1:55:29
Speaker 1: pouch in Maine.
1:55:32
Speaker 2: In Portland, yeah.
1:55:33
Speaker 1: In Portland.
1:55:33
Speaker 2: Yeah, some states have cracked.
1:55:34
Speaker 1: Down on that. In Portland, you can go get some
1:55:36
Speaker 1: free needles to shoot up fentanyl.
1:55:37
Speaker 2: Actually, I sent a reporter undercover into the exchange in Portland,
1:55:43
Speaker 2: and he got needles, but he also got a boofing kit.
1:55:46
Speaker 1: A what?
1:55:47
Speaker 2: A boofing kit.
1:55:48
Speaker 1: What's a boofing kit?
1:55:50
Speaker 2: If you've so thoroughly abused your veins that you can't
1:55:55
Speaker 2: get fentanyl in, The Boofing Kit is a non-needle syringe
1:56:01
Speaker 2: with some lubricant that you put in your butt.
1:56:06
Speaker 1: It's called Boofing.
1:56:07
Speaker 2: Have you tried that? I have not tried that, but
1:56:14
Speaker 2: we did get a Boofing Kit. In Maine, you can't
1:56:18
Speaker 2: get mint-flavored tobacco pouches in some cities, but you can
1:56:21
Speaker 2: get free boofing kits to squirt Dominican fentanyl up your ass.
1:56:26
Speaker 1: And bring needles. Thank God. Thank God.
1:56:28
Speaker 2: But they did away with the one-to-one needle exchange requirement,
1:56:32
Speaker 2: and instead you get one box of 100 needles. And
1:56:36
Speaker 2: there was actually just an attempt to bring back the
1:56:39
Speaker 2: needle exchange requirement in the city of Lewiston that was
1:56:42
Speaker 2: voted down. And so we've got needles everywhere. I mean,
1:56:46
Speaker 2: the exchange program worked because you, like, users had to
1:56:50
Speaker 2: collect their dirty needles and bring them back, and they
1:56:53
Speaker 2: were put into sharps containers, and then they could get
1:56:55
Speaker 2: clean needles. And now there's just needles through all of
1:57:00
Speaker 2: our public spaces. And this entire program, keep in mind,
1:57:03
Speaker 2: was created in order to prevent the spread of blood-borne
1:57:07
Speaker 2: illnesses like hep C and AIDS. And this year, Maine
1:57:11
Speaker 2: had its biggest ever spike of hep C and HIV
1:57:19
Speaker 2: related to a cluster of individuals in Bangor who were
1:57:21
Speaker 2: all customers of the needle exchange clinic there.
1:57:24
Speaker 1: Wow.
1:57:26
Speaker 2: Well, that's a little bit off topic, but that's why
1:57:28
Speaker 2: I think you haven't seen 70H take off to the
1:57:33
Speaker 2: extent that.
1:57:36
Speaker 1: It will.
1:57:36
Speaker 2: I mean, we're on the cusp of it. This is,
1:57:38
Speaker 2: you know, in the undercover video that I supplied your
1:57:41
Speaker 2: producers with, you'll see an individual who goes into CBD,
1:57:46
Speaker 2: American Shaman store locations. And he talks with sales rep
1:57:51
Speaker 2: after sales rep after sales rep about products, not specifically those,
1:57:57
Speaker 2: but basically the same thing. They're 70H, they're tablets, they're
1:58:00
Speaker 2: drink mixes, whatever. And the sales reps are like, they're
1:58:05
Speaker 2: reading off a script. This is all natural. This is plant-based.
1:58:09
Speaker 2: You'll be able to stop taking your prescription painkillers. You'll
1:58:14
Speaker 2: be able to stop taking your prescription Adderall. This is healthy. Oh,
1:58:19
Speaker 2: you know, it's not addictive. We just recommend that you,
1:58:24
Speaker 2: you know, take it for two days and then take
1:58:26
Speaker 2: one day off and then take it for two days
1:58:28
Speaker 2: and then one day off.
1:58:30
Speaker 1: And it says right here, Kratom may be addictive.
1:58:34
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:58:35
Speaker 1: On the package.
1:58:36
Speaker 2: Yeah.
1:58:36
Speaker 1: And they're telling people it's not addictive.
1:58:40
Speaker 2: And I mean, you can see it in the undercover video,
1:58:42
Speaker 2: the way they're marketing it.
1:58:43
Speaker 1: The CBB American Shaman employees you're about to see are
1:58:46
Speaker 1: not doctors. Yet they claim this drug can treat many
1:58:50
Speaker 1: different ailments, none of which are on the label. So
1:58:54
Speaker 1: you have something for the main thing is chronic pain.
1:58:57
Speaker 4: Yeah, absolutely, for sure.
1:58:58
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:58:59
Speaker 4: The alcohols are really, really great for chronic pain. The
1:59:03
Speaker 4: only thing that's ever worked for my pain was after
1:59:06
Speaker 4: my surgery.
1:59:08
Speaker 1: It was hydrocodone.
1:59:10
Speaker 2: Hydrocodone.
1:59:12
Speaker 1: Would that be like a comparable?
1:59:13
Speaker 2: Because nothing ever works. Yeah.
1:59:15
Speaker 4: Oh, yeah.
1:59:17
Speaker 1: These are very strong, and they're really great for chronic pain.
1:59:20
Speaker 4: I'll be honest.
1:59:21
Speaker 1: I've used a lot of prescription drugs. These are somewhat
1:59:24
Speaker 1: cleaner and better that I'm very grateful for.
1:59:26
Speaker 2: It kind of like replaced it? For me, 100%.
1:59:28
Speaker 3: For people I know, 100%.
1:59:32
Speaker 2: So it's worth trying.
1:59:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'll try one, whatever you recommend for sure. Do
1:59:38
Speaker 1: people use it for rec, like just at the end
1:59:40
Speaker 1: of the day? Yeah, some people do use it instead
1:59:42
Speaker 1: of alcohol or instead of taking like a Xanax or
1:59:45
Speaker 1: whatever it may be.
1:59:45
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:59:46
Speaker 1: So definitely, bro.
1:59:47
Speaker 2: You can definitely use.
1:59:48
Speaker 4: It to relax and chill out and to cope with
1:59:51
Speaker 4: that pain.
1:59:52
Speaker 3: Nice.
1:59:52
Speaker 2: I have customers who've successfully switched from pharmaceutical like opiates
1:59:57
Speaker 2: to this. Oh, popular people buying it?
2:00:00
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
2:00:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's probably about close to.
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Speaker 2: And for people who have been following I guess this space,
2:03:02
Speaker 2: it's deja vu back to the beginning of the prescription
2:03:06
Speaker 2: opioid epidemic when you had like the Federation of State
2:03:12
Speaker 2: Medical Boards, which is just a nonprofit. It's not a
2:03:14
Speaker 2: government entity. It's a nonprofit that was created and positioned
2:03:19
Speaker 2: itself as the head of the medical boards and some
2:03:22
Speaker 2: medical licensure processes. But the Federation of State Medical Boards
2:03:26
Speaker 2: actually commissioned books advertising and touting the safetiness of prescription
2:03:33
Speaker 2: opioids and later submitted, solicited donations from some of the
2:03:40
Speaker 2: companies making these prescription opioids in order to spread this
2:03:45
Speaker 2: book and this pro-opioid material to different doctor's offices. So
2:03:51
Speaker 2: it's the same exact thing as Unfolding, except for instead
2:03:54
Speaker 2: of doctor's offices, It's happening at head shops and tobacco
2:03:57
Speaker 2: shops and CBD American Shaman locations, where they're saying, oh no,
2:04:02
Speaker 2: this is a safe, you know, natural way for you
2:04:04
Speaker 2: to just live better. It's an anti, it's an anxiolytic.
2:04:08
Speaker 2: It's gonna help you be a happier, more productive person. Oh,
2:04:11
Speaker 2: you got knee pain? Just take a little bit of
2:04:13
Speaker 2: this natural cure-all. There's no downside whatsoever.
2:04:16
Speaker 1: So is your fear that is the Fentanyl crisis, you know,
2:04:22
Speaker 1: as we tackle that, you know, hopefully, hopefully they're making
2:04:25
Speaker 1: some damage to, you know, to the fentanyl trade. I mean,
2:04:29
Speaker 1: are you, I mean, we saw this in Florida, right?
2:04:31
Speaker 1: With all the pill mills.
2:04:32
Speaker 3: Yeah.
2:04:32
Speaker 1: All the pill mills popped up, opiates, opiates, opiates, oxy, oxy.
2:04:37
Speaker 1: Then they cracked down on the pill mills. Everybody went
2:04:40
Speaker 1: to heroin. Is that what your, is that what your
2:04:42
Speaker 1: fear is? The same exact dynamic. When we crack down
2:04:45
Speaker 1: on the, on the fentanyl crisis, they move into 7-0-H. Yeah.
2:04:49
Speaker 2: It's the same exact dynamic. I mean, we.
2:04:53
Speaker 1: But I want to know, you know, how much of
2:04:55
Speaker 1: this does somebody have to take to get the same effects?
2:04:58
Speaker 1: That would be interesting to know. And what are the
2:05:00
Speaker 1: actual effects? Will it turn you into, you know, a
2:05:05
Speaker 1: straight addict where this is all you think about all
2:05:08
Speaker 1: day long? Are there, you know, are there withdrawal symptoms?
2:05:13
Speaker 1: Can you function without the shit?
2:05:14
Speaker 2: I mean, in some contexts... with Kratom and I would
2:05:20
Speaker 2: assume 7-OH, there have been withdrawal side effects. I don't
2:05:24
Speaker 2: know if they're like debilitating flu-like with fentanyl and, you know,
2:05:30
Speaker 2: prescription opioids, but I would assume that it's one of
2:05:34
Speaker 2: those things where you've got to experience it to really
2:05:37
Speaker 2: know what it actually feels like. But it's so new
2:05:41
Speaker 2: that there's, we don't have, you know, a population of
2:05:44
Speaker 2: people who are 7-OH addicts who have gone into treatment
2:05:49
Speaker 2: who can describe what that process was like. We don't
2:05:52
Speaker 2: have people who are in recovery specifically from 7-0-H at
2:05:55
Speaker 2: this point who can describe what that process is like.
2:05:59
Speaker 2: Because again, they're new products, but it is my fear
2:06:01
Speaker 2: that they're like the kind of messages about where to buy,
2:06:07
Speaker 2: you know, the fake hemp that's actually cannabis spreads quickly
2:06:11
Speaker 2: in drug circles. You know, they've got like stickers outside
2:06:13
Speaker 2: of hemp shops that can communicate where to buy the
2:06:16
Speaker 2: real weed that's fake hemp. The idea about Kratom or
2:06:21
Speaker 2: 7-OH or any of these synthetic drugs, the message moves
2:06:26
Speaker 2: very quickly in drug-using circles. And if the price of
2:06:30
Speaker 2: fentanyl starts to dry up because of the success that
2:06:34
Speaker 2: the Trump administration has had shutting down not just the
2:06:36
Speaker 2: southern border, but also the super labs on the Canadian border,
2:06:40
Speaker 2: then it's just, you know, microeconomics. The supply of fentanyl shrinks,
2:06:46
Speaker 2: the price goes up, and suddenly the $ 8 package of
2:06:49
Speaker 2: pills at the head shop looks much more attractive. I
2:06:53
Speaker 2: think that the federal government is a little bit ahead
2:06:58
Speaker 2: of the curve in some ways because they've begun, like
2:07:03
Speaker 2: I said, the FDA is asking the DEA to schedule 7-OH.
2:07:06
Speaker 2: They're sending letters to some vape stores and tobacco stores
2:07:11
Speaker 2: telling them, warning them, don't sell these products. That's like
2:07:15
Speaker 2: a prelude to armed DEA agents kicking in your door
2:07:20
Speaker 2: and raiding your shop. The same goes for some of
2:07:24
Speaker 2: the illicit cannabis that's being sold. But really, it's like
2:07:29
Speaker 2: one kind of network of people quasi-legal businesses that are
2:07:36
Speaker 2: hustling these synthetic drugs and quasi-legal drugs through the same system.
2:07:42
Speaker 2: And you're starting to see more and more law enforcement
2:07:46
Speaker 2: actions from the federal level. Like, all the time, there's
2:07:49
Speaker 2: state-level raids of vape shops. There were some vape shops
2:07:53
Speaker 2: hit recently where it was Operation Vape Trail. This was
2:07:59
Speaker 2: a federal initiative shutting down some vape shops that were
2:08:01
Speaker 2: just selling good old-fashioned THC, and they were pretending that
2:08:05
Speaker 2: they were selling nicotine or CBD or something like that.
2:08:08
Speaker 2: And three of them happened to be operated by Chinese
2:08:10
Speaker 2: nationals who just so happened to operate vape shops close
2:08:13
Speaker 2: to US military installations in Texas. And some of these
2:08:18
Speaker 2: vape shops tunnels underneath them that look like what you
2:08:23
Speaker 2: would see from Hamas or the Sinaloa cartel. So if
2:08:27
Speaker 2: you're a vape shop that needs to use the same
2:08:29
Speaker 2: kind of techniques and tactics as Hamas or Sinaloa, you're
2:08:33
Speaker 2: probably doing something that's not legal. That's not strictly above board.
2:08:39
Speaker 2: So I do think that the federal government is a
2:08:40
Speaker 2: little bit ahead of the curb when it comes to
2:08:42
Speaker 2: cracking down on this stuff, but waiting in the wings,
2:08:46
Speaker 2: like with bath salts, are new formulations of 7-OH because
2:08:51
Speaker 2: it's just a synthetic drug. It's just a molecule. And
2:08:56
Speaker 2: they know you've got this spot in your brain where
2:08:59
Speaker 2: the derivatives of the poppy seed can go plug in
2:09:03
Speaker 2: and make you feel euphoria. And they made it into
2:09:06
Speaker 2: Percocet and Oxycontin and hydrocodone and all these different chemicals.
2:09:10
Speaker 2: And then they found another somewhat naturally occurring version of
2:09:14
Speaker 2: that alkaloid. in the chemical formulations coming from the Kratom plant,
2:09:19
Speaker 2: and they're finding new ones. I'm already aware of second
2:09:23
Speaker 2: and third generation versions of 7-OH that will hit the
2:09:27
Speaker 2: market as soon as 7-OH is cracked down on. And
2:09:30
Speaker 2: it's in part because the federal government's approach is to ban,
2:09:34
Speaker 2: you know, a molecule. So, they'll make 7-OH illegal, and
2:09:38
Speaker 2: then newer versions of the product will come out, and
2:09:40
Speaker 2: the process will start again, the drug-using community learns about
2:09:45
Speaker 2: the product, and then law enforcement starts seeing it pop up,
2:09:48
Speaker 2: and then it gets to the political level, and they
2:09:51
Speaker 2: decide that they're going to ban it again. And throughout
2:09:54
Speaker 2: this entire process, gobs and gobs and gobs of money
2:09:58
Speaker 2: are being made. That's, whether it's the 7-OH thing, or
2:10:03
Speaker 2: the legalization of marijuana in Maine, the lesson that I
2:10:07
Speaker 2: learned through what's now two years of investigative reporting is
2:10:13
Speaker 2: that we're dealing with amounts of money that normal people
2:10:19
Speaker 2: just can't understand. Like, when you legalized marijuana in Maine,
2:10:23
Speaker 2: they had all these estimates about what the sales were
2:10:26
Speaker 2: gonna be like and what the taxes were gonna be like,
2:10:28
Speaker 2: and our schools were gonna be better, our roads were
2:10:31
Speaker 2: gonna be better, our police departments were gonna be better
2:10:34
Speaker 2: funded because of all the tax revenue coming from this.
2:10:36
Speaker 2: It was all a lie. None of it turned out
2:10:38
Speaker 2: to be true. But they radically underestimated the size of
2:10:43
Speaker 2: the market there, they thought it was gonna be, you know,
2:10:46
Speaker 2: 300 million, 400 million, 500 million. It's probably like 5
2:10:51
Speaker 2: billion on its way to 10 billion because we're growing
2:10:55
Speaker 2: the weed to supply the demand for the rest of
2:10:58
Speaker 2: the country, or at least the part of the country
2:11:01
Speaker 2: that Oklahoma and California aren't supplying. And when you, when
2:11:06
Speaker 2: a state legalizes like Ohio has done recently, you basically
2:11:12
Speaker 2: break a dam that was holding back access to billions
2:11:16
Speaker 2: of dollars. And the kinds of people that that attracts,
2:11:20
Speaker 2: whether it's Chinese cartels or American cartels or pharmaceutical companies
2:11:26
Speaker 2: or big corporate players, are maybe not the kind of people,
2:11:33
Speaker 2: not the most ethical operators. And, you know, people will
2:11:38
Speaker 2: do crazy shit for $ 10, 000.
2:11:38
Speaker 1: Mm-hmm.
2:11:40
Speaker 2: What would you do for a billion? Or, you know,
2:11:44
Speaker 2: it's a big problem that Maine was totally unprepared to
2:11:48
Speaker 2: grapple with. And we did not have the immune system
2:11:50
Speaker 2: to deal with the kind of forces that were unleashed
2:11:52
Speaker 2: when we legalized marijuana. And the Chinese cartels were just
2:11:56
Speaker 2: one of the examples willing to come in here and
2:12:01
Speaker 2: just totally ransack the state.
2:12:04
Speaker 1: You know, I mean, Has anybody, I mean, is there
2:12:10
Speaker 1: any record of anybody overdosing or, you know, fatally overdosing
2:12:16
Speaker 1: on this stuff? You know, I have a tweet here
2:12:19
Speaker 1: from Matt Gates. It says, how many people has 7-0-H killed?
2:12:23
Speaker 1: I can't find a single case where there wasn't some
2:12:27
Speaker 1: other drug like fentanyl in the system when someone has
2:12:30
Speaker 1: died with 7-0-H. Maybe I'm missing something. By comparison, Tylenol
2:12:34
Speaker 1: kills 550 people per year. You know, and so... I mean,
2:12:41
Speaker 1: this isn't to blast Matt Gaetz by any means, but,
2:12:44
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, it does bring up a relevant point, right?
2:12:49
Speaker 1: That if there are no documented deaths just from 7-0-H,
2:12:53
Speaker 1: you know, is it that bad?
2:12:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think Matt raises an interesting point, but it's
2:13:01
Speaker 2: not because those deaths aren't happening. It's because they're not
2:13:05
Speaker 2: being tracked. Like, you know, if we were to do
2:13:09
Speaker 2: a random survey of just small town police departments and
2:13:15
Speaker 2: ask them, what's 7-0-H, how many would be able to
2:13:18
Speaker 2: tell you what 7-0-H is? I would say it'd be
2:13:23
Speaker 2: very low. Very low percentage would be able to tell
2:13:25
Speaker 2: you what it is. The more important thing, I think,
2:13:29
Speaker 2: about that tweet is who paid Matt Gaetz to ask
2:13:33
Speaker 2: that question?
2:13:35
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
2:13:35
Speaker 2: Why is Matt Gaetz asking about 7-0-H? Why is he
2:13:38
Speaker 2: defending the 7-0-H industry?
2:13:40
Speaker 1: That was, you know, that was another point that I
2:13:42
Speaker 1: was about to bring up. I mean, who in the
2:13:47
Speaker 1: government is, you know, who's lobbying for this?
2:13:51
Speaker 2: Well, the Kentucky senators certainly have an interest in protecting
2:13:55
Speaker 2: the hemp industry. So on that side, there is a
2:14:00
Speaker 2: you know, a caucus of Republicans who are committed to
2:14:03
Speaker 2: keeping hemp legalized, and that means keeping the hemp loophole open.
2:14:08
Speaker 2: But specific to 7-0-H, I think it's... it's less well
2:14:14
Speaker 2: understood because it is so new. And again, like with
2:14:19
Speaker 2: small town cops, if you were to poll, you know,
2:14:23
Speaker 2: the U.S. Senate or the U.S. House of Representatives and
2:14:26
Speaker 2: ask them what 7-0-H is, they don't know. But there
2:14:30
Speaker 2: are trade associations that have formed to represent the interests
2:14:36
Speaker 2: of 7-OH producers, just like there are trade associations formed
2:14:41
Speaker 2: to represent the interests of hemp producers. And trade associations
2:14:45
Speaker 2: exist for one purpose, to communicate an industry's priorities to
2:14:51
Speaker 2: the political sphere. And oftentimes that involves financial contributions to
2:14:56
Speaker 2: campaign committees. I don't think it's an accident that Matt
2:15:01
Speaker 2: randomly tweets out about 7-OH. It seems like it's an
2:15:05
Speaker 2: innocuous tweet just kind of saying, shouldn't we be focused
2:15:08
Speaker 2: on fentanyl and other priorities? But I'd be interested to
2:15:13
Speaker 2: hear the story behind why that message came out, just
2:15:16
Speaker 2: like I'd be interested to hear more about Representative Comer's
2:15:20
Speaker 2: recent message about the importance of the hemp industry for
2:15:25
Speaker 2: America because I've looked pretty hard and I can't find
2:15:28
Speaker 2: hemp being used in industrial applications, but I can find
2:15:33
Speaker 2: plenty of examples like this of, this is a hemp product,
2:15:39
Speaker 2: a smokeable hemp product purchased at a gas station in Lewiston,
2:15:42
Speaker 2: Maine that has THCP on it. And there's one lab
2:15:48
Speaker 2: that makes THCP and it's located in Shanghai, China. and
2:15:53
Speaker 2: you can go online and you can buy it in
2:15:56
Speaker 2: large chemical formulations and you can take your hemp plant
2:16:00
Speaker 2: matter and sprinkle THCP on it. And if you smoke this,
2:16:03
Speaker 2: you'll get high. You'll be more likely to have a
2:16:05
Speaker 2: schizophrenic episode and tachycardia, which racing hard, but you'll get high.
2:16:10
Speaker 2: And if you're desperate to get high, it'll work for you.
2:16:13
Speaker 2: This is the kind of hemp product that I'm familiar with.
2:16:16
Speaker 2: I haven't seen a lot of hemp rope or hemp
2:16:18
Speaker 2: shirts or hemp t-shirts proliferating which is what the people
2:16:22
Speaker 2: advocating for the hemp industry have said was the purpose
2:16:26
Speaker 2: of advocating for it. But it's, you know, the reason
2:16:29
Speaker 2: why I bring up hemp in the context of the
2:16:31
Speaker 2: 7-OH conversation is because they're really the same conversation. And
2:16:34
Speaker 2: there'll be new ones. A year from now, there'll be
2:16:37
Speaker 2: a new formulation of 7-OH. And the following year, there'll
2:16:40
Speaker 2: be a new kind of drug. And our regulatory system
2:16:43
Speaker 2: will be really slow to catch up to it. And
2:16:46
Speaker 2: they'll get better as the science gets better. already we
2:16:50
Speaker 2: have labs capable of producing very high quality synthetic drugs.
2:16:55
Speaker 2: The more they experiment with cannabinoids and marijuana, the more
2:16:59
Speaker 2: they'll be able to finely tune the drugs that are
2:17:02
Speaker 2: available at these locations. So it's just a problem that
2:17:05
Speaker 2: I think society and law enforcement will have to deal with.
2:17:08
Speaker 2: But right now they seem not, I don't want to
2:17:14
Speaker 2: say lethargic, but just like not equipped to deal with
2:17:19
Speaker 2: the scope of the problem. You know, like, there's a
2:17:22
Speaker 2: lot of people, you know, we're having a gubernatorial race
2:17:24
Speaker 2: in Maine now, and I've said that the law enforcement
2:17:28
Speaker 2: budget in the state could double easily, and not even,
2:17:32
Speaker 2: still not be adequate to tackle the problems that we're facing,
2:17:37
Speaker 2: from organized crime to petty crime, street crime. And this
2:17:42
Speaker 2: drug aspect is one part of it. And it's because
2:17:45
Speaker 2: there's so much money to be made. So much, I mean,
2:17:48
Speaker 2: selling a product product that someone is addicted to, there's
2:17:51
Speaker 2: a lot of money to be made in that.
2:17:53
Speaker 1: So, I mean, you can drink it, you can vape it,
2:17:56
Speaker 1: you can take a pill.
2:17:57
Speaker 2: I mean, are there any other avenues? Depending on how
2:18:01
Speaker 2: it's formulated. I think it has to be a... I'm
2:18:05
Speaker 2: not aware of an injectable form. It has to be
2:18:08
Speaker 2: formulated differently. in order to be vapable. And the only
2:18:14
Speaker 2: combinations of vapable 7-OH I found were in combination with THC.
2:18:22
Speaker 1: Okay.
2:18:23
Speaker 2: But again, these were, you know, available on websites that
2:18:27
Speaker 2: are still legal in some cases, shipped through the United
2:18:31
Speaker 2: States Postal Service, purchased totally legally. There are no laws
2:18:36
Speaker 2: that I'm aware of. against 7-0-H. You know, there are
2:18:41
Speaker 2: some counties, maybe, in southern states that have developed ordinances
2:18:46
Speaker 2: against them. But by and large, states have yet to
2:18:51
Speaker 2: figure out what's going on and prohibit it. But it's happening,
2:18:56
Speaker 2: in Maine at least, it's happening systematically. The same family
2:19:00
Speaker 2: that purchased the Um, Bros 2, where I got those tablets,
2:19:06
Speaker 2: next to Tucker's studio, uh, has purchased other gas stations
2:19:10
Speaker 2: and convenience stores in Maine. And almost every gas station
2:19:15
Speaker 2: and convenience store and motel in Maine, north of Portland,
2:19:19
Speaker 2: has been purchased by basically the same family. And the
2:19:24
Speaker 2: playbook that they run once they purchase it is to
2:19:27
Speaker 2: stop making the red hot dogs and the chicken parmesan
2:19:31
Speaker 2: sandwiches and.
2:19:34
Speaker 2: And bring in the pipes and the fake hemp products
2:19:38
Speaker 2: and the 7-OH products. And, uh, you know, it has
2:19:43
Speaker 2: all the hallmarks of something that's being done according to
2:19:46
Speaker 2: a plan. And the goal might not be to, uh,
2:19:50
Speaker 2: you know, weaken the American people broadly by getting them
2:19:55
Speaker 2: addicted to shady shit like, you know, high potency THC
2:19:59
Speaker 2: or THC-P or 7-OH. That's the effect of it, though.
2:20:03
Speaker 2: And the other effect of it is to make gobs
2:20:07
Speaker 2: and gobs of money. I just can't emphasize enough how
2:20:11
Speaker 2: much money is being made on this. It's a different podcast,
2:20:16
Speaker 2: the Freakonomics podcast did an episode, I think maybe last year,
2:20:21
Speaker 2: all about marijuana. And they noted that last year was
2:20:24
Speaker 2: the first year where the total number of daily active
2:20:29
Speaker 2: marijuana users surpassed uh, daily active alcohol users. And I
2:20:34
Speaker 2: think that that probably underestimates the actual trend that we're seeing, where, uh,
2:20:39
Speaker 2: daily active marijuana use has become, uh, not just destigmatized,
2:20:45
Speaker 2: but totally normalized as a form of, like, having a
2:20:48
Speaker 2: cup of coffee or taking medicine or, you know, popping
2:20:51
Speaker 2: a nicotine pouch. And, uh, the amount of money being
2:20:56
Speaker 2: made there is, is huge. and a lot of it
2:21:00
Speaker 2: is being poured into politics. And it was something that
2:21:02
Speaker 2: I realized too late in my reporting on this. You know,
2:21:08
Speaker 2: once I'd gone around all of these different Chinese grow
2:21:13
Speaker 2: houses and documented them and had like hard proof and
2:21:17
Speaker 2: like tax records and all of this, I thought I
2:21:19
Speaker 2: was gonna publish my story and the cops were gonna
2:21:23
Speaker 2: show up and be like, okay, we're taking care of
2:21:24
Speaker 2: it now. Done. Problem over. move on to my next
2:21:28
Speaker 2: story and go report on like welfare fraud or tax
2:21:31
Speaker 2: policy or something. But that didn't happen. Nothing happened. In fact,
2:21:36
Speaker 2: the operation professionalized, grew and got even better and got
2:21:40
Speaker 2: even bolder. And one of the few differences I noticed
2:21:45
Speaker 2: was that there were some Republican lobbyists and Republican politicians
2:21:49
Speaker 2: and non-Republicans who used to like me and want to
2:21:53
Speaker 2: make small talk with me at the statehouse who no
2:21:56
Speaker 2: longer wanted to make eye contact with me. and stopped
2:21:58
Speaker 2: picking up the phone when I called.
2:22:00
Speaker 1: What companies are they using? I have two nonprofits that
2:22:04
Speaker 1: they're using for kind of like lobbying firms, it sounds like,
2:22:09
Speaker 1: for some type of protection.
2:22:10
Speaker 2: So there's the Hemp Roundtable is a conglomeration of people
2:22:16
Speaker 2: who represent the hemp industry and say that they're representing
2:22:22
Speaker 2: the industrial purposes, but there's also state-level associations Um, so
2:22:27
Speaker 2: there's like the, uh, the Kentucky association for hemp or
2:22:31
Speaker 2: something like that. So there's a couple of those. And
2:22:34
Speaker 2: then there's one that I know that, um, I believe
2:22:37
Speaker 2: Vince Sanders is affiliated with, um, uh, called, uh, it's
2:22:41
Speaker 2: hope seven or, uh, seven hope. So, uh, seven OH
2:22:47
Speaker 2: is their logo, but they've got some of these, um, non-profit,
2:22:51
Speaker 2: I don't know if they're technically filed as 501 groups
2:22:54
Speaker 2: or if they're just websites or organizations, but there is
2:22:57
Speaker 2: a concerted PR effort being funded with some of this
2:23:01
Speaker 2: money to represent 7-OH as a medical cure to the
2:23:09
Speaker 2: fentanyl epidemic. They want, you know, instead of consuming the
2:23:14
Speaker 2: fentanyl that's being trafficked over the border or, you know,
2:23:17
Speaker 2: pill-pressed with Chinese precursors at super labs in Canada, they
2:23:22
Speaker 2: want you taking their products instead. And, you know, I
2:23:27
Speaker 2: don't know personally people who have gone down the Kratom
2:23:31
Speaker 2: or 7-OH path as a means of recovery from heroin
2:23:37
Speaker 2: or fentanyl. I've heard from other people about that being
2:23:43
Speaker 2: used as an approach, and it never ends with a
2:23:46
Speaker 2: full recovery from substances generally. It's more of, uh, you're switching, uh,
2:23:54
Speaker 2: the person you're buying your substances from. You're switching substances.
2:23:58
Speaker 1: Is there anybody against this in government? Uh....
2:24:04
Speaker 2: I don't know that there's enough education. I don't know
2:24:07
Speaker 2: that they know. Again, you know, if you poll U.S.
2:24:12
Speaker 2: senators and ask them if they know about it, um,
2:24:16
Speaker 2: I doubt that they know about this. And it gets
2:24:18
Speaker 2: back to the question that Matt Gaetz asked, is how
2:24:21
Speaker 2: many people have died about it? Like, how many bodies
2:24:23
Speaker 2: need to stack up before it rises to the level
2:24:27
Speaker 2: of concern for a United States senator? I don't know.
2:24:32
Speaker 2: But this, I think, I guess one of the reasons
2:24:35
Speaker 2: why I'm happy for the opportunity to talk with you
2:24:37
Speaker 2: about it is because we are at a point where
2:24:40
Speaker 2: we're really early with the development of this product and
2:24:43
Speaker 2: can tell people about it. And we don't have to
2:24:46
Speaker 2: be where we were with the prescription opioid epidemic where
2:24:49
Speaker 2: you had millions, tens of millions of people who had
2:24:53
Speaker 2: a doctor give them a prescription and they wound up
2:24:56
Speaker 2: addicted to it. And they went from taking a product
2:24:59
Speaker 2: that a licensed medical doctor provided to them to out
2:25:03
Speaker 2: on the street looking for, you know, heroin to get
2:25:07
Speaker 2: their dope sickness to go away. So, we're still very
2:25:11
Speaker 2: early to it. I would suspect that there are some
2:25:15
Speaker 2: politicians who are in the medical world who would understand
2:25:21
Speaker 2: the inherent danger of a product that acts on your
2:25:24
Speaker 2: opioid receptors. That's a code word for drug users, for sure,
2:25:29
Speaker 2: but it's also a very real, I guess, medical reality
2:25:36
Speaker 2: that those substances in those 70H tabs are going to
2:25:40
Speaker 2: tickle the same parts of your brain that or morphine
2:25:44
Speaker 2: or Percocet would. And they're gonna give, they're gonna create
2:25:47
Speaker 2: in you that same sensation. And they'll also be, um,
2:25:52
Speaker 2: you know, relieved or you'll be saved from Narcan, which
2:25:56
Speaker 2: is designed the opioid reversal drug, or the overdose reversal drug. Um,
2:26:02
Speaker 2: so it's, it's, uh, in almost every way except for
2:26:07
Speaker 2: how it's formulated and where it, uh, the raw ingredients
2:26:12
Speaker 2: originate from. It's identical to morphine or any other opioid.
2:26:17
Speaker 2: Hopefully now there will be more concern or at least
2:26:21
Speaker 2: some attention to it. And I should have said Mark
2:26:23
Speaker 2: Wayne Mullen, the senator from Oklahoma. Like, he's familiar with
2:26:28
Speaker 2: it and has, you know, talked about it publicly and
2:26:30
Speaker 2: knows what it is. If you haven't had him on,
2:26:34
Speaker 2: I'm sure you've had him on before.
2:26:35
Speaker 1: I haven't had him on. You haven't?
2:26:37
Speaker 2: He would be good to have on on this. And especially, too,
2:26:39
Speaker 2: because the... Chinese drug trafficking in Oklahoma is different and
2:26:47
Speaker 2: probably worse than in Maine because of the geographic characteristics
2:26:52
Speaker 2: of Oklahoma and the way they have their licensure process
2:26:57
Speaker 2: set up. You just have huge greenhouses, like city-sized complexes,
2:27:01
Speaker 2: controlled by Chinese drug cartels, where Chinese migrants are smuggled
2:27:06
Speaker 2: across the border, they have their passports and their phones taken,
2:27:10
Speaker 2: And they're sent out there, they're like lured there, told
2:27:14
Speaker 2: that they're getting flower cutting jobs or flower arranging jobs,
2:27:17
Speaker 2: when in reality, they're just gonna be cannabis slaves. And
2:27:20
Speaker 2: it's a huge, huge problem in Oklahoma. And they only
2:27:25
Speaker 2: have a medicinal program there. No adult use recreational program,
2:27:29
Speaker 2: just medicinal. And I think they've got 5,000 or 6,000
2:27:34
Speaker 2: registered medicinal growers. And Oklahoma authorities have estimated that, you know,
2:27:39
Speaker 2: maybe three of those are suspected of ties to Chinese
2:27:43
Speaker 2: organized crime. And they've had Republican politicians, prosecutors, officials who
2:27:50
Speaker 2: have been investigated or indicted for taking bribes. from some
2:27:55
Speaker 2: of those cases. So, Oklahoma has had a tremendous, tremendous
2:27:59
Speaker 2: problem with this. And we actually found a few ties
2:28:02
Speaker 2: to Oklahoma. We found, you know, there's some shared addresses
2:28:07
Speaker 2: or people we believe came from Oklahoma, but I was
2:28:11
Speaker 2: in Eastport, Maine at a old sardine cannery. And Eastport's
2:28:15
Speaker 2: like the furthest east city in Maine. You can see
2:28:18
Speaker 2: Campobello Island, which is where FDR used to have his
2:28:22
Speaker 2: summer White House. It's technically Canada. And there's this beautiful building,
2:28:28
Speaker 2: sardine cannery, that a guy named Jimmy Wong had purchased
2:28:32
Speaker 2: and turned into. Supposedly, he was going to export lobsters
2:28:35
Speaker 2: to China. And all the stuff in the ocean that
2:28:38
Speaker 2: Americans don't eat, but the Chinese do, he was going
2:28:41
Speaker 2: to harvest it, freeze it, sell it, make a bunch
2:28:43
Speaker 2: of money. And everyone believed him. But it ended up
2:28:45
Speaker 2: just being a human trafficking operation and a marijuana growing operation.
2:28:50
Speaker 1: And we....
2:28:53
Speaker 2: Were in that facility after it had been cleaned out
2:28:56
Speaker 2: by the guy who owned it. And we noticed that
2:28:59
Speaker 2: tacked up to block out the light from coming in
2:29:03
Speaker 2: and ruining the marijuana plants and also to keep prying
2:29:06
Speaker 2: eyes out, there was like an Oklahoma State University tablecloth
2:29:12
Speaker 2: had been tacked up on the wall. It's like, that's
2:29:15
Speaker 2: not an accident. These guys aren't fans of Oklahoma State,
2:29:18
Speaker 2: you know, Oklahoma State University football. Like, Somehow, you know,
2:29:23
Speaker 2: vehicles from Oklahoma came to Eastport, Maine, as part of
2:29:26
Speaker 2: the same criminal organization that was trafficking in people and
2:29:31
Speaker 2: exploited laborers and growing huge amounts of marijuana to sell
2:29:35
Speaker 2: across the United States by virtue of the hemp loophole.
2:29:40
Speaker 3: Wow.
2:29:40
Speaker 2: Man.
2:29:43
Speaker 1: What am I missing, Steve? Covered a lot of info there.
2:29:50
Speaker 1: We have.
2:29:53
Speaker 2: I don't know that we're missing much.
2:29:55
Speaker 1: Well, I just want to say, like I mentioned, I've
2:29:58
Speaker 1: had a lot of friends reach out to me about
2:30:00
Speaker 1: the 708 stuff, wanting me to cover it from various people,
2:30:05
Speaker 1: and then we found you. And so I just want
2:30:07
Speaker 1: to say thank you for shining a light on this
2:30:10
Speaker 1: and raising awareness of this and something we should all
2:30:14
Speaker 1: be looking out for. And it sounds like Sounds like
2:30:17
Speaker 1: we're pretty early on this, and I think this is
2:30:19
Speaker 1: gonna gain some traction, you know, on the subject, so.
2:30:22
Speaker 2: I think you're not just early, I think you're the first.
2:30:25
Speaker 2: And I think that there's going to be new developments
2:30:30
Speaker 2: in the story as the second generation and the third
2:30:33
Speaker 2: generation of those opioid products come out. And what we're
2:30:38
Speaker 2: really gonna be dealing with is a phenomenon of how
2:30:41
Speaker 2: do we as a society control the kind of mind-altering
2:30:45
Speaker 2: substances and addictive drugs that we allow to be sold
2:30:48
Speaker 2: at gas stations and convenience stores. Uh, because right now,
2:30:53
Speaker 2: the regulatory barriers to, um, creating, marketing, and spreading a
2:30:58
Speaker 2: product like that all across the United States are very,
2:31:02
Speaker 2: very low. Uh, and it's... when there's such a large
2:31:07
Speaker 2: amount of money to be made, it's, um.
2:31:12
Speaker 2: There's really nothing stopping them from doing this. And you
2:31:16
Speaker 2: don't have to be wearing your tinfoil hat to see
2:31:19
Speaker 2: how it's in the interest of America's enemies to have
2:31:23
Speaker 2: everybody addicted to gas station heroin, and have everybody smoking
2:31:27
Speaker 2: gas station weed, and have everybody, you know, sucking on
2:31:30
Speaker 2: these little vape pens made by Chinese chemists in Flushing,
2:31:35
Speaker 2: New York. And who knows what else they're putting in them.
2:31:38
Speaker 2: So we've allowed the proliferation of networks and even if
2:31:43
Speaker 2: they're just totally benign, just here to make money, it's
2:31:46
Speaker 2: not in America's best interest to have this. Um, but
2:31:49
Speaker 2: I think we both know that, um, you know, uh,
2:31:52
Speaker 2: drug trafficking networks that are backed by the Chinese Communist Party,
2:31:56
Speaker 2: explicitly backed and connected to the Chinese Communist Party, do
2:32:00
Speaker 2: not have America's interests, uh, in mind. And they're co-locating
2:32:04
Speaker 2: their facilities next to sensitive infrastructure, next to military bases,
2:32:08
Speaker 2: next to places that would be ideal surveillance targets, and
2:32:12
Speaker 2: they're doing that on purpose. And heaven forbid, you know,
2:32:15
Speaker 2: some kind of a conflict breaks out or there's an
2:32:20
Speaker 2: escalation to the geopolitical tensions before we're able to fully
2:32:24
Speaker 2: wrap our arms around this. But I'm hopeful that the
2:32:28
Speaker 2: Trump administration, who is aware of this problem and is
2:32:31
Speaker 2: working to find the legal levers that can be pulled
2:32:36
Speaker 2: in order to control the problem and eliminate the problem,
2:32:41
Speaker 2: I'm hopeful that they'll be able to put an end
2:32:44
Speaker 2: to it for the safety of Americans and for the
2:32:46
Speaker 2: safety of everybody who wants to consume products. You know,
2:32:48
Speaker 2: I know plenty of people who smoke weed. I know
2:32:51
Speaker 2: some people who run, you know, businesses that make a
2:32:53
Speaker 2: couple million dollars a year and they'll smoke two or
2:32:56
Speaker 2: three grams of THC oil a day. which is an
2:33:01
Speaker 2: insane amount of THC oil to smoke. But they're running
2:33:04
Speaker 2: successful businesses, and they're paying their taxes, and they've got
2:33:06
Speaker 2: a bunch of employees, and they're law-abiding citizens. Uh, they
2:33:12
Speaker 2: deserve to have a cannabis product that doesn't have 16
2:33:16
Speaker 2: Chinese pesticides in it. You know, the people who are
2:33:19
Speaker 2: moving into houses in Maine, they deserve to know that
2:33:22
Speaker 2: the house that they're moving into wasn't formerly a Chinese
2:33:25
Speaker 2: marijuana grow where the walls are all poisoned with these pesticides.
2:33:29
Speaker 2: Just like you would, you know, if you crack a beer,
2:33:31
Speaker 2: you want to know what's in it. You want to
2:33:33
Speaker 2: know that there's not crazy Chinese fungicides in it. You
2:33:37
Speaker 2: deserve the same thing if you're smoking a joint legally
2:33:40
Speaker 2: in some state. And right now, because of the patchwork
2:33:44
Speaker 2: of laws and the large, powerful forces that benefit from
2:33:47
Speaker 2: this patchwork of laws, we don't have that. We have
2:33:50
Speaker 2: no certainty. So, if I could say anything, it would
2:33:53
Speaker 2: be just, you know, if you want to smoke some pot,
2:33:57
Speaker 2: grow it yourself. You know, whatever, just because it comes
2:34:01
Speaker 2: in a shiny plastic package at a gas station or
2:34:04
Speaker 2: a convenience store or a head shop and the guy
2:34:06
Speaker 2: at the head shop is really nice and really cool
2:34:09
Speaker 2: doesn't mean a thing. Doesn't mean a thing. I will
2:34:13
Speaker 2: not be bringing the cannabis I purchased here on the
2:34:16
Speaker 2: airplane with me back to Maine because that would be
2:34:19
Speaker 2: a violation of federal law. But if I did bring
2:34:21
Speaker 2: it back there and had it tested, I'm willing to
2:34:23
Speaker 2: bet that it would probably test positive for at least
2:34:27
Speaker 2: Paclobutrazole microbutanol, and a couple of the more common pesticides
2:34:33
Speaker 2: and growth hormones and other chemicals that the Chinese growers
2:34:37
Speaker 2: and others use on their products. And American consumers deserve
2:34:40
Speaker 2: not to be poisoning themselves in that way.
2:34:43
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, like I said, Steve, I appreciate it, man.
2:34:47
Speaker 1: Keep going. Keep going. Thank you.
2:34:48
Speaker 2: I'm not going to stop. Thank you very much.
2:35:03
Speaker 1: I'm Sean Ryan, former Navy SEAL, CIA contractor, and host
2:35:08
Speaker 1: of The Sean Ryan Show. Much of my life has
2:35:11
Speaker 1: been dedicated to seeking truth and getting answers no matter
2:35:15
Speaker 1: how uncomfortable the questions are that we have to ask.
2:35:20
Speaker 1: But in the age of the PSYOP, that search has
2:35:23
Speaker 1: never been more difficult. In September of 2022, the U.S.
2:35:34
Speaker 1: Army's 4th PSYOP group released a cryptic video on YouTube.
2:35:40
Speaker 1: There is another very important phase of warfare.
2:35:43
Speaker 2: It has as its target not the body, but the
2:35:47
Speaker 2: mind of the enemy.
2:35:51
Speaker 1: Between clips of troops assembling chess pieces and social unrest,
2:36:00
Speaker 1: phrases begin to appear on screen. They ask, have you
2:36:04
Speaker 1: ever wondered who's pulling the strings? These are the sidewall soldiers.
2:36:08
Speaker 1: The series you're about to listen to is an attempt
2:36:10
Speaker 1: to answer that question, and an even bigger one. The
2:36:14
Speaker 1: global power brokers that conduct psychological operations constantly evolve. Technology
2:36:19
Speaker 1: like AI has evened the playing field, and now, in
2:36:24
Speaker 1: the era of social media, In the democratization of information,
2:36:28
Speaker 1: all it takes to conduct a PSYOP is a smartphone.
2:36:31
Speaker 1: Like and subscribe. In each episode, we look at a
2:36:36
Speaker 1: different method of psychological operations, how they've evolved, and how
2:36:41
Speaker 1: they are being deployed. There's a quote that is attributed
2:36:46
Speaker 1: to a scientist named E.O. Wilson that says, We are
2:36:52
Speaker 1: drowning in information. while starving for wisdom. This is a
2:36:57
Speaker 1: life raft in that sea of both information and misinformation.
2:37:06
Speaker 1: PSYOPs are all around us. They are conducted by corporations, governments,
2:37:12
Speaker 1: activist groups, intelligence agencies, foreign adversaries, in anyone who knows
2:37:18
Speaker 1: how to shape perception to get what they want. The
2:37:27
Speaker 1: series provides an in-depth look at how these psyops work
2:37:31
Speaker 1: from conversations with whistleblowers, experts, historians, tech innovators, and more.
2:37:38
Speaker 1: We look at world events that are being shaped by
2:37:40
Speaker 1: highly constructed psychological operations specialists and look at the terrifying
2:37:45
Speaker 1: possibilities of where this could all be headed. Along the way,
2:37:52
Speaker 1: you'll learn about everything from Russian troll farms, fake ghosts
2:37:56
Speaker 1: in the jungles of Vietnam, and mind control cults to
2:38:00
Speaker 1: the CIA's involvement in Hollywood.
2:38:03
Speaker 3: Do you have any people paid by the CIA? who
2:38:11
Speaker 3: are working for television networks.
2:38:15
Speaker 1: The early history of psyops and psychological experiments laid the
2:38:18
Speaker 1: foundation for what we see today in modern campaigns that
2:38:22
Speaker 1: seek to divide culture over polarizing issues. We look at
2:38:27
Speaker 1: where we are and how we got here. But ultimately,
2:38:31
Speaker 1: this series is a toolkit to help you understand how
2:38:35
Speaker 1: you're being manipulated and how to spot the signs of
2:38:38
Speaker 1: a psyop. Before the Army's viral PSYOP recruitment video ends,
2:38:46
Speaker 1: the words on screen inform viewers that war is evolving
2:38:51
Speaker 1: and all the world's a stage. This series is a
2:38:54
Speaker 1: peek behind the curtain. Welcome to the PSYOP. Buy it
2:39:01
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