A quadruple murder in Oklahoma shows how the Chinese underworld has come to dominate the booming illicit trade, fortifying its rise as a global powerhouse with alleged ties to China’s authoritarian regime.
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Oklahoma has quickly become a top supplier of illicit weed. Although street prices fluctuate and calculating the value of a black market is complex, officials estimate the value of the illegal marijuana grown in the state at somewhere between $18 billion and $44 billion a year. State investigators have found links between foreign mafias and over 3,000 illegal grows — and they say that more than 80% of the criminal groups are of Chinese origin.
The federal response, however, has been muted. With the spread of legalization and decriminalization, enforcement has become a low priority for the U.S. Department of Justice, anti-drug veterans say.
“The challenge we are having is a lack of interest by federal prosecutors to charge illicit marijuana cases,” said Ray Donovan, the former chief of operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration. “They don’t realize all the implications. Marijuana causes so much crime at the local level, gun violence in particular. The same groups selling thousands of pounds of marijuana are also laundering millions of dollars of fentanyl money. It’s not just one-dimensional.”
These figures seem like pure BS using wildly inflated police “street values” and plant weights that typically include the soil and container.
For a value of $18-$44B per year, they’d somehow need to be growing and transporting tens of millions of plants undetected. This is 3x-8x the amount of marijuana sold in the entire state of California each year, 2x-5x more than the entire west coast of the US, and somehow these foreigners are pulling it off in conservative, rural Oklahoma without anyone noticing?
I also couldn’t help but laugh at the line about “marijuana causing a lot of gun violence and street crime.” Here in Oregon, it’s dirt cheap and abundant and not worth shooting someone over a $40 ounce. Walmart has far more criminal activity than any dispensary I’ve ever seen. This is just Reefer Madness style propaganda.
This just seems like more drug war propaganda from a bunch of gullible, xenophobic cops.
Your math sounds right. I’m surprised that ProPublica would fall for copaganda.
In a situation like this, they’re probably heavily relying on the information provided by police or other government officials since it’s not easy to find people willing to go on record to talk about their illegal activity.
I don’t doubt that there are organized groups growing and selling illegally, but the scale of what they’re claiming just seems wildly exaggerated. Police also have a vested interest in making crime seem worse as that leads to more funding and new military toys to use against the populace.
I don’t find it too surprising from ProPublica as it’s not too dissimilar from articles about the Satanic panic back in the day that had huge outlets like the New York Times publishing complete fabrications. I think any news outlet can be susceptible to things like this because it’s highly sensational and difficult to verify.