Steve Robinson

This is my licenses.

Pay no attention to the fact that all this flower looks different and it's all in different baggies.

And you can know just based on common sense that it didn't come from the same grow.

But I've got my license.

Your ass is covered.

And oh, by the way, it's 50% what some other guy is going to charge you.

And this is in the middle of the pandemic when the state of Maine was in this severe lockdown.

So much economic uncertainty.

People are trying to put bread on the table.

and somebody's offering you half price weed that you can mark up and make a buck off of, yeah, you're gonna take them up on it.

And then it's laundered into the existing medicinal system.

So that's one example of how the illegally grown cannabis can be laundered into the legal regulated cannabis sales system.

But the other method that they're using increasingly is through the hemp loophole.

And this is a national problem that really started in 2018 with the legalization of hemp cultivation, which was led by Senator Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell at the time.

The idea was that, you know, there's lots of hemp farmers in Kentucky, and we're going to grow a bunch of hemp, and pretty soon people will be wearing, you know, T-shirts and sweatshirts made out of hemp, and they'll make concrete out of hemp, and it'll be environmentally friendly.

That never panned out.

What happened instead was we gave rise to this whole new class of intoxicating hemp products.

There's chemicals that you can extract from hemp and then convert into intoxicating substances.

But we also have smokable hemp products that can have chemicals added to them that make them psychoactive, that turn them into drugs.

But most of what we have is