Steve Robinson

And once they're, they call it blowing it out.

So once you take, you know, in Oklahoma, you can grow a huge field of hemp legally, harvest it, and you blow it out by putting the plant biomass into a canister, passing the gas through it to do gas extraction.

And then the end result is all of this oil.

And there's a couple of different cannabinoids that are in that oil.

With hemp, the most prominent one is CBD.

And you can convert that CBD into THC.

They call those products conversion products.

And then that THC is indiscernible from the THC that you would get from growing cannabis at a flop house in Dexter, Maine.

So they're basically the same thing, but our politicians and our regulatory system treats them like they're completely different.

Like Representative Comer just the other day put out a statement about the value of the hemp industry and how important hemp farmers are the backbone of America.

And I'm sure that there are a couple of guys who are growing hemp.

in an honest way to use it for industrial products.

But the most of the hemp is being used for consumable hemp products.

Maybe more.

More than that.

So it's over.

And it's not just houses where they're growing marijuana.

We found boarding houses, places that are set up for a large number of guys to...

um eat sleep and in between cycles going out to tend to the marijuana plants that was in 2022 yeah or 2022 you found 270 homes now there's well over five yeah so in 2022 that was when the memo came out revealing the existence of these locations uh and in the ensuing years we began a process of uh

Based on the patterns we found on the address that we obtained from the reporter who first published that leaked memo, we expanded our investigation, looking at property records, real estate records, tax records, electrical records, to identify more of these places, and then set about driving probably more than 10,000 miles around the state of Maine to inspect these spaces, try to talk to these people, talk to their neighbors, and see if we could