Steve Robinson

So if you were to have at least a national framework that established rules for the road for doing this kind of thing, you could

take away the advantage that the least ethical players have when it comes to exploiting this arbitrage.

The system currently forces the cultivation demand into states like Maine, Oklahoma, and California to feed the appetite for the entire country.

So Maine is growing way more cannabis than can ever be consumed by Mainers.

Same for Oklahoma, same for California.

And it's not just the Chinese.

There's other cartels that are involved.

And there's other just straight up American businesses that are involved.

Increasingly, people in Maine are looking at the lack of consequences for the Chinese cartels and saying, fuck it, I'm going to do the exact same thing.

And if you were to have at least a bit of a national framework and legalize some form of cultivation in other states, it would take some pressure off of states like Maine.

And maybe it's selfish of me as a Mainer to say like,

Other states should also be dealing with this problem so it's not so intensely focused in my backyard.

But there needs to be some kind of a federal recognition for this.

And in terms of the Chinese specifically, there needs to be a very deliberate targeted effort to go after the money and all of the properties.

According to our research, there were at least 75 of these properties were acquired using mortgages.

All of those mortgages were from the same company.

The loan officers on those mortgages, two of them did those mortgages.

One was a Chinese national, one was a Taiwanese national.

Those need to be looked at because in those mortgage documents, they swore to make those houses their primary residences.

Instead of making them their primary residences, they turned them into illegal small businesses, marijuana grows, as bank fraud.