Steve Robinson

And some of these vape shops had tunnels underneath them that look like what you would see from Hamas or the Sinaloa cartel.

So if you're a vape shop that needs to use the same kind of techniques and tactics as Hamas or Sinaloa,

you're probably doing something that's not legal.

That's not strictly above board.

So I do think that the federal government is a little bit ahead of the curb when it comes to cracking down on this stuff, but

Waiting in the wings, like with bath salts, are new formulations of 7-OH because it's just a synthetic drug.

It's just a molecule.

And they know you've got this spot in your brain where the derivatives of the poppy seed can go plug in and make you feel euphoria.

And they made it into Percocet and Oxycontin and Hydrocodone and all these different chemicals.

And then they found another somewhat naturally occurring version of that alkaloid in the chemical formulations coming from the Kratom plant.

and they're finding new ones.

I'm already aware of second and third generation versions of 7-OH that will hit the market as soon as 7-OH is cracked down on.

And it's in part because the federal government's approach is to ban a molecule.

So they'll make 7-OH illegal and then newer versions of the product will come out and the process will start again.

where the drug-using community learns about the product, and then law enforcement starts seeing it pop up.

And then it gets to the political level, and they decide that they're going to ban it again.

And throughout this entire process, gobs and gobs and gobs of money are being made.

Whether it's the 7-OH thing or the legalization of marijuana in Maine, the lesson that I learned through what's now two years of investigative reporting is that we're dealing with

amounts of money that normal people just can't understand.

Like when you legalized marijuana in Maine, they had all these estimates about what the sales were gonna be like and what the taxes were gonna be like, and our schools were gonna be better, our roads were gonna be better, our police departments were gonna be better funded because of all the tax revenue coming from this.