The debate over rescheduling marijuana has brought one of the most underreported dangers of America’s weed trade into sharp focus: its penetration by Chinese criminal networks illegally growing marijuana throughout the country.
This is not just a problem of public health and safety, but also a problem of national security—and last week’s hearing on the issue by a House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, & Accountability offered crucial insights.
Witness Chair Rep. Josh Brecheen’s (OK) remark that “we’ve enabled these foreign organizations with potential links to” the Chinese Communist Party to create “a sophisticated network throughout the United States, which facilitates a wide range of other criminal activity and presents a national security threat.”
One key voice offering expert testimony was that Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.
Oklahoma has been a hotspot for these networks; a recent, worrying ProPublica investigative series shows that some of them seem to have deep connections to the highest levels of government in Beijing.
So how did this all come about? Anderson correctly pointed out that it was a second-order effect of medical legalization.
Proponents argued that legalizing marijuana would end or at least greatly reduce the black market. Not only has it not reduced the market, but it has grown and even spawned new criminal elements engaging with it. Medical marijuana was legalized in 2018, and there were no laws to limit marijuana cultivation. What happened? Extreme oversupply. The vast majority of marijuana plants were then and continue to be diverted to the illicit market. Anderson reports that between 2024 and 2025 in Oklahoma, licensed grow sites reported 87,210,960 plants. Yet dispensaries sold only 1,689,601. That means more than 85 million plants remain unaccounted for—with a huge slice of them almost certainly diverted to the black market, one dominated by the Chinese networks.
The result? The aforementioned investigative reporting series from ProPublica entitled “Fields of Green” gives the ugly details.
Here’s a sample: in 2022, four Chinese nationals were executed at an illegal marijuana farm in Oklahoma. The owner of the marijuana farm used a fraudulent license to enter business (Oklahoma law requires marijuana business owners to be state residents with at least two years of residency. Nearly all Chinese-operated grows circumvent this requirement through fraud. One Oklahoman was listed as owning 300 farms). A more recent one, in July 2025, a Canadian national was found murdered execution style at an illegal Chinese grow operation near Lake Thunderbird.
These networks exploit the legal sloppiness around legal weed programs; they themselves are not sloppy. Consulting firms, real estate agents, and attorneys help the Chinese nationals and China along their way.
From a global strategy perspective, the Heritage Foundation’s Paul Larkin offered some recommendations on how to deal with this problem.
The first step for states that still haven’t legalize, is: don’t. Criminals will exploit any relaxation of marijuana laws. Keep marijuana laws strong, and if they’re not, strengthen them. They must be strong enough to completely deter potential criminal actors, which in turn will help keep China in check.
In states where these criminals are already operating, The Department of Justice should aggressively prosecute their crimes to the full extent of the law. Keeping marijuana Schedule I is pivotal here in that the criminals will face felony charges for trafficking in a Schedule I drug. Additionally, prosecutions for other crimes committed by these cartels should be done alongside that of the drug trafficking itself. Keeping laws strong and even making them stronger as well as going on the offense will significantly deter others let alone other Chinese nationals from attempting to join the endeavor and bring to justice those who had already decided to.
This issue goes beyond public health and enters the domain of national security—which shows that in the 21st Century, those two areas have become intimately connected. And as SAM President Kevin Sabet has noted, any effort to further commercialize and normalize marijuana by moving it into Schedule III will damage both the health of Americans and the global strategic position of their nation irreparably.