Yreka, California—Siskiyou County is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. It sits against the towering backdrop of Mount Shasta and is surrounded by more than a million acres of farmland and forest. But in recent years, Chinese nationals have invaded this serene Northern California paradise to build an illegal cannabis empire.
Chinese nationals, including some associated with the Chinese Communist Party, run massive illegal marijuana operations just beneath Mount Shasta. They and the county’s other illegal growers rake in billions of dollars per year, and terrorize the rural community with shootings, gang violence, and trafficking. This massive criminal enterprise operates in the shadows of America’s most populous state.
We met local law enforcement, spoke to policy experts, and rode along for an early-morning raid in a primarily Chinese area of the county. The picture that emerged was shocking. Growers operate massive illegal weed operations with impunity. County authorities have seized bags and bags of toxic, unregulated, and banned pesticides from Siskiyou pot farms. An expert told us that Chinese nationals are running illegal grow operations on U.S. soil to poison Americans. One group seems poised to benefit from the mayhem: the Chinese Communist Party.
It’s a Tuesday morning in Siskiyou County, and it’s silent as the sun rises over the nearby mountain range. Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue is in front of his county office preparing to conduct a raid on a marijuana farm.
A radio cuts through the quiet. The first batch of officers dispatched to the site is calling LaRue to tell him that a wanted grower has escaped.
We hop in LaRue’s truck and convoy down County Route A12, a dusty path that leads to the epicenter of Siskiyou’s illegal marijuana cultivation: the Shasta Vista subdivision. Here, growers smuggle out illegal marijuana in vans, shoot at unwanted visitors, and produce an estimated $2 billion of unlicensed marijuana annually.
We reach the subdivision’s entrance in time to see hordes of Asians in pickup trucks, minivans, and water trucks flee the area. LaRue says that this is normal. Once gang lookouts spot authorities, they alert the community and “start getting in their cars and booking it out.”
“Sometimes this looks like a freeway,” he says, pointing to the main road, where cars are exiting dirt driveways. “There’s just car after car coming out, that’s got dust all over [them] from turning off one of these side roads.”
Asian lookouts line the subdivision’s main road, huddling together in groups and retreating as a pack when the sheriff’s truck approaches. We see a sprawling landscape filled with hundreds of hoophouses, many hidden behind padlocked gates and “No Trespassing” signs as Mount Shasta looms in the background.
LaRue parks his truck at the first parcel of land, where his deputies have already started securing the site and hunting for evidence. He leads us to a large tarp-covered pool.
“This is a big swimming pool you’d get at Costco and it’s full of water—and this is not for swimming,” he says. “Water trucks are delivering out front. It comes through [a hose] into the pool, and then on the other side, it’s being pumped out into the greenhouse. That’s the kind of traditional system we see [here] at these illegal marijuana grows: water being trucked in and then being used for illegal cultivation.”
LaRue leads us to an area across from the pool, where growers have set up a plywood shack and trailer. Inside, he points out the Chinese labels on imported food items, a bowl of chicken feet sitting out in the open, and piles of trash scattered around the floor. Outside the trailer are bags of toxic pesticides with Chinese labels—all banned for use in the U.S.
“As you look around, you see that really, the story is that trash doesn’t leave the property, no matter what it is. And you’ll see plastic everywhere,” he says. “It’ s either burned or buried, and it doesn’t leave.”
LaRue walks us past open sewage pits to a massive hoophouse, a tarp-covered greenhouse made of PVC pipe. The average parcel in Siskiyou uses these structures to raise 2,000 plants, each of which produce between one and five pounds of flower per grow cycle. In the Shasta Vista alone, per LaRue, the total amount of weed grown could top $2 billion a year.
“This is just one tiny parcel, right?” he says, surveying the plants. “Start multiplying this by thousands and that’s the true number. Even the stuff you see today, you think, ‘Wow, if this was your only problem, this could take forever to resolve.’”
Once we step outside, deputies will destroy the hoophouse with a bulldozer, which they’ve found is the most effective way to prevent future grows. Unfortunately, LaRue says, the growers return as soon as officers leave.
Today, officers will destroy thousands of plants and confiscate hundreds more processed marijuana bulbs, doing their best to cause lasting damage to the growers’ infrastructure. But it’s a Sisyphean task: in California, illegal marijuana cultivation can be difficult to prove and is generally a misdemeanor.
“Most people aren’t afraid of that,” he said of the potential punishment. “It doesn’t deter any activity, as is demonstrated by what we see.”
Deputies don’t encounter growers on today’s raid, but when they do, things can turn ugly. In one case, authorities went to evacuate the subdivision during the massive 2021 Lava Fire. An Asian man with methamphetamine in his system carried 132 pounds of weed to the evacuation checkpoint. Apparently mistaking the checkpoint for a marijuana search, authorities say he pointed a gun at responders before officers shot him. Apparently as a result of similar incidents, the sheriff’s office says cops are “routinely called to act as security” before firefighters arrive at cultivation sites.
Siskiyou is desperate. Residents have been shot and killed. Authorities have found people suspected of marijuana cultivation murdered.
“There is this dread out here of the criminal enterprise doing all kinds of things, from violent crime to stealing water,” LaRue said. “With this illegal enterprise that we have, we have people that show up and are being kidnapped, or they’re being tied up, they’re being robbed, they’re being shot . . . imagine having that as your neighbor.”
LaRue says about 60 percent of growers they encounter in the Shasta Vista, a subdivision almost exclusively dedicated to marijuana cultivation, are Chinese. They probably aren’t running these massive farms alone. “We do know that there are certain associations with some of the Chinese gangs—the triads for example,” LaRue said. “There were some other associations that link back to Communist China.”
It wasn’t always like this in Siskiyou. Things began to change around the time California legalized recreational marijuana.
Starting around 2015, Asian cultivators began flooding the area. Cultivators bought up residential land en masse. Today, the estimated number of illegal growers in the largely Asian Shasta Vista subdivision could total over 7,000—about 20 percent of Siskiyou’s entire population.
Aerial images we received from the sheriff’s office show the stark changes since the growers arrived. In 2017, many lots in the Shasta Vista sat dormant. By 2021, those same lots were filled with greenhouses.
County Supervisor Jess Harris has lived in Siskiyou his whole life and saw the transformation firsthand.
“My entire life, you always had the Mexican cartel grows,” he said. “But it wasn’t ever a major issue on private property or anywhere residential. Ten years ago, somewhere around there, all of a sudden there was this big boom of land on subdivisions that prior weren’t developed, and all of a sudden were full of illegal cannabis grows.”
Ten years ago, California’s then-lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, championed Proposition 64, a measure to legalize recreational marijuana use. Shortly before it passed, Hmong growers had begun moving to the Shasta Vista. According to Harris, Chinese growers moved in after the law passed.
“I was hearing rumors that the Chinese were coming in and actually telling the Hmong, ‘Here’s a cash offer for your land. Take it or take a bullet,’” he said.
How did the growers purchase the parcels of land in the first place? In most cases, LaRue told us, the individuals growing the marijuana are not the landowners. Siskiyou authorities have tracked the property deeds back to individuals with Chinese names who reside in separate states like Washington, or in other parts of California.
“Honestly, we have no idea who actually owns the parcel because there’s this shell game of names that go on property deeds,” LaRue said.
A federal taskforce would consider it a Herculean task to track down the property-owners supposedly in charge of marijuana operations. A 62-officer jurisdiction like Siskiyou County would find it even harder. A larger county facing a similar infiltration, however, has been able to document how the scheme works.
A 2019 criminal complaint against a Southern California real estate broker sketched a potential outline of the scheme. First, foreign nationals descend on California, where they’re wired money from China to buy up land. With the help of real-estate agents embedded in the scheme, they bury property deeds in obscure LLCs and shell companies. From there, masterminds appoint proxies to run marijuana grow operations—everything from purchasing infrastructure supplies to facilitating distribution of the pot on the black market.
A case in Siskiyou demonstrates how managers try to work the local officials. In 2017, a brother-sister duo named Chi Meng Yang and Gaosheng Laitinen tried to bribe Siskiyou’s then-sheriff to ignore illegal grows. Yang offered the sheriff $1 million in exchange for his “friendship” and help lobbying to legalize medical marijuana in another state.
Once managers establish themselves as criminal landlords, they recruit laborers to handle day-to-day operations. In Siskiyou, LaRue says, authorities have found overwhelming evidence that some of the Chinese nationals who cultivate marijuana on farms are illegal immigrants. They “have come over the border—and this was during the Biden administration—and they were either working off debt, or they’re working essentially just because they were brought over across the border,” LaRue said.
But the shell companies and real-estate fraud only scratch the surface of the criminal activity that investigators have found on these farms. In the past few years, authorities have reported that Chinese criminal organizations are smuggling illegal pesticides into California, potentially contaminating millions of pounds of marijuana.
At the raid, we saw empty vats of chemicals scattered across the property, some of which had Chinese labels. The sheriff told us these were highly toxic pesticides, used, in theory, for tasks like bug prevention. But at least one investigator believes that illegal grows are using chemicals like these as part of a larger plot to poison Americans.
In the early years of his marijuana farm raids, LaRue often found hundreds of mylar bags of Chinese-labeled products. At first, his office assumed these were household products. It wasn’t until an agent translated some labels in 2023, he said, that law-enforcement discovered that the bags littering grow sites contain toxic fumigants.
LaRue contacted CalEPA with Siskiyou’s discovery of illegal pesticides. Law-enforcement officers also reported symptoms of exposure to poisonous chemicals. Authorities called in help from the National Guard unit that analyzes chemical agents to identify the pesticides. What they endured, LaRue said, should have been enough for the state to classify the Shasta Vista as a Superfund site.
The chemicals have injured multiple emergency responders. In one case, firefighters encountered pesticides at a grow site and suffered chemical burns. In another case, law enforcement personnel accidentally walked into an active fumigation on a marijuana farm. They suffered respiratory symptoms and were hospitalized.
Siskiyou County authorities have documented dozens of “mystery” chemicals at these sites, some of which are carcinogens, groundwater pollutants, and toxic air contaminants—and none of which, per LaRue, are approved for fumigation use in California.
Methomyl is one restricted compound found in pesticides in Siskiyou. Almost all methomyl products are restricted-use pesticides, according to the federal EPA, because they can cause respiratory paralysis or death. Other states have applied that label to methomyl products because of their toxicity; in Michigan, methomyl was used to kill animals like skunks, opossums, and raccoons.
These compounds just scratch the surface of what investigators have found. They’ve also discovered organochlorine pesticides like pentachloronitrobenzene, a soil fungicide that can cause convulsions, coma, pulmonary edema, and myoclonic jerking movements; pyrethroid insecticides like cypermethrin and lambda-cyhalothrin, which can cause coma and seizures within 20 minutes of exposure; and the pyrrole insecticide chlorfenapyr, which can cause convulsions, seizures, and cardiac arrest.
If the growers were interested in killing insects, they could go to the local Home Depot and buy a commercial insecticide, Rob Roggeveen, national coordinator at HIDTA’s Marijuana Impact Group, said. His theory? Chinese masterminds may intentionally inject lethal chemicals into the plant as a form of “chemical warfare” against the United States.
“This stuff is definitely being sent here to poison the plant that then gets ingested by the consumer,” Roggeveen said. “And what better way to do it than on a product that’s not going to get you right away? It’ s going to take time for it to fester in the body.”
“It’s chemical warfare at its finest,” he added.
Paul Larkin, a legal expert with a background investigating organized crime at the Justice Department, said that the Chinese Communist Party has a long history of trying to infiltrate America with lethal substances.
“There is utterly no doubt that the fentanyl problem that we have, and still have, is attributable in large part to what China has done,” Larkin said. “You have to look at the entirety of the drugs that China is getting into the U.S. or helping get into the U.S. because it not only makes them money, first of all, if people overdose and die; it reduces the population and it will also weakens the United States from within.”
Who’s responsible for the criminal behavior on these sites? Officials believe that the hydra that is California’s Chinese-dominated illegal cannabis empire may have a head: the Chinese Communist Party.
It’s not hard to believe that the CCP has played a part in the criminal enterprise in Siskiyou—especially given the scheme that investigators discovered in the Mojave Desert. In July 2022, authorities discovered an illegal marijuana farm on a 75-acre property that was later reported to be owned by a CCP intel official. Authorities are investigating similar potential CCP connections throughout the state.
It’s also no secret that California Governor Gavin Newsom, the cheerleader behind California’ s legalization of marijuana, is friendly with the Chinese. He’s brokered massive deals with Chinese companies and accepted gifts from Chinese-linked entities.
Newsom’s communications director did not respond to a comment request by deadline.
LaRue says he has spoken with Newsom. The governor, he thinks, is turning a blind eye to the illegal activity for political reasons.
“The state understands how bad this is, but they don’t want to talk about it, I think, because it’s bad press,” LaRue said. “This is exactly what he wouldn’t want people to see. It really is another failure, under his leadership, whether he wants to own it or not.”
The low hanging fruit would be a persistent ICE presence to detain and deport all the undocumented on these grows. Then of course come in with perhaps national guard and confiscate and burn the crops and destroy the infrastructure. This is addressable. Whether it is solvable is unclear.
As an R N, I stand by my assertion that MJ is bad for our teens, our adults and our Country. Make it criminal again. how come Chinese get to buy our farmland?