In a deep-red state that became the nation’s hottest marijuana market, keeping regulations to a minimum didn’t keep the bad guys out.
LOVE COUNTY, Okla. — Shortly after sunrise on July 22, a dozen or so police officers from across Oklahoma descended on a property about 15 miles north of the Texas border. They moved past the fence with the “No Trespassing” signs and the pink building with the aluminum roof toward a collection of hoop houses. They didn’t know much about the occupants, although the cops strongly suspected they were of Chinese descent.
“We pulled in like gangbusters,” recalled Love County Sheriff Marty Grisham, on a recent weekday afternoon. “The guy who spoke Mandarin got on the loudspeaker, and I don’t know what he was saying, but I’m sure: ‘Come out with your hands up,’ or that sort of thing.”
Love County Sheriff Marty Grisham’s department conducted a July raid on an illegal cultivation site in the county that netted 2,300 cannabis plants with a street value of roughly $3.5 million.
“We all know that things are going on,” Grisham said of other potential operations in Love County. “There’s probably some human trafficking going on. There’s probably some money laundering going on. There’s a lot of things going on behind the fences of those places.”
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