Chinese investors, owners and workers have emerged in recent years as a new source of funding and labor for illegal marijuana production.
Francis Chung/POLITICO

Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee and is a cosponsor of the PASS Act, suggested requiring Chinese investors or owners interested in purchasing agricultural land or other agribusiness property to prove they are not linked to the Chinese Communist Party.

“It’s probably harder to prove that they’re not connected than to prove that they are, because of Chinese law itself,” Cramer said. The North Dakota senator says that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States already has the authority to hold a shipping container that comes to the U.S. from certain parts of China under the presumption that it may be associated with Uyghur forced labor. Similar determinations could be made by the agency in the case of agribusiness.

Cramer is not the only Republican senator drawing a connection between all Chinese business and the CCP.

“You don’t have Chinese business activity without the Chinese Communist Party either knowing about it, being involved in it, or looking the other way and ignoring it,” Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma also said.

Felbab-Brown says there no solutions right now to this problem because there are too many question marks lingering over Chinese funding and workers in the illicit cannabis industry. Answering questions about exactly what groups are funding illicit cannabis grows and where the cannabis is going is the key next step to knowing what the growing presence of Chinese investment in illicit cannabis cultivation means and how best to deal with it.

The function of illegal cannabis grows may pose a challenge for the PASS Act approach, since many are not on agricultural land. Sometimes, like in Antioch, they are in suburban homes or other buildings not intended for agribusiness. They are often also purchased or rented by a third party, keeping the true funding source far from the lease.

In Oklahoma, Woodward said many of the cultivation licenses deemed fraudulent by the OBN were fronted by locals posing as the primary license holder.

“These organizations — I can’t overstate how much effort they take to layer or protect their identity,” said Bill Jones, DCC’s chief of law enforcement, explaining that they do so through LCCs and straw ownership. “You don’t have heads of the Chinese or Mexican cartels buying these properties.”