[Epoch Times Premium Reports] Illegal cannabis cultivation operations, or "grows," are a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry in California, dominated by a mix of transnational criminal organizations that authorities believe are symbiotic, if adversarial.
Lengthy, and likely behind a paywall, but you'll get the idea.
When agents serve a warrant, they often find human trafficking victims, automatic weapons, booby traps and, increasingly, banned toxic pesticides smuggled from China. Buildings contaminated by illegal grows are dangerous because the harsh pesticides that growers use permeate every surface - ceilings, walls, floors, vents, and drywall.
 Toxic black mold blooms in the 75 percent humidity needed to grow marijuana. The massive amounts of water and electricity required to sustain an operation can result in structural damage to vents and sunken floors, overloaded transformers, and corroded wiring just itching for a fire.
Working and middle-class families migrate to bedroom communities such as Lancaster, where you can still find a single-family home with a backyard for about $500,000—about half the median price in Los Angeles, according to Redfin. You may find one for even less if a grower has been busted and is offloading at a discount.
Labor and sex trafficking, animal abuse, gun violence and rampant environmental crimes have long been associated with illegal marijuana cultivation.
The prevalence of indoor grows and collateral effects on residential buildings are not new or limited to California. In 2017, Denver police estimated that one in 10 homes were being used to cultivate, leaving the city with a dangerous mold problem.
It may seem counterintuitive that indoor operations are increasingly relying on contraband pesticides, but the lack of natural predators inside means spider mites, aphids, mildew, and black rot or fungus can easily take hold, according to Josh Wurzer, CEO and cofounder of SC Labs, a cannabis testing and research lab.
"Once you get a single fungus spore or any tiny spider mite into a grow and it starts to proliferate, they take root and it takes off," he said. "There are no birds to eat them or natural controls to keep pests in check like there are outdoors."
"All kinds of chemicals are being found. The ones from China, they’re not even in any chemical library," Katz said, noting that they’re having to send samples to an "extremely expensive" lab in Sacramento. "The EPA got involved. We’ve found all kinds of nerve agent pesticides, and they’re not listed in any of these libraries for the machines that read this stuff."
The fact that these compounds are inhaled—either by unsuspecting consumers who think they’re smoking regulated cannabis or by unsuspecting residents who move into a former grow house—exacerbates the harm.
As Wurzer said, when the plant is inhaled rather than eaten, it goes directly into the lungs, bypassing many of the body’s natural defense mechanisms, such as the digestive system and the liver, which filter toxins.
"Any pesticide deemed harmful on a food crop in the U.S. would be extra harmful when it’s inhaled," Wurzer said.
Tom Lackey, a California assembly member whose district includes the Antelope Valley, thinks the dangers are underestimated, in part because of a prevailing misconception that "it’s just pot."
He points to the fact that black market marijuana comprises some 80 percent of total sales in California, , and licensed growers pressured by high taxes and the cost of compliance are taking shortcuts to survive.
 The uneasy mix of crime syndicates running illicit marijuana in California, according to law enforcement officials, includes Chinese and Hmong groups, Mexican cartels and Latin American street gangs, and Chaldean and Armenian organizations.
But according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Mexican cartels and Chinese groups continue to dominate the state’s black market. And in recent years, federal investigations have unearthed how Chinese crime networks have risen to global prominence, in part by laundering cartel drug money.
"The fentanyl, the money laundering, the marijuana grows—it’s all connected," Leland Lazarus, associate director of national security at Florida International University’s Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy, told The Epoch Times in an email.
These syndicates, Lazarus said, typically employ illegal Chinese migrants, who are often subjected to forced labor or criminality, terrible working conditions, and even sexual violence.
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