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Pawnee County Sheriff Darrin Varnell had been getting ominous calls about a marijuana farm near Maramec for years. Men patrolling with assault rifles. A man chasing a naked woman with a machete. A terrified worker who fled the farm to a nearby house.
So Varnell was glad when the Drug Enforcement Administration shut down the operation, which was located at a former horse racing track, in January 2023. Agents seized over 17,000 marijuana plants from five warehouses, $45,000 in cash and a pistol. They arrested the manager of the farm, Jiubing Lin, who has pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges in a broader investigation of a Chinese money laundering group, according to court documents.
But Varnell’s relief was short-lived. Days after the raid, deputies noticed men at the farm disassembling warehouses and setting them up at another grow site a few miles down the road, he said.
“As the buildings are disappearing here, the same buildings are going up at the other location,” Varnell, who left office in November 2024, told The Frontier.
Corporate filings show both operations are linked to the same owners — including a man with prior convictions for an armed robbery and wildlife trafficking who has ties to an illegal Chinese police station in New York.
“That farm didn’t go away, it just moved,” Varnell said.
Today, the farm, now a sprawling complex of greenhouses and indoor cultivation structures, continues to operate with a state-issued cultivation license. A new building was under construction when reporters visited the farm in February.
Sheriff’s deputies elsewhere in Oklahoma report similar patterns: after raids, criminal groups often consolidate their operations at other licensed sites. Even after a 2022 quadruple murder at a marijuana farm, deputies in Kingfisher County caught three Chinese men hauling equipment from the site in a semi-truck.
These cases highlight how six years after legalization, powerful Chinese mafias continue to thrive in Oklahoma’s marijuana industry, exploiting legal loopholes and quietly outmaneuvering the state’s efforts to crackdown.
For state authorities, prosecuting major crimes like interstate marijuana trafficking, money laundering, and human trafficking is difficult. As a result, they have targeted other offenses — primarily ownership fraud. State law mandates that majority owners of marijuana businesses reside in Oklahoma for two years, but many operators circumvented this rule by paying local residents to pose as majority shareholders. The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics has aggressively targeted these schemes.
But officials say this tactic is becoming less effective: many illegal operators have now met the residency requirement and re-registered their licenses. The active Pawnee County farm was first licensed in 2021 to an attorney who was later charged for creating hundreds of fraudulent licenses. By late 2023, its ownership had shifted to a Chinese man.
Oklahoma lawmakers have introduced several bills this year to strengthen the state’s hand against bad actors in the marijuana industry:
Rep. Tom Gann, R-Tahlequah, filed a bill to lower the threshold for aggravated marijuana trafficking, which carries a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 15 years, from 1,000 pounds to 100 pounds. It has passed a House committee vote.
Senate President Pro Tempore Lonnie Paxton, R-Tuttle, filed legislation to ban out-of-state ownership of marijuana businesses entirely, eliminating the previous allowance of 25% out-of-state owners.
Sen. Bill Coleman, R-Ponca City, filed a bill to require licenses for and strengthen oversight of marijuana storage facilities.
Rep. Justin Humphrey, R-Lane, has filed an act related to the regulation of marijuana businesses.
Other proposals aim to strengthen enforcement of laws that prohibit foreign nationals from owning farmland. Some specifically target individuals with ties to “foreign adversaries,” including China. Another would establish an “Office of Agricultural Intelligence” overseen by the Attorney General.
Rep. Kevin West, R-Moore, and other lawmakers have introduced bills targeting human trafficking.
However, Paxton said he believes the Legislature has already done most of what it can.
“This year when I talked to the Medical Marijuana Authority, the Bureau of Narcotics, and the Attorney General’s office, they didn’t ask me to run any legislation,” Paxton said. “For the most part, they have the tools they need. They’ve gone from, for example, 10,000 licensed grows to about 3,000, which is now manageable.”
Mark Woodward, a spokesperson for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, said Gov. Kevin Stitt and the Legislature have been “great partners in helping us enact numerous laws over the past several years to investigate and prosecute criminal elements operating in the state’s Medical Marijuana program.”
Oklahoma has also enacted new laws in the past year including controls on farm license transfers, mandatory employee IDs and background checks, a ban on multiple licenses at a single address, and restrictions on foreign land ownership. Attorney General Gentner Drummond also told The Frontier he believes a recent law giving the state power to arrest undocumented immigrants will weaken criminal operators by reducing their access to cheap labor.
But critics worry these reforms aren’t enough.
Marco Palumbo, an Oklahoma City-based defense attorney who frequently represents Chinese immigrants accused of marijuana-related crimes, argues that the most effective solution would be a law limiting the size of farms that local law enforcement can help enforce. Similar so-called “canopy limits” on marijuana farms have constrained criminal groups in other marijuana hotspots like Maine, California, and Colorado, largely forcing them to hide their operations in suburban homes.
“If you limit these farms to a half acre and 1,000 plants, these farms would be gone overnight,” Palumbo said. “You can’t use slave labor to grow 100,000 plants if the law caps you at a fraction of that. … It would deal with the oversupply and it would take away their incentive to be here.”
Three senior state and federal law enforcement agents, who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media, also expressed support for size limits on marijuana farms. One agent added that lawmakers should clarify a regulatory gray area in workplace oversight in the marijuana industry that continues to enable abusive working conditions.
Andrew Livingston, the chief economist at the cannabis law firm Vicente LLP, cautioned that farm size restrictions could hurt legitimate large-scale operators. Instead, he suggested Oklahoma may need more enforcement personnel to track black market diversion through the state’s seed-to-sale tracking system.
After Oklahoma legalized medical marijuana in 2018, the number of licensed farms in the state surged to 9,400 by 2021. Unlike anywhere else in the country, the state did not limit the number of farms or their scale. This allowed criminal networks to establish thousands of sprawling, industrial-scale grow operations — all operating under the cover of state-issued licenses.
A crackdown has since reduced the total number of farms with active licenses to around 3,000. The reduction followed a 2022 moratorium on new licenses and state narcotics raids on more than 1,000 farms. Others lost licenses after authorities required compliance with the state fire code in late 2023.
State officials have touted these efforts as an overwhelming success.
“Oklahoma has gone from having a reputation as ‘the Wild West of Weed’ to now being viewed as having some of the most effective enforcement and regulatory oversight in the nation,” Gov. Kevin Stitt told lawmakers in his 2024 State of the State address.
Donnie Anderson, the director of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, made similar claims last year, though he has acknowledged there is still more work to be done. Last July, the Oklahoma Medical Marijuana Authority reduced its staff by 10% because of “decreasing commercial license numbers.”
But with 3,000 licensed farms, Oklahoma still surpasses other hotspots for illegal marijuana cultivation like Maine and California. Woodward said the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics is investigating between 1,500 and 1,700 of these grow operations.
And Oklahoma’s farms continue to produce vastly more cannabis than the state needs: A 2023 study found the in-state legal market requires 329,000 plants annually, but at least 8 million plants are currently being grown in Oklahoma, a figure 24 times higher. California, in contrast, produces about three to five times more cannabis than its residents consume.
Following up on its 2024 investigative series with ProPublica, The Frontier has identified dozens of operations with potential links to criminal activity that continue to operate with state-issued licenses in 2025. At some, immigrant workers have died in suspicious circumstances and endured exploitation, physical abuse, or sexual assault. Others have ties to the Chinese government and illegal influence operations it has carried out in the U.S.
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The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics has filed to revoke the licenses of a couple of these farms, but the operators are contesting the actions, allowing their licenses to remain active. Preliminary administrative hearings in these cases are still months away due to a case backlog.
And some farms that lost their licenses continue to operate. The Frontier interviewed an immigrant worker who was shot by his boss at a farm near Maysville last August. The farm’s license had expired the year before, but it was still growing marijuana and employing workers. Today, the operation is expanding: A new greenhouse is under construction, neighbors said. Criminal charges against the farm owner for shooting the worker are still pending.
Authorities have recently raided and responded to fires at other grows with expired or revoked licenses. Because of a lack of personnel, most of the thousands of farms with inactive licenses have not been inspected to confirm they closed, officials said. The state has no protocols in place to ensure formerly licensed farms shut down.
Palumbo says he believes Oklahoma has little incentive to address these problems at the legislative level, given the enormous sums of money generated from asset seizures since legalization in 2018. Authorities often forfeit hundreds of thousands of dollars on farm raids and traffic stops.
Thus far in 2025, the state has seized nearly $1.7 million from defendants. Almost $1 million of it was confiscated from suspected Chinese marijuana traffickers, according to court filings.
Authorities say asset seizures play a crucial role in weakening criminal groups by stripping them of valuable resources and equipment. But Palumbo says he believes they also create a financial dependency.
“In a way, this has become like the military industrial complex: We don’t really want to see war stop because the money will stop,” Palumbo said. “The state knows they can end this. Go to a half acre and 1,000 plants and they’ll leave. Why are we wasting time?”
Meanwhile, marijuana-related violence continues in Oklahoma. Last month, a prominent Chinese investor in the cannabis industry was murdered in his home in Edmond, making waves in the Chinese-American community. One of the suspects wore an ankle monitor from a recent marijuana farm robbery.
State agents uncovered a large-scale sex trafficking operation linked to the industry last summer. Similar investigations are ongoing, an official said. Police also continue to crackdown on illegal gambling parlors in Oklahoma City run by Chinese mafias, which are often sites of drug use and prostitution.
Even so, Woodward said Oklahoma has largely shed its reputation as the “Wild West of Weed.”
“We’ve still got a lot of active connections that we’re making to other farms, money laundering, possibly tying back to homicides,” said Woodward. “But to be down 7,000 farms, we’d like to say we flipped the script.”
“}]] Proposed laws target organized crime in the marijuana industry. Are they enough? Read More
