australia
Last night, after a recent discussion with Michael on F'nAround about Australia’s absurdly high black-market cannabis prices, I couldn’t let it go. Naturally, I started digging deeper. What I found opened a rabbit hole connecting cannabis hubs, drug trafficking, money laundering, human trafficking, and the investments flowing into publicly traded cannabis companies. The connections are messy, dirty, and honestly, a little too convenient.
Take Australia. It’s become a hub for black-market cannabis because legal prices are astronomical. Edible operations making over $600K selling “special” brownies are hitting headlines, but the real story is how organized crime has woven itself into the cannabis industry. They’re not just feeding the black market; they’re investing in the legal one too. Diversification… criminal enterprise style.
Then there’s Spain and Italy. Spain is Europe’s entry point for Moroccan hash, and Italian ports follow close behind. The same routes that bring in cannabis also traffic humans. Throw in some corrupt organizations laundering money through cannabis investments, and you’ve got to wonder if anyone’s even trying to keep the industry clean. And honestly, if I wasn’t born and raised Catholic, I might raise an eyebrow at some of this being so close to the Vatican.
Thailand’s legalization efforts had me hopeful for a second. Legal cannabis there is thriving, but traffickers are now using it as a transit point to smuggle product into Europe. It’s almost laughable legal weed businesses trying to grow while smugglers run circles around them, moving products they can’t compete with.
And then there’s North America. The U.S. and Canada lead the legal market, but it’s not pretty. Chinese organized crime groups dominate a lot of the illicit operations in the U.S., while Canada is busy accepting international investments from sources that seem intentionally hard to trace. When you combine cash-heavy businesses with loose oversight, you don’t get transparency; you get a playground for laundering dirty money.
The more I dug, the more the patterns became clear. Drug and human trafficking share the same routes and ports: Spain, Italy, Thailand, the U.S. are all hotspots for both. And then there are the investments. Some of the same regions notorious for trafficking are now pouring money into cannabis companies. Call it coincidence, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
So here we are, with the cannabis industry claiming to go legit while traffickers and launderers ride the wave. The question isn’t just about who’s growing or selling, it’s about who’s profiting and how many layers of dirt they’re hiding it under.
Those pennies-on-the-dollar, fully built operations facilities in the middle of nowhere we talked about now seem a little more obvious especially when you connect the dots to the trafficking routes and laundering pipelines. Funny how the “middle of nowhere” is always right in the middle of something.