NBC’s Jacob Soboroff Discovers Ties Between Marijuana Industry And ‘Modern Day Slaves’

With marijuana use legalized in two thirds of American states, it’s perhaps tempting to believe that a legal product has been produced legally, but NBC’s Jacob Soboroff discovered the business for black market pot growers is booming, and they’ve turned to the victims of human trafficking to produce their crop. “What law enforcement tells us is that Chinese organized crime has gotten involved,” Soboroff told me. “Marijuana that people might be smoking or eating or drinking may have been cultivated by people who are doing it under duress as human trafficking victims, or as you know, DHS defines it: modern day slaves.”

For his special report, “Captives of Cannabis,” debuting Friday night at 10:30 p.m. ET on NBC News Now, Soboroff rode with a special team from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department on a raid of a black market marijuana farm in the California desert. “It’s hard to comprehend until you get out there to the Mojave Desert, and see scores of people living in trailers, and going into greenhouses literally in the middle of the middle of the desert,” Soboroff told me.

While many of the people living in squalor refused to identify themselves as victims of human trafficking, seven victims did speak to Soboroff. “Obviously, human trafficking is a huge problem,” he said. “But I had no idea that it was it was this pervasive in in marijuana.”

Law enforcement believes the use of human trafficking victims is widespread—and the marijuana these victims help produce may in fact end up on the shelves of legal dispensaries across the country.

Soboroff’s reporting on the link between human trafficking and marijuana production first aired in a pair of exclusive stories on NBC Nightly News, but he says he’s grateful to have the ability to tell an even deeper story on the network’s streaming platform. “For me, it’s huge because it adds so much more to the story,” he told me.

While the reach of Nightly News is massive, he enjoys the engagement that he gets with viewers who settle in for the longer stories he can tell on platforms like NBC News Now. “We’re reaching people in ways we’ve never reached before, and having conversations that we were never able to have before with people we were never able to talk to you before. And this type of content is a prime example,” he told me. “At least for me as a journalist who likes to get out there and see things for myself, that’s what I want to be doing.”

Soboroff points to his 2017 documentary on fentanyl, “One Nation, Overdosed,” which was published on YouTube, and has accumulated 2.3 million views and nearly 5,000 comments. “It’s young people, and they’re having a conversation,” Soboroff told me, noting that the story has created an ongoing discussion that remains active five years later. “I still hear from people today who say, you know, I just saw ‘One Nation, Overdosed’ on YouTube.”

As his new documentary, produced by Nightly News Films for NBC News Now, prepares for its debut Friday night, Soboroff was back on broadcast TV, filling in as the news reader this morning on NBC’s Today, another part of the NBC franchise that has its own huge—but different—audience.

“I feel like I can be myself, tell the stories that interest me,” he said. “This place just lets you flex different muscles, different parts of your brain. And I think, most importantly, I just feel like I’m gonna be myself here, which is a dream come true and work with people I really care about.”