If you have been watching the Lucas Sirois story unfold, you already know this stopped being about cannabis a long time ago. This is not about a few extra plants or a caregiver who pushed his limits. This is about a man who wrapped himself in the legalization movement, bought his way into influence, paid off cops and a selectman, received tips from a prosecutor, and then tried to hide behind the same laws he helped shape.
Thanks to a 2015 Bangor Daily News article, we now know the missing piece. Lucas Sirois was not just floating around the legalization movement. He was a Legalize Maine board member and its top financial backer. His companies wrote checks, he sat at the table, and he helped steer policy that shaped the future adult use market.
This means he helped build the structure he later abused.
A Legalization Leader Or A Man Building A Pipeline
The July 2015 reporting made it clear:
“Lucas Sirois, of Rangeley, a Legalize Maine board member, has been its biggest backer so far.”
His companies contributed more than seventeen thousand dollars, with ten thousand coming in a single quarter from Spruce Valley LLC, a caregiver network he controlled.
So years before the indictments, before the raids, before the corruption charges, Sirois was positioning himself as a public leader in legalization. While activists fought for fair laws, he invested in a system he was already exploiting from the inside.
He was not just influencing the conversation. He was helping write the blueprint.
Buying Influence. The Pattern Was Always There
By the time federal prosecutors exposed the full operation, the pattern was obvious.
Sirois paid sheriff’s deputies for protection and insider information.
Sirois handed cash to a town selectman to pass ordinances he personally drafted. Sirois received investigative tips from an assistant district attorney and watched her destroy evidence to cover for him.
Sirois ran a massive black market supply chain disguised as a medical caregiver operation. Sirois used shell companies to move money and hide profits.
This was not cannabis culture.
This was corruption dressed as cannabis advocacy.
And what makes it worse is the timing. He was doing all of this while serving on the board of an organization that claimed to represent local growers and small Maine operations.
He was using legalization as camouflage.
How This Shaped The Adult Use Market See Today
Here is the uncomfortable truth.
When a person with this level of dishonesty helps design a policy structure, parts of that structure can end up reflecting their interests instead of the public’s.
Legalize Maine pushed a model (knowing or unknowingly) that depended heavily on municipal control, local gatekeeping, caregiver legacy operations turning into adult use sites, and slow rollout of licensing.
Some of that came from good intentions.
Some of it fit perfectly with what a man like Sirois needed.
A fragmented system with uneven enforcement can be manipulated.
A town by town approval process can be influenced.
A caregiver centered structure can be exploited by someone who already had dozens of caregivers under his umbrella.
Pieces of the current adult use landscape do not exist by accident.
They were shaped in an environment where a key decision maker was simultaneously building an illegal empire.
Call It What It IS
This was never a cannabis case.
This was a corruption case that happened to involve cannabis.
Sirois did not fight for legalization because he cared about growers, consumers, or justice. He fought for legalization because it gave him legitimacy. It opened political doors. It softened scrutiny. It allowed him to scale his operation without raising alarms. And it gave his companies the appearance of being industry pioneers.
He was not a pioneer.
He was a parasite.
And the worst part is that he stood on stages, sat in meetings, gave interviews, donated money, and acted like a champion of the movement. The truth is that he undermined the same people legalization was supposed to help.
He did not just corrupt the industry.
He corrupted the movement.
Final Thoughts:
The crime was never the weed.The crime was the network. The deputies. The selectman. The prosecutor. The cash envelopes. The fake companies. The ordinances he wrote himself. The entire machine he built behind the scenes while smiling for the legalization camera.
Luke Sirois did not break cannabis laws.
He broke the trust of the entire Maine cannabis community.
Legalization was supposed to free people and the plant, not free one man from accountability while he treated a small Maine town like a personal monopoly machine.
Derek Shirley was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At the age of 19, he received a felony for 4 ounces of cannabis. After, he became a “cannabis nomad” living in Ohio, Arizona, and Maine, which he now calls home, and lives with his wife Sequoia and son Haze.
Being a cannabis nomad had its advantages, like relying on all markets for his medical cannabis needs which gives him a unique perspective of the cannabis markets. Currently, he is an influential pro-cannabis activist in the state of Maine who helps local people and small businesses navigate their local and state governments without picking a political party specializing in protecting and preserving the small medical cannabis farmers of Maine. For fun, Derek enjoys screen printing and making cannabis memes under the pseudonym @gettinghighwithcats on IG and GettingHighwithCats on X/Twitter
