I filed FOIAs about the Chinese Mystery Seeds with state departments of agriculture in all 50 states. I received thousands of emails, spreadsheets, complaint forms, presentations, voicemails. The takeaway is that MANY Americans planted the seeds https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/akz9qk/hundreds-of-americans-planted-chinese-mystery-seeds

not to be TOO bleak here, but what I saw was eye-opening. Hundreds of people unable to follow instructions, thousands who didn't understand whether they had actually ordered something or not. People called 911, took them to the police, "salted the earth," widespread chaos

Many states were able to identify the seeds. Most were harmless (as has been already reported). Some were weeds that are illegal to plant in most states. Here's one wild voicemail I listened to:

I've done lots of FOIA projects but here's a thing I learned: State FOI laws and agency-by-agency responses vary incredibly. Some states rejected me citing "active law enforcement investigation." Others asked me to narrow. Some sent me gigs of unredacted files. Some charged me

These documents are from seven states, and seems like ~200 or so people in 7 states (most of them small states) planted the seeds. I think conservatively speaking, a couple thousand Americans planted random unsolicited seeds they got in the mail

this is my favorite voicemail:

I am trying to find a reasonable way to upload and share all these files, some are well-organized, most are a complete mess. Shoutout to New Mexico who sent me a 1 gb zip file

here's a small excerpt of the comments section of one of the spreadsheets i got. some definite "sir this is a wendys" answers in here

Nebraska wants $767 for emails but did send me this tally chart of how many calls it got