The True Cost of the War On Drugs - Ioan Grillo
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 8 minutes
Words per minute
186.20184
Harmful content
Misogyny
7
sentences flagged
Toxicity
21
sentences flagged
Hate speech
18
sentences flagged
Summary
Johan Grillo is a Mexican-based journalist and the author of several books about the War on Drugs, including this latest one, Blood, Gun, Money. In this episode, he talks about his journey into journalism and how he became interested in the war on drugs.
Transcript
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We've now had our last year record overdose deaths in the United States.
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The level of violence in Latin America has been, in the last 20 years,
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there's been more than 2 million homicides in Latin America.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our brilliant guest today is a Mexican-based journalist and the author of several books
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about the war on drugs, including this latest one, Blood, Gun, Money.
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We're so excited, as you know, about speaking with you.
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This is an issue we were really keen to talk about.
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Before we get into all that stuff, tell us a little bit about who you are,
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You've had a very interesting journey through your life, haven't you?
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Well, I'm originally from the UK, grew up just near Brighton, did a bit of a checkered few things I did before I get into journalism.
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I played in a punk band for a bit around the Brighton area, was involved in pirate radio in London for a bit.
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And at 27, I went over to Mexico to get into journalism, originally with a bit of romantic ideas of like, you know, running around with guerrillas, fighting military dictatorships and stuff.
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arrived in mexico in the year 2000 um when things had changed very much and very early on fell into
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covering drugs issue of drugs i grew up um in the southeast with a lot of drugs around then a kind
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of bit of an opioid epidemic back then in the 80s i knew about four teenagers or young men who died
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of heronovid doses around those times so it kind of was very interesting to me connecting this issue
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of drug use countries and communities that use a lot of drugs
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I was just fascinated at the beginning with this kind of glamour
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So I was covering this a lot, and while I was there covering this,
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2006, the government launched a military crackdown on cartels.
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and it became like a weird hybrid armed conflict.
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I found myself in situations I couldn't have imagined.
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Found myself just dealing with a really crazy situation
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Thought I couldn't get this out just in news reports.
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which turned into a trilogy of books about this.
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Travelled around Latin America looking at how this was playing out
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across the continent, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Honduras, Jamaica,
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And I've now got more to doing some sort of TV series as well,
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but still out here writing away, living as a journalist.
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It's great to have you on to talk about all this stuff.
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And there's obviously so much we could talk about.
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But we always like to start with the very basics
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For anyone who's coming to this conversation for the first time,
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What is the drug war, the war on drugs as we talk?
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Yeah, so if you look at drug trafficking in the modern sense,
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You had a thing in the US called the Harrison's Narcotic Tax Act
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and prohibiting some opium and cocaine back then in 1914.
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Because prior to this, you could just buy it as normal.
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Yeah, I mean, there were some local measures came in.
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when it started to really be more national kind of drug prohibition
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you had a drug trade from Mexico to the United States.
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So there's a case you can look at going back to 1916
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of cases of people trafficking drugs from Mexico to the United States.
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Initially, it was often Chinese immigrants to Mexico.
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People moved to Mexico, started planting opium in Mexico
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some of the very first cases you can see in 1916.
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And right back then, there was Mexican governors involved in the corruption.
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Then the real war on drugs happens under Richard Nixon.
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The date is generally seen as being in 1971 when Richard Nixon, President Richard Nixon, had this press conference where he said public enemy number one in the United States is illegal drugs.
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And he had, you know, we're going to fight a war against them, a war on drugs.
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And he talked in very absolutist terms in those days.
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It was like we will have an abolition of drugs from American life.
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like there will be no heroin you know middle-class parents don't worry about your kids taking heroin
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it's not going to happen there will be no heroin available that was 1971 then you saw this
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escalation the drug trade in Colombia really kicking off the violence in Colombia you know
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Escobar cocaine and drug habits in the United States really really increasing the drug consumption
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that really we've got a zombie war on drugs now
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we've now had our last year record overdose deaths in the United States
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there's been more than 2 million homicides in Latin America
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So the level of violence now, a lot of this, when you see it on the ground,
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is more actually like an armed conflict you're covering.
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I mean, these are heavily armed groups, military crackdowns by governments.
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So you've seen a lot more death there than most of the Middle East.
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And a large amount is related to cocaine trade.
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Not obviously not all the murders, but that's a large factor in this violence there.
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but there isn't really any more the impetus the kind of real energy of people about let's try and
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stop drugs being in people's lives they kind of accept and live with drugs now but we still have
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this kind of prohibition stumbling on elements and this kind of enforcement and so forth and
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you know it seems quite clear to me and I think to most people that the war on drugs simply doesn't
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work can you explain number one why it doesn't and the effects it has on these types of communities
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So if you look at drugs, let's take cocaine is one of the ones which is interesting to look at.
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First, it starts off with a bunch of leaves from coca leaves in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia.
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About $80 someone will get for harvesting a bunch of leaves.
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Some peasant farmer down in Campesino down in Colombia.
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Eventually it goes through two chemical processes
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And that sells, depending on where in Colombia you buy,
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if you buy it in the countryside, it's cheaper.
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and then you make it double $200,000, $300,000.
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I mean, we're all in the shit business of journalism.
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I was about to say we're in the wrong business, my friend.
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where you could like anyone who wants to go into business
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you know, most businesses you might see have 20% markups.
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this is what drug dealers, it's the way they talk.
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and I'm expecting to make half a million out of that at least.
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So you get such an incentive for anyone to do this.
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So what happens now is it doesn't take a rocket scientist to do this.
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It's buying products, selling products, moving products.
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So the most violent people are often going to succeed in this.
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Or people using calculated violence, calculated corruption.
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So you end up in Mexico with psychopathic cartels
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I mean, the stuff you cover there, I've covered there is insane.
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I mean, I've covered a mass grave with the remains of 298 people
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And as they were uncovering it, the reek of that death,
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And they were complaining about, well, we've got our kids playing in the gardens here.
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But anyway, why it doesn't work is, I think, that amount of incentive.
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And you're going to arrest people, but someone else will take their place.
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And he said, like, I'm not the only one doing this.
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There are those people involved in drug trafficking.
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All people keep on taking their place, can keep on doing it.
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And unless, you know, and the governments in the West are not prepared
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for like a really authoritarian crackdown that could stop it.
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Like if it was a really authoritarian crackdown,
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like saying anybody we see with drugs we're going to execute right away
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and cut your head off, then that might stop it.
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But just saying we're going to lock people up in prison,
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you know, you're always going to find more people who wouldn't do traffic drugs.
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The one thing that I always struggle, because, you know,
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some of that money is going to reach these cartels.
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who's leaving, like, you know, kids disappeared
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It's not just bad guys being taken out with this.
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I mean, our phones are made in pretty much the same way.
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People say, well, you know, should you try to have a campaign?
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people are, you know, like in some pub and someone's drunk
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But the other thing is what I've seen over the last 20 years
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And you see how this can play out in the 21st century
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what that means in terms of quality of life standard of life for people when you know
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somebody's daughter is disappeared and then brutally raped and murdered when you know you
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have a a mother who's a school teacher who describes her 18 year old son who's a philosophy
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student being taken away by an armed group from her house and just disappeared and she's going
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around morgues trying to find is there any sign of him um these kind of things now i know we're a
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way from that now but i do see in this country and in europe society getting more fragmented
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um you know like these kind of divisions and stuff and we shouldn't take for granted
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because we've had a fairly non-violent society for for many years it's always going to be the
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case because historically we're just as violent in europe or you know as anywhere else so what
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what is the solution to the war on drugs it looks like the author we're not going to do a complete
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I think, I mean, I advocate for drug policy reform.
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it's more complicated than just the word legalisation
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because actually when you get into drug policy,
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You actually have to get into the nitty and gritty of drug policy and stuff.
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So drug policy reform, I see as representing saying the current policies don't work.
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We have to reform and reshape this and look for ways.
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Now, part of that means elements of legalisation.
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I think the UK should legalise marijuana for a lot of reasons.
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I mean, this is the reasons of why should somebody be arrested?
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Why should there be, you know, gangs making money from selling weed, which is an incentive and drives violence and all kinds of stuff?
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Still today, you know, you have these really violent cartels in Mexico.
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Still, it's a lot less now because of legalisation in the States, but they're still moving some some weed now.
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You still have the most, you know, the most violent players growing a bunch of marijuana, trafficking in the United States.
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in Baltimore there's still people selling weed on the street corners there and people getting
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shot over that. So legalising marijuana and then we have
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to get into a very difficult discussion about what we do with heroin
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and other things. It's a difficult discussion. I don't
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know the answers. One thing I do think we need to look at
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which we can agree on is we need to really take rehab
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very seriously, particularly in the US, but in the UK as well. We have very, sorry,
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fragmented societies. I mean, why in the US is there so much drug addiction? Why are people
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hurting so much? And according to the American Medical Association, only 10% of people who need,
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addicts who need rehab are getting it. So you've got 90%, you've got a huge amount of work
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just to try and offer people the help they need. And for every addict you get off heroin,
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Now, I do realise it gets into difficult things
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about cocaine and how we try and move on cocaine,
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but we've got to start having a conversation about this.
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And it's interesting as well what people assume
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when you start seeking practical solutions to this
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But seriously, though, but I also think you need to have a practical approach, right?
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And whatever we're doing now is just not working.
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And one of the ways you see that is what's been happening in Mexico,
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I mean, from what I understand, and correct me on this,
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Mexico is essentially not run by any, it's run by the cartels.
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Most of the money that's made in Mexico is in some way connected to the drug trade.
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Yeah. But like, I mean, the situation is horrific. And at a local level, that's true.
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I'll give you an example. So the Carter, we don't know the exact amount of money.
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It's very, you know, because it's a black market. But the estimates, it could be, say,
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$30 billion of money from trafficking drugs to the United States. Now, Mexico's actually
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a trillion dollar economy. You know, Mexico's not a poor country. It's a mid-income country
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with rich people and poor people and people in the middle.
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So you have certain areas, certain cities, certain neighbourhoods,
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certain villages where drug money is the biggest thing.
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But then that money helps pollute and corrupt the entire system
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and we were, the cartel, local cartel was unhappy we were there.
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we're unhappy about journalists, you snooping around being here.
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with a cartel representative, a cartel guy from there
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who came to our hotel with AK-47s in the back of his car.
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First saying, we don't want you filming here, blah, blah.
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We originally talked to him and, you know, kind of leveled stuff out.
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I said, oh, yeah, you can leave, you'll be fine, don't worry.
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And he said, if you have any problems with the police, you call me.
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who have actually carrying cocaine in their car,
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which they're running for the cartel, who have cartel-issued guns.
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the level even more so there was you know a case in Michoacán of a police officer a few years ago
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his nickname was Tyson after the boxer kind of guy and he was caught and gave a forced confession
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for the federal government but in that confession he was describing not only working for the cartel
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not only murdering people for the cartel but being a ranking cartel member and training
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young cartel affiliates how to like butcher victims how to cut off limbs so that's a level
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when you have police force police forces doing that imagine what law enforcement's like in those
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areas and how bad it is now in terms of you know you know as you get into mexico a concept of like
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narco state or you know does it become a narco state at that point and then you've got presidents
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I mean, right now, a guy who was the former public security secretary,
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he was really one of the leading figures in the war on drugs.
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I interviewed him before, kind of guy with a big, big kind of square jaw,
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He's currently imprisoned in the United States on drug trafficking charges.
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Now, you say it's a narco state, but then it gets more complicated
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Because at the same time, you say, well, the entire state is just illegitimate now.
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But then it gets more complicated because then you have, OK, you still have doctors who are working very, very hard fighting COVID.
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You still have teachers who are working hard trying to teach kids.
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You still have people running electricity, collecting rubbish.
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All of these things the state is doing more functionally.
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It's not like we're, say, an area where the Islamic State controls or in Latin America, the Sindero Luminoso,
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the Shining Path in Peru, where they control the whole area
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and they're very interested in changing the way people think
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and turning them into Maoist communists or Islamic State
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They don't really care what the school's doing.
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What they care about is controlling the police force,
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controlling the rackets, but they've got the drugs,
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but they're also into extortion, kidnapping, prostitution,
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stealing oil, illegal mining, and a whole bunch of other things.
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So you see a real breakdown, kind of like a warlordism.
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I think a lot of the world is suffering this kind of challenge to authority as well.
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And Yon, is it, do they have that kind of relationship that Escobar had with the Colombian people
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whereby the Colombian people loved him because, you know, he gave them schools, he provided them resources,
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he helped a very, very poor people, or is it far more oppressive than that?
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And I've been up to the village where El Chapo is from,
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His mum's an evangelical Christian in a church that he built.
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They talk about them, they call them valientes or brave ones.
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sons and daughters, have been murdered in violence.
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or by the corrupt police working with the cartels,
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And they're going around trying to find the bodies of their loved ones.
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And there's one woman who I interviewed in the state of Veracruz
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who actually helped find that biggest grave I mentioned earlier of 298 bodies.
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After four years of looking for her son, she found that mass grave.
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And after two more years, the DNA of one of the bodies was traced to her son.
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So you've got this level of mass disappearances.
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Now, it gets complicated because it's mixed with cartels,
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So people are like, you know, what's actually who we fight with,
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But, yeah, you've got that kind of mixed thing.
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But you still have, you know, people look up to cartels as well.
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And it's, you know, during the COVID, they were handing out bags of goodies.
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You know, at the beginning of COVID, when all the lockdown happened,
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They were handing out these plastic bags of goodies of rice and eggs and good products and, you know, getting their loyalty from people at the same time.
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And we seem to have seen, particularly in Mexico, an intensification that you referred to since, I think, 2006, was it?
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Yeah, so there was a real big crackdown under President Calderon.
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you would have thought the the government of a pretty big country with support from the united
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states at the time as well cracking down using the military using full the full force of the state
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to deal with this would have had a positive impact on dealing with it and yet what we've seen
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seems to have been the opposite how how has that happened sure i think i think two big reasons
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um one is the a lot of the military corrupt in fact one of the cartel was actually a special
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forces unit yeah wasn't it the setas and i've interviewed one of the guys who was a military
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guy and was in in that from early on so yeah you had these um soldiers like hardcore soldiers who
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then flipped to the cartel and so that's the equivalent of like the sas yeah flipping to
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become a drug trafficking organization initially they were the enforcement arm and then they formed
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their own cartel and then and they they really you could say they were the ones who militarized
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the conflict right because when it um and i was covering this first covering this as a young
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journalist working for the houston chronicle in the states and as this was kind of playing out
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and you saw the violence was really upped it used to be like gang bangers as they say you know the
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u.s guys in fact it was america they'd have some of these american like mexican-american
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gang bangers would come over and be hired by the cartels before guys with shaved heads tattoos like
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pistols like you know shooting and stuff and then the setters were like no no you know we're going
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to do violence a different way we're like ak-47s uh body armor bulletproof jackets metal helmets
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radios organizing so one of these early things i covered there was a bunch of these gang members
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were sent to fight them and they killed them all piled them up their borders up in a house
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and put a message saying you know send us some some more pendejos like these so we can kill them
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like, you know, pendejos, meaning, you know,
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send us some more idiots like these so we can kill them.
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But also the military carried on being corrupt.
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You know, there was, you know, recently a case of a general
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They dropped the charges, sent him back to Mexico.
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I covered a trial of two, a court-martial of two generals
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So there's no, you know, it's not a big secret.
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You know, the military themselves can be corrupt.
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But also, if you look at this from a strategic point of view,
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and I think the government underestimated the threat there was in Mexico in 2006
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It's not like one cartel in Mexico, it's loads of cartels all over the country.
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So you start sending in the military to one place and fighting the cartel,
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So they're fighting the military, which might be even allied to a different cartel.
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and they start ambushing soldiers, ambushing police, kidnapping police,
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leaving the bodies of police, you know, kidnapping marines.
00:28:15.980
There was one case where some marines were tricked by some local police
00:28:20.120
who were affiliated to the CETAS cartel, that same cartel,
00:28:24.960
into going to a bar without their weapons, were kidnapped and tortured and murdered on video.
00:28:29.100
So suddenly they're like, you know, you're cracking down on us,
00:28:30.860
we're going to use violence to press you to back off.
00:28:34.200
So you suddenly started having more of an escalation of the conflict.
00:28:37.280
So now you've got, I mean, there was a situation in 2019
00:28:41.120
when some members of the police and the military
00:28:45.260
attempted to arrest a son of El Chapo in Culiacan.
00:28:54.280
700 to 800 gunmen took to the streets, cartel gunmen,
00:28:58.720
to put pressure to liberate him against 350 soldiers.
00:29:03.920
They eventually, that day, under orders from the government
00:29:10.980
they were just going to start massacring everyone.
00:29:15.920
So again, I mean, it looks like an armed conflict.
00:29:22.440
I don't think understand what we're talking about.
00:29:24.120
That's the equivalent of a major drug dealer's son,
00:29:27.400
let's say, in London or in Liverpool or in New York
00:29:32.700
Then nearly 1,000 people armed with military-grade weapons
00:29:35.940
are on the streets, and the government is like,
00:29:43.500
Exactly, exactly what happened, yeah, very well put.
00:29:46.440
No, no, no, no, it's a good way to try and get that through to people
00:29:49.360
because people do see this as being some place you can't really relate to.
00:29:53.760
To try and say, imagine this stuff happening in England or whatever,
00:30:02.180
mass graves in fields next to an estate in Coventry or something.
00:30:07.480
And so they start digging up and found 200 bodies there.
00:30:14.600
But isn't there also a fundamental hypocrisy in that we've got America,
00:30:18.980
the UK lecturing about drugs, the evil of drugs,
00:30:34.000
And I don't know, you know, can we legalise cocaine?
00:30:39.500
Often when I do talks about this, I'll ask people,
00:30:41.520
I'll say, who's in favour of legalising marijuana?
00:30:43.660
And most places I'll go, a majority will put their hands up.
00:30:45.940
I'll say, who's in favour of legalising cocaine?
00:30:50.400
And so I don't know totally the answer to this.
00:30:56.900
I mean, cocaine is not as lethal as heroin or crystal meth.
00:31:07.900
Could there be a place, you know, could you go to an off-licence
00:31:10.240
and also go and say, I'll have, you know, a six-pack of lager
00:31:13.240
and a couple of grams of Columbia's Finest or not?
00:31:20.760
But, yeah, but right now it's happening anyway.
00:31:52.360
They've got, like, little bags with the numbers there, cocaine, crack,
00:31:55.820
and the guys are openly there with guns with rocket launchers on and stuff,
00:31:59.940
with grenade launchers as well, grenade launchers on.
00:32:06.400
So, yeah, we have to try and think about a better way out of this.
00:32:09.480
And this is a question I think many people probably don't understand the answer to,
00:32:15.040
Am I right in thinking that the reason Mexico is such a violent place because of drugs
00:32:20.220
is because it's the trafficking point to the United States,
00:32:23.780
which is the biggest market for illegal drugs in the world.
00:32:27.540
Why are all these drugs made in Latin America?
0.99
00:32:34.740
I mean, the United States is the biggest drug consumption
00:32:42.200
but there's estimates put out by the RAND Corporation.
00:32:46.360
They have, like, they put out a commission by the White House.
00:32:51.320
It's called What Americans Spend on Illegal Drugs.
00:33:11.780
You still have groups in Colombia, more so in Bolivia,
00:33:14.680
using indigenous communities, using the plants.
00:33:18.100
They just chew it as like we take coffee or something, right?
00:33:23.220
I went up to see the coca fields in Colombia, an area there,
00:33:29.760
And it was interesting because this group had a bunch of ex-FARC.
00:33:36.360
And they had this indigenous group who took me up to see it.
00:33:42.680
And their thing was if they were ever challenged,
00:34:37.420
or they're bringing fentanyl and mixing it up with heroin.
00:34:43.080
So you've got the big class of drugs called opioids or opiates, which are opium-based things, which are like downers.
00:34:57.180
And that's the biggest real addiction problem in the United States is really these.
00:35:01.580
Opiates are the biggest really for deaths because the level between what you can take and your body can survive with an overdose is much closer than with cocaine.
00:35:21.120
I mean, you've had through the pharmaceutical industry
00:35:25.080
in the United States of people prescribing OPS.
00:35:32.100
who got addicted to heroin after going into hospital
00:35:36.200
and being given down as then as going back to the 80s.
00:35:40.360
But in the US, there was like big pushing from the drug companies
00:35:44.080
to like, yeah, prescribe them, you know, like prescribe them opiates,
00:35:49.440
prescribe them, you know, make money out of this, you know.
00:35:51.680
And a lot of people making money and then people are hooked
00:35:55.480
So then the cartels start also getting these formulas, making it,
00:35:59.040
going to countries, buying precursors, making it themselves.
00:36:02.900
So now there's a big amount of money you can make.
00:36:05.040
you don't need to be in the mountains growing opium leaves
00:36:09.940
You've just got a lab somewhere bringing some precursors,
00:36:13.360
you know, bribe customs or like sneak them through
00:36:16.160
and just in a lab right by the border or any place
00:36:19.340
and be making these opiates or crystal meth as well.
00:36:23.080
It seems to me that, you know, drugs are so prevalent
00:36:31.840
Are there not people really high up who have got their fingers
00:36:34.640
in this pie because I just think to myself it can't be so prevalent and people up top know what's
00:36:40.580
going on or don't know what's going on yeah it's an interesting idea like you know sometimes I'll
00:36:45.920
try and put you know write op-eds and try and be like end the war on drugs and do this you know
00:36:50.820
can and just trying to push for real solutions because I get very frustrated now I feel like
00:36:55.460
politics is broken yeah and I feel this is something we can fix you know a lot of things
00:36:59.620
we can't fix you know we're not going to be able to find common ground on but this is something we
00:37:03.280
should be able to fix it's like wrong and can't we find a better way it's like why are they not
00:37:07.620
doing it you know so i try and put forward optimistic things whoever it is biden administration
00:37:11.880
you know boris john anything you know just move forward in this policy and everyone says you know
00:37:15.480
then people be like ah you're so naive you know there's a bunch of people making a big money on
00:37:20.360
this they want this kind of disorder i don't know i mean my dad used to say um you have conspiracy
00:37:27.300
theory and you have the cock-up theory and often i will first look at the cock-up theory yeah
00:37:32.080
But then also you have the cocked up conspiracy theory.
00:37:35.680
So you have like stuff that can be like, you know, are there interests there of people?
00:37:41.760
I mean, certainly people, you have got bureaucracies there.
00:37:45.400
So you've got like the DEA, a couple of billion dollars budget every year.
00:37:49.960
They've got an incentive to keep that budget, to keep it.
00:37:54.700
You know, they're seizing, you know, drug traffickers.
00:37:57.520
because the biggest cash bust in the world ever was in Mexico,
00:38:07.300
from a Chinese guy actually bringing precursors for crystal meth.
0.85
00:38:12.000
That money is then asset seized by the Mexican government
00:38:19.920
sees houses of people and stuff and then use that.
00:38:27.520
People selling guns to gangs, that's a business.
00:38:31.680
Banks, HSBC was caught, big money laundering case there.
00:38:38.980
You know, you're like, I talked to a guy, a guy contacted me
00:38:42.280
who was selling expensive watches to drug traffickers in Colombia.
00:38:48.660
He was a Colombian guy based in Miami, but he was going to Europe
00:38:52.100
and he was selling, like, he was going to Colombia with like,
00:38:56.220
I mean, we're talking, you know, really expensive watches,
00:39:02.160
go off to these, like, rants of drug traffickers,
00:39:09.760
Now, who can you find with that kind of money to buy watches?
00:39:15.860
but I think also there's a lot of just broken politics,
00:39:20.480
and we can't fix, you know, why can we not fix anything more?
00:39:33.740
You know, people flee violence in Latin America
00:39:58.100
And so, you know, you have to care because if, you know,
00:40:09.040
I know America was involved in supporting governments
00:40:14.140
in Latin America, in Central America in the 80s.
00:40:24.020
But I think a lot of politics is more about like posturing
00:40:26.780
than actually saying any kind of pragmatic solution
00:40:31.660
That's what I find really odd about this whole thing,
00:40:34.400
because it's like many of the issues that we talk about,
00:40:51.620
if you've got a continent of people who are being murdered and raped and disappeared and whatever
00:40:57.640
a lot of them are going to want to leave that and come to the united states so if you
00:41:01.580
fix this issue you're going to solve that problem to to a very significant extent
00:41:07.040
uh likewise in the uk i mean one of the things we've been talking about a lot recently is
00:41:12.180
racial disparities over policing of certain communities etc and a lot of that is in my
00:41:18.760
opinion down to the fact that there's there's there's a lot of people being criminalized for
00:41:23.080
something that they didn't they oughtn't be criminalized for but if you create an opportunity
00:41:28.900
to make as much money as you're saying for people who don't have many other options that's what's
00:41:33.660
going to happen then the police have to come in because of the violence and then you know the
00:41:37.620
17 year old with a bag of weed in his pocket is being treated in a very different way to somebody
00:41:42.700
who's got the same bag of weed at Oxford University right so there's so there's so many things that
00:41:48.560
can be fixed by addressing this issue why do you think that first of all politics you've alluded
00:41:54.560
to somewhere but also just you know public sentiment isn't necessarily on the side of
00:41:58.920
what we're talking about here i mean i see a massive switch on the drug issue over the last
00:42:04.200
few years i remember in 2010 i was on charlie rose show before his demise but i was on the
00:42:12.840
charlie rose show and we're having discussion then and charlie rose asked about uh drug legalization
00:42:19.280
legalization and oh sorry 2012 he asked about drug legalization and one of the other guests
00:42:25.560
in our journey said oh it's a non-starter um and this was a sentiment i heard a lot in older
00:42:31.440
journalists you know drug drug legalization is a non-starter you mentioned it's just not going
00:42:35.600
happen that year in 2012 they legalized cannabis first of all in washington state and colorado
00:42:44.420
and then it's you know it's been spreading across legalized recreational marijuana so that's
00:42:48.540
obviously on the table now um so you have seen and you've seen like you know just you know this
00:42:53.440
last election there was a whole bunch of these um other votes in the united states and mississippi
00:42:59.300
you know by a big percentage approved legalizing medical marijuana so you've seen a big change in
00:43:06.520
this i mean you go back to 30 year you know 30 years or 20 years that wouldn't have happened
00:43:10.500
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So there has been a big swing in public opinion on this issue.
00:44:19.700
I'm not sure exactly what the surveys are now in the UK,
00:44:23.200
how many people would be in favour of legalising marijuana here, for a start.
00:44:27.620
But I think there is a certain move with politicians,
00:44:32.760
but I do think that politics has become very, very broken.
00:44:37.920
And they're not looking at solving practical issues.
00:44:42.800
It's not like sitting down and saying, I think the spirit that's lasted for a long time in the US, in Europe, of we can solve things, we can solve problems.
00:44:54.220
And it's people now just like posturing, showing off their own kind of social media followers, attacking the opposition, not really saying how can we actually come together and find a real solution to this problem.
00:45:08.800
I mean, you must be, surely you're covering this stuff,
00:45:11.560
just absolute horror for, what, two decades now
00:45:16.960
And you're seeing that you're giving people information
00:45:21.180
You talk about two million people being murdered
00:45:29.480
I mean, like, it's, I mean, it's been a crazy journey.
00:45:36.660
And as well as, you know, some of the things that really strike with me,
00:45:41.940
I spend a lot of time interviewing cartel members and gangsters, criminals.
00:45:46.360
So it's spending a lot of time with people who are like serial murderers.
00:45:51.360
Now, I, as a journalist, feel I've got, you know, it's important to talk to these people
00:45:55.360
to try and understand who they are, you know, what they're going through.
00:46:02.100
Some of them you can, you know, I can get on or, you know, one can get on OK with them.
00:46:09.300
This one guy, I went out drinking in a nightclub with him.
00:46:12.180
I didn't really know quite how deep he was in beforehand.
00:46:14.720
We did a big bucket of beer, kind of nice, seemed like a nice guy.
00:46:18.140
When we sat down and did an interview with him later,
00:46:21.500
and he was describing butchering an entire family,
00:46:24.520
he was describing decapitating people while they're still alive,
00:46:27.240
which would be in the contracts, how they have that there,
00:46:30.540
they decapitate them and how their bodies are reacting to that.
00:46:36.920
So you see this stuff and it's repeating, repeating, repeating.
00:46:43.940
And, yeah, I mean, I kind of think I had a certain naivety
00:46:49.320
And now I look back and read my first book that I wrote 10 years ago.
00:46:54.820
Oh, we can solve this because this can be changed.
00:46:56.960
When I talk to a lot of people living in these areas,
00:47:03.360
there's violence, and I'm going to try and make the best of this for myself.
00:47:07.960
They're not thinking, oh, how can we change and move this situation?
00:47:19.320
I mean, you think there's got to be a way to stop this.
00:47:24.640
all of the things that we can do, we can create nuclear bombs,
0.60
00:47:28.460
how can we have, you know, in Latin America right now,
00:47:32.200
And in some US cities, murder rates which are like 50 times London.
00:47:42.840
So if you think London's bad at stabbing, imagine that times 50.
00:47:46.420
What that means when everybody knows several people who have been murdered.
00:47:52.360
What that means in terms of you don't want your kid out by themselves ever
0.69
00:47:57.340
because you're just scared that something could happen.
00:48:06.160
And even you compare it to like medieval London,
00:48:09.460
it's the murder rates right now in Latin America
00:48:16.000
So it's not like it's this natural state of things
00:48:20.080
Don't you think that part of the problem as well
00:48:24.340
So if you take drugs, you ultimately become immoral
00:48:27.840
and if you're immoral, then you should be punished.
00:48:30.340
when it's been proven time and time again that, you know,
00:48:33.440
as long as there's going to be human beings, they're going to be taking drugs.
00:48:38.520
Yeah, we have taken drugs since time immemorial.
00:48:41.320
I think there's differences in the drug taking now
00:48:45.600
compared to some of, like, you know, drug taking before.
00:48:48.360
I mean, things like the fact, you know, there was, we drink alcohol now,
00:48:53.620
much stronger alcohol than people used to drink, you know,
00:48:56.120
it'd be like a weaker beer or whatever, or a weaker wine,
00:48:59.360
and now it's like now we're doing mezcal and vodka and that kind of thing um you know we've
00:49:05.180
taken people took um say magic mushrooms um in you know like druids took them or people took
00:49:12.280
them in like ceremonies before but now people are just doing like lines of coke and and just
00:49:18.380
taking drugs at kind of parties and people are kind of so i think i think there's issues i think
00:49:22.460
there's quite big issues about the nature of modern society i think the nature of mental health
00:49:36.260
someone's super happy, everything's going great
00:49:38.400
in their lives and they become a bad drug addict.
00:49:54.020
start taking them and then they've got a real big
00:49:58.060
like a bad addict and then people die of overdose and stuff so we've i think we've got to look at
00:50:02.280
these i think this gets into bigger issues and it's kind of hard to solve but about i think about
00:50:07.120
about people about separation about um loneliness and about all of these things we have to kind of
00:50:11.980
address as well yeah it's a really good point i i wouldn't want this into me to come off as like
00:50:16.500
us going oh yeah everyone should be taking drugs and there's nothing wrong with it at all because
00:50:20.320
we know that there's a lot of problems that come with that uh but i guess there's been a lot of
00:50:25.500
written about now that we know that the reason people take drugs often is to do with trauma it's
00:50:31.500
to do with suffering some kind of pain is to deal with difficulty and yeah we've said okay you can
00:50:37.120
take alcohol and drink yourself to death and that's okay but you can't take this other stuff
00:50:41.540
that to me is really the issue but you mentioned the AOC and the conversation around America's
00:50:50.340
past behavior in Latin America. Yeah. What has been the West's role in in the war on drugs and
00:50:58.700
the violence you talk about in Latin America? Has the West helped? Has the West made it worse? Like
00:51:04.420
what has been the impact of of the attempts to intervene in one way or another? Yeah, sure. So
00:51:09.880
historically, when you go back to Richard Nixon before, then the US really pushed this. So at
00:51:17.420
beginning like the U.S. pushed crop spraying in Mexico is going back to the 1970s and started
00:51:25.520
saying you've got you've got to like use you know we'll give you and they said we'll give you military
00:51:28.320
helicopters and you spray crops and so the military then empowered and getting money to be cracking
00:51:34.160
down on drug production which then just shifted so they actually began in Sinaloa they ran them
00:51:39.000
out of Sinaloa they went to the second city Guadalajara just grew in grew in size crop
00:51:44.380
spraying in Colombia, which they never, you know, never wiped out the cocaine trade.
00:51:48.380
You know, you just spray, crop, spray, spray, spray.
00:51:51.380
You know, you're going bang, bang, bang, and it's just all springing up all the time.
00:51:54.580
So the US, I mean, the US was pressuring as a policy.
00:51:57.000
So they used to have a thing called certification, where they'd certify countries for how much
00:52:03.220
They had this idea this would work, and this would stop drug trafficking, and it failed.
00:52:07.600
So the US, you know, did this and pushed this for a long time.
00:52:10.260
um now it i say now it's kind of a zombie war on drugs now it doesn't you know now this thing's
00:52:15.680
just like carrying on moving the drug trade is there there's billions and billions of dollars
00:52:20.080
in it people just carry on doing it you've also got um which my third book looks at the the traffic
00:52:26.480
of firearms so now the united states has the biggest firearms market in the world by far the
00:52:32.720
last count or estimate was 393 million guns in civilian hands which is more than the next 25
00:52:38.660
countries combined from that you have a like a legal firearms market you have a parallel black
00:52:44.260
market from this parallel black market you have guns flowing down well moving around to the gangs
00:52:49.700
in the united states you know all around the us but also flowing down to mexico um the last 12
00:52:55.460
years you've seen more than 160 000 firearms taken from cartels in mexico and definitively traced
00:53:01.620
to us gun shops and gun stores the real numbers were believed to be more than 200 000 guns every
00:53:08.020
year going down there so this is trafficking historic case of trafficking to a heavy armed
00:53:13.040
conflict which again is why i think i mean are americans and some of these politicians they
00:53:17.660
not know about that um some of these politicians who are talking in you know in congress they not
00:53:23.420
know about these things or they're not interested in in in real solutions to this stuff right now
00:53:30.260
well there was a scandal wasn't there it was operation fast and furious yeah exactly tell
00:53:34.600
Tell everybody a little bit about what happened there.
00:53:35.980
Yeah, so Fast and Furious was an operation by the American gun police
00:53:39.660
called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
00:53:52.980
And what it was was that the ATF agents were watching people,
00:53:58.520
cartel affiliates, buy guns and trafficking them to the cartels.
00:54:13.640
They ended up watching 2,000 guns be trafficked
00:54:19.560
One of them was found in the last safe house of El Chapo.
00:54:23.400
Some of them got, then bounced down to Colombia.
00:54:27.540
an American Border Patrol agent in the United States,
00:55:00.980
I think on the actual issue of guns themselves,
00:55:06.460
But this issue actually was owned by conservatives
00:55:18.640
They want to do this to kind of take away our guns.
00:55:21.160
In Mexico, it was more of a conspiracy of saying,
00:55:26.200
They're involved in trafficking the guns to us.
00:55:30.760
So, yeah, it cuts, you know, all kinds of ways.
00:55:33.140
Well, the thing is you don't have to be anti-gun
00:55:34.960
to be anti-trafficking guns to Mexican drug lords.
00:56:05.660
I was just doing this and none of this came to anything.
00:56:23.300
that there is no solution to this problem, really?
00:56:26.540
Yeah, I mean, like I said, you know, politics is broken and, you know, we've got to try and, you know, bring the conversation on.
00:56:34.120
Now, like, I think a lot of people now, probably most of you, as I'd imagine, would be in favour of legalising marijuana, as a guess.
00:56:43.040
When you get to cocaine, some people get like, you know, or someone's suffering or people like seeing like, like in the US now, you know, they've got loads of homeless people on the streets who are taking drugs.
00:56:54.520
So you think, well, decriminalisation isn't working there
00:56:56.440
because we're just allowing them to be doing, you know,
00:56:59.080
like just sitting there taking drugs on the streets.
00:57:05.800
But also I think, you know, you've got another discussion
00:57:10.120
So I think on the one side, I think we need drug policy reform.
00:57:13.100
On the other side, we do need to take law enforcement very seriously
00:57:19.040
And antisocial crime, I mean, in Latin America,
00:57:21.460
I mean, violently antisocial disappearances, I mean, rapes.
00:57:28.040
And I mean, there, I mean, there's a very aggressive feminist movement in Mexico, in Latin America.
1.00
00:57:37.400
But there they've got these grievances of like, you know, horrific, you know, every day you see a woman's been raped and murdered and their body left.
00:57:45.680
I interviewed one woman who was going down to Central America
0.52
00:57:49.180
and she was gang raped by the members of the MS-13 gang
00:57:56.940
and it was kind of used as a weapon of conflict, of violence against people.
00:58:02.740
So these kind of anti-social crimes and violence in poor communities
00:58:07.080
are the ones that suffer most from this everywhere.
00:58:09.920
And we need to take this stuff very, very seriously
00:58:12.560
and say how do we have law enforcement for that?
00:58:14.420
at the same time as saying actually on drug issue itself
00:58:18.520
we need to rethink this and just locking everyone up for this
00:58:21.000
or just allowing an illegal black market in drugs
00:58:24.340
which generates money, which gives an incentive
00:58:31.580
Do you think part of the solution could be, though, Yohan,
00:58:43.820
look, we need to regenerate, we need to think of ways to make more money.
00:58:47.760
Let's be fair, if you want to monetise something,
00:59:02.840
And if it did happen in the UK, I'm sure you get some of the same old networks
00:59:11.060
Yeah, weatherspoons or the Friends of Boris Johnson or whatever.
00:59:13.820
in business, you know, who are, like, jumping into another.
00:59:17.720
if it's only started, like, opening, like, you know,
00:59:23.140
Sure, I mean, there's a lot of money in this, absolutely.
00:59:29.420
I mean, again, these numbers are pure estimates or guesstimates,
00:59:33.000
but, you know, there was a UN thing talking about $300 billion globally,
00:59:37.200
and that's $300 billion, you know, governments can tax or whatever.
00:59:46.200
you can ever allow people to go to the shop and buy heroin.
00:59:50.380
But the thing is, this conversation doesn't need to be had in this way, does it?
00:59:53.860
Because when we talk about decriminalising things, let's say,
00:59:56.520
we're not saying you can go into a pharmacy and buy a kilo of heroin.
01:00:00.700
What we're saying is if you are a user of heroin,
01:00:06.160
we make sure you get the treatment that you need,
01:00:24.180
I think there's got to be some nuance in the conversation.
01:00:26.560
I think marijuana is something you could probably legalize,
01:00:32.280
I think in Switzerland to some extent with heroin as well.
01:00:37.940
It doesn't have to be, like, free-for-all, you know.
01:00:41.520
Well, yeah, but that still leaves a problem, though,
01:00:49.600
and let's say people spend, and this is just out, you know,
01:00:54.840
So they're no longer going to arrest people who are, like,
01:00:57.660
who are just having this, being caught with a bit
01:01:06.560
Yeah. So you still then got the gangs, you know, moving the heroin and making money from it and having the violence.
01:01:12.580
And you've still got the cartels or whatever. I mean, heroin comes from, say, Turkey.
01:01:16.780
But I think in Switzerland, what they do, though, is they give them the heroin.
01:01:21.060
So, yeah, that's another step. So that's another thing we could look at where you have government programs and you have things like methadone as well.
01:01:28.040
There's other other like substitutes. Yeah. So we like expanding those kind of programs.
01:01:33.080
Now, again, it's still difficult when you get into this
01:01:35.240
because you might have somebody who gets some scripts from the government
01:01:42.180
And I used to remember back when I was in the 80s, early 90s,
01:01:45.780
I remember people doing that, like get scripts for pills,
01:01:48.840
call them like jellies or something, something like pills,
01:01:50.660
and then they're reselling them on the street and stuff.
01:01:54.960
But I think some of these, we have to look at this stuff.
01:01:58.780
I think one way to see this, and a lot of problems,
01:02:01.000
is rather than, you know, these absolutist things of saying,
01:02:04.520
like, you know, Richard Nixon, when he began the war on drugs,
01:02:12.820
but we've got to reduce the harm, reduce the damage.
01:02:16.700
So if the illegal drug money right now is, you know,
01:02:25.500
then that's $75 billion less going to organised crime.
01:02:36.100
and reduce the number of people dying of overdoses
01:02:39.940
rather than saying we're going to get rid of this problem completely.
01:02:46.000
So obviously whenever you talk about this issue,
01:02:50.580
just given the nature of what we're talking about here, right?
01:02:53.600
But do you think there's any reason to be positive?
01:02:59.860
Do you think there's any light at the end of the tunnel here
01:03:03.260
or do you think this is just an issue that's not going to get better
01:03:08.760
Yeah, I try and be optimistic and not really pessimistic about stuff.
01:03:12.180
I don't like the idea of pessimistic views on the world and stuff.
01:03:18.040
And, I mean, there are a lot of things driving a particular violence in Mexico.
01:03:22.240
The drugs are, in a way, you know, you could talk about Mexico as being,
01:03:27.000
rather than the Mexican war on drugs, the Mexican drug war.
01:03:44.320
which I think is a bigger issue as well across the world
01:03:51.740
A lot of countries don't have functional law enforcement.
01:03:55.040
It's something else we can easily take for granted.
01:03:57.460
And there's a lot of problems with law enforcement in the UK.
01:03:59.860
But it's a hell of a lot better than many, many countries.
01:04:06.180
But if you look at a positive solution or positive take on this,
01:04:13.500
I mean, yeah, public opinion has changed massively on this issue.
01:04:19.460
So people started taking drugs in a really big way, I think, in the West
01:04:48.600
often people who are the most scared about drugs
01:05:54.980
over digitalization of everything i think the way particularly england has become such
01:06:01.320
a digital society and it's in some parts of life where we don't need it um you know like going to
01:06:08.600
a pub and having to go on an app to order a drink instead of being able to go to a bar and i understand
01:06:13.300
the health stuff there but like this idea that everything's online that every bank has to like
01:06:18.400
close down its branches that you can't you know talk to a doctor anymore you have to go like and
01:06:23.780
send emails i think this is fracturing society more um i think one of the big challenges now
01:06:30.040
is i mean it's also for all of us you know how we try and get a balance between digital life
01:06:35.420
and you know real life and really seeing people and stuff and i think that's one of the things
01:06:40.040
we need to talk about more that's a really good point you know uh and for those of you watching
01:06:44.000
we're going to ask some questions in fact your questions from locals so join locals check out
01:06:48.120
our page there and you'll be able to submit questions for our future guests and read the
01:06:51.900
answers uh but in the meantime thank you for coming on blood gun money is your latest book
01:06:56.340
everyone should get it of course i look forward to reading your back catalog as well because it
01:07:00.360
just it's this is an issue i really find very interesting um and thank you for coming on the
01:07:04.700
show where should people go to check out your work and follow the latest in what you're doing
01:07:08.660
yeah sure so i've got a weird name it's easy to find uh i-o-a-n first name and grillo g-r-i-double
01:07:14.540
l-o so it's just just you can just search for that but you can see i've got a website
01:07:47.260
or 2 p.m eastern standard time take care and see you soon guys we hope you've enjoyed this
01:07:54.580
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