Camp Gagnon - The Cartel That Created a Country | Patrick Winn

Episode Date: December 16, 2025

Patrick Winn, award-winning American journalist who covers crime and illicit economies in Southeast Asia, sits down at CAMP to reveal the darkest secrets of the Wa Cartel. Patrick takes us deep into the mysterious Wa State, an unrecognised "country inside a country", to expose its origins, how it became a global drug hub, and the shadowy involvement of the CIA and DEA...WELCOME TO CAMP! 🏕️Shoutout to our sponsor: Mars Men, Morgan&Morgan and BlueChewFor a limited time, our listeners get 60% off FOR LIFE AND 3 Free Gifts at Mars Men when you use code 'CAMP' at https://mengotomars.com👕🧢 Use CHRISTMASCAMP at checkout for 17% off when you shop at https://camp-rd.com/collections/christmas🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets Here: https://markgagnonlive.com🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History Here: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.comTimestamps:0:00 County Inside a Country4:02 Who Are The Wa Cartel7:54 Controversial Creation of Myanmar11:18 The Wa People15:54 The Growth of Drug Trade20:37 CIA’s Wa State Involvement32:25 Drugs Distributed to U.S. Troops In Vietnam45:00 Leader of Wa State53:41 Origin of Wa Cartel59:39 Wa Country Today1:03:30 How Wa Became Official1:06:05 Religion of Wa State1:09:00 DEA Asset Inside Wa State1:15:04 Wa State Drugs Reach The U.S.1:22:24 CIA Setup Drug Lord1:31:05 The Shift to a New Drug1:41:05 Chief & Leader of Wa State1:53:43 China’s Support For Wa State2:03:51 Sneaking Into Wa State2:08:08 Superstar’s Death + Wa State Today2:13:18 The Future of Wa State2:21:08 How Wa State Avoids Addiction2:23:23 Check Out Narcotopia#podcast #foryou #history #mystery #crime #knowledge #horror #china

Law State is the world's most powerful narco state, the most powerful drug trafficking organization on planet Earth. And China supports them. This is Patrick Wynne, and he's gone deep into Myanmar's shadow world where an entire country exists within a country. And the entire economy is based on one thing. Meth. And Myanmar doesn't just have a civil war. It has nestled within the mountains an entire narco state. For decades, this region has been carved up by warlords, rebel armies, and generals, each funded

not by taxes but by drugs. First opium and then heroin, and now something far more efficient and far more deadly. And today we talk about forgotten Cold War deals, Chinese alliances, CIA entanglements, and rebel states that outlast governments, and how the modern synthetic drug trade

made Myanmar more powerful and more dangerous than ever. This isn't chaos by accident or a story about narcotics, it's about how history, empire, and war created a system that no one seems able or willing to shut down. If you want to understand how a country truly becomes ungovernable

and why the drug war will never end, well, this is the episode for you. Patrick Gwyn is a brilliant journalist and has all the answers on how the Wa state deep in the mountains of Myanmar actually operates. So, sit back, relax, and welcome the camp. Patrick Gwynn, thank you so much for joining me. Glad to be here.

I am very excited to chat with you, and there's a lot to get into. You have a fascinating story to tell. You wrote a book called Narco-Texam. Topia, which really shows a part of sort of geopolitics and like the American War on drugs and drug trafficking in a really, really interesting way. And I want to get into all the details. But in short, the thing that I was kind of taking away when my friends were asking me about this interview is I was like, okay, look, I don't have all the details. But basically, there's a

country with its own borders and its own military inside of a country that you've never heard of that is bigger than some European nations that basically exists on an entire economy built on heroin and meth. That's pretty crazy. Close. Heroin is now passe. It's all about meth these days. Everything else you said is correct. And it's quite astonishing that more people don't recognize this fact.

If you look at Google Maps or you look at a globe in a classroom, you could look at the country of Burma or Myanmar, same country, two different names. and it looks like one, you know, unified country, but that's a lie. There is a country inside that country that is totally sovereign. They have their own documentation. They have their own highways. They have their own cell phone towers, hospitals, ministries of finance and health. And I can go on and on everything that makes a country, a country. And yeah, the economy is really rooted in it was heroin and now it's meth.

And the CIA and the DEA is involved in this? at various points. Yes, well, the CIA, where do we get? Yeah, we can get into that, but I'm just kind of now just like sort of set in the stage that there's a country inside a country that has an economy that exists on meth, that the CIA is aware of and is in some way involved in it in some capacity and it's affecting Americans. Yeah, well, I mean, I think anything the CIA does comes back to, comes back to America, but absolutely, yeah.

CIA has played a role in its formation. DEA has played a role in how the state has come together. And really what I tried to unravel is the strange relationship between this narco state and my own country. And it's just surprising that there's a relationship at all and even more surprising how deep it goes. Yeah. And maybe it in some way sheds light on the cartels in Central and South America and kind of our relationship with that drug war as well. Yeah, let me ask you something. When you think of a cartel in Mexico, like throw out a few, few like main facts about cartels.

Like, what do you imagine? I imagine that they operate on a code of honor, which is like against, you know, outside of the bounds of the law. They have their own internal sort of law that they kind of operate with. They're often at odds with the government or they're working under, you know, bribery with the government. They're typically pretty violent in order to get what they want. and they are more sophisticated than we typically think, and they have access to decent tech in order to get drugs into America.

Yeah, I would say all that's true. Looking really at what a cartel is, a cartel is a corporation. The purpose of a cartel is to make money. I don't think they have much of a higher agenda beyond that. And they, yes, they can corrupt parts of the government, let's just go with the Mexican government to get their way.

but that's not at all how things work in Southeast Asia, specifically with this country within a country that we're talking about, which is called Waa state. It's a narcotics trafficking organization, but really, like, Agenda A is sustaining itself as a state, okay? Making money isn't the number one objective. They want to sustain themselves as a state, and they want it to be a place that defends the homeland of a very specific, ethnic group called the Wa people. Okay. Now, this has all of the makings of a fantastic story. I feel like we've set the stage pretty well.

All right. So tell me, who are you? And how did you get involved in this? Where do you live? What is your background? I've lived, well, I'm originally from North Carolina, from a very small town, like a factory town in North Carolina. Worked in newspapers in my home state.

And eventually I met somebody. at one of the newspapers I was working at, who was a photojournalist. She is a Thai citizen, and we fell in love, and she wanted to go back to Bangkok where she's from, and I followed. We're now married. Nice. So that happened 17, 18 years ago. And you've been living in Bangkok since 2008-ish.

Yeah, exactly. Summer of 2008. So I'm an investigative journalist, and so when I got to Thailand, I started looking around for the most interesting stories that I could tell. and reported on all sorts of things. I've been in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, publications like that, not to toot my own horn, but just, you know,

I'm not just blogging, okay? For more than 10 years, kind of my great white whale has been this story. The fact that Americans are so fixated on the drug war and they really just look at Latin America. So everyone knows Pablo Escobar and El Chapo and all those guys, right? There's a whole other half of the drug war that's played out in Asia that just gets completely ignored. And the fact that there is, look, the most powerful drug trafficking organization on planet Earth is not in Mexico.

It's in Southeast Asia. And I just really wanted to tell that story because its leaders are indicted by the DEA. the DEA would like to throw them in a prison cell in the U.S., extradite them. It's hard to tell that story. Yeah. And how did you hear about this for the first time? If you just read the newspapers in, say, Thailand, this, I'll use the word cartel because Americans understand it, but we'll get into why that's an imperfect word.

This cartel is talked about, written about, usually as like this great boogeyman. and they're seen as this nefarious force that pumps methamphetamine into the region and, you know, screws everything up and gets people hooked on meth, which is bad. It's a much more complicated story than that, but that's what you'll read in the papers. The other thing is when you read about the group that is really at the core of this narco state, the Wa people, their indigenous group that lives up in the mountains of Burma, and they are seen. as nefarious and it's quite open. Like in the newspaper they would be described as sort of villainous, low morality type people, kind of like hillbillies.

Like, you know, evil hillbillies. Yes. So, I mean, I love evil hillbillies. So I was drawn to that. So you heard about it and then you start asking people and you're like, have you heard of this? And everyone's like, yeah, you know, those, yeah, we've heard of that. They had heard of it in very black and white terms.

So the Wa people, if you're You ask someone in Southeast Asia about the wa, if they've heard of them. They've heard one thing. Well, they've heard two things. The first is that they used to be headhunters. So they had a culture of cutting off people's heads and putting them on sticks way up in the mountains of Burma to scare the crap out of any intruders. Is this like 200 years ago, a thousand years ago? No, it was happening as recently as the 60s.

Wow. Yeah. and then eons before that. Now, Christos, I think some visual aids here is going to be very helpful. Is it possible just to, one, I think, get everyone on board with what exactly Myanmar is, where it exists in the region, why there's disparity between Myanmar and Burma. So what can you tell me about Myanmar? Myanmar is a country that's wedged between India and China. It's very chaotic.

Some of the greatest, most intelligent, creative, most awesome people have ever. met are from this country. I think the chaotic situation breeds pretty amazing people. But it's one of these countries where the British Empire went in and drew borders around all these different groups that never agreed to all be in the same country. No. The British? Come on.

I don't mean to blow your mind. Come on, dude. So it's just set up to be contentious and chaotic. there are dozens of different ethnic groups. And really when you get into the mountains, like mountains in general, the geography of mountains breeds diversity. Because you've got one group on this mountain

and they speak a certain language and you go three peaks over and it's a different language. Whereas when you get into like low, flat areas, you know, everyone can commingle. They're trading and they get a common language. Yes. There's much more homogene. Yes, yes.

So, yeah, Myanmar was a British colony. It went independent after World War II. And back then it was called Burma. And around 1988, a military junta, which has controlled the country for much of its existence, said Burma, that's the old British colonial name. We're going to change the name to Myanmar. And a military junta is basically like when a coup happens from the military and then they form like a military government more. more or less. Yeah.

North Korea would be a junta. It's a military state. Got it. Yeah. And so this is where it is, as we can see, it borders Thailand, which is where you live. And so if there's going to be issues in Myanmar,

it's going to get to the Thai press and people are going to be aware of this. Yeah. So Myanmar in recent history, like a few years ago, has also gone through another military coup, basically. I don't even know if it's like a different one. Is the current state of Myanmar and the conflict happening there?

Is it super relevant to the story? No, not necessarily because as we will hear, the Wa people, Wa state exist, like, high up on the mountain, above the clouds, looking down and everything else, like, you guys fight it out. The conflict I think you're referring to is there's like a raging revolutionary war happening in the country for the soul of the country. Will it remain in the hands of a dictatorship? or will it be a liberated freer place? And it's so complicated. Dozens of groups are fighting it out. But the biggest, most formidable group consistently are the Waa and they're up in the mountains

next to China. Their country, I would call it, is almost as big as the Netherlands. So this is not, you know, some backwoods, you know, they've got one valley or something like that, I mean, it's a huge piece of real estate. And now the Wa people are an ethnic group that live in the specific region. Now, when the British occupied were the Wa people kind of just separate? Like, did they not really interact? They kind of just stayed on their, you know, mountain top and like didn't cohabitate or like,

how exactly did that work from British colonization? Yeah, they were totally isolated and wanted it, wanted to keep it that way. So when I was doing my research, just to set the stage like in writing, this book, I poured through everything from CIA documents. I talked to so many DEA agents, anti-narcotics, police in Thailand, Burma, people in the U.S. State Department. So this was like a five-year process of trying to get my bearings. Part of that was looking at historical documents. And you could see where British colonizers, let's call them, are trying to go up into the Waugh Mountains and add them to the colonial project. And, um,

At one point, like a wah village writes them a letter and says, don't come here, we eat squirrels raw. Bam. And usually that would like make people say, oh, maybe I won't visit. By the way, I don't think they actually eat squirrels raw. I think that they were just saying that to be like, don't come up here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if that's going to work against the British.

I mean, we've seen what their food looks like. That's true. You know what I mean? Their food is so bad. They were like, oh, that sounds kind of nice. There's some baked beans on that raw squirrels. It sounds kind of good. Toad in the hole, isn't that raw squirrel?

Yeah, exactly. I don't know. They kept coming. Some would-be colonizers lost their skulls in the process and ended up, you know, in the, in front of Wa villages, they would have these skull displays. And a small village might have two or three. And then a bigger one might have 12. And you could get up to the dozens. And the Wa lived in these fortresses.

It actually really cool. if you could imagine a giant, like giant wooden walls surrounding a village. And there's, to get into the Wa village, you have to go through like an obstacle course. So to actually get in, you might have to go through this like trench that's covered in thorny vines. Like they would plant these thorny vines, like natural barbed wire. There were trap doors where you could fall on spikes. they would take poison they would get from local amphibians and like, you know, moisturize the spike

so that if you did fall in, now you're impaled and poisoned. Whoa. This is what happens if you don't, if you see the skulls and you keep going. Yeah, which for most people, the skulls is enough. That would be enough for me. Yeah.

So they lived in these giant fortified villages and then once you get inside the village, everything is chill, I suppose. Right. But very, very fortified. And so, yeah, the British kept coming and kept coming. And finally, like, when Burma went independent, they got some, like, Wa chieftains to sit down and they were like, don't you want, like, hospitals? Don't you want schools?

Don't you want to be a part of this? And they said, no, we are a wild people and we want to remain this way. So let's get an image of these folks because I feel like it might be helpful to kind of visualize it. Could we just get just a picture just the Wa people? Because I think, for me at least, I'm picturing almost like an indigenous group of like warriors kind of like with spears or something. Well, back in the day, yeah, and they didn't wear many clothes either. So they would just have like a scrap of cloth over their genital area and women would not necessarily have tops on. There's very little water up in these mountains.

So there wasn't much bathing. So the British said all these awful things about them that they're like ogres and things. things like that. And it's like, all right, well, you can call them whatever you want, but can you dominate them? And the answer was no. Right. And so what the British did is they added the Wa area to Burma on their maps. But this was a lie. They hadn't actually conquered it. They couldn't exercise power over the Wa. And so they just added it. And that's why the Wa people are in Burma now. Right.

And they basically resisted British colonization. They fortified. And I'm sure the British, to some certain extent, we're like, hey, we're over-extended here in general. And there's not much up there. So we basically conquered them and let's just loop them in with these borders. Yeah, who would know? Yeah, right?

Well, here we are. Right, right, exactly. So the Wao do this throughout, you know, the 1900s. They're living ethnically is like their own people with their own customs and culture. they resist the British, and then once Burma is sort of established at its own independent state, they continue to do that and really never cohabitate with the other ethnic groups within broader Burma, aka Myanmar. Yeah, it's never really been fully conquered, and it's never really been a part of Burma.

We have to remember on the other side of those mountains that the Wa Occupy is China, and that will play like a really big role in the story as well. So the Wa wanted to remain separate from the Burmese lowlanders and the Chinese lowlanders as well. They just really wanted to be left alone. Right. So how do they progress in terms of infrastructure and then how do drugs come into play? Well, the funny thing about the Wao territory, it's just slopes and slopes and slopes. I mean, there's hardly a patch of flatland to farm on.

And the soil is not very, it's not good soil. It's like this gritty, sandy alkaline soil. So you plant rice there, you plant corn there, and it sprouts, but not very much. One thing that grows really great in that soil is the opium poppy. And at some point, a couple centuries ago, they figured this out, and they started growing opium, and it was just the most kick-ass opium in the world, probably. And they realized they had this thing that the lowlanders wanted. Interestingly, the Wa people, even back then, weren't dopeheads like they didn't get high on their own supply. So these different fortified villages would grow opium.

And then, you know, normally outsiders wouldn't be welcome. But they did start letting some traders come in, mostly from China, to buy their opium. And it was really primo stuff. And now they're getting tools. They're getting the occasional gun weapon. They can buy rice from the lowlanders. And that's how they start interacting with the work. And when does that start, like this opium trade, I guess, in the very early stages?

A long time ago, but let's roughly think about like 1800s and this is continuing to happen up through, say, like World War II. They're still super isolated at this point. The Cold War hasn't started yet. Right. Now, does opium have another purpose, obviously, outside of, you know, making heroin or drugs? Like, was there, you know, obviously we put like, you know, poppy seeds on bagels and stuff? Like, was there another use for this, you know, these opium poppies? Medicine.

So in general, I have to speak in generalities, but from like the anthropological writings and me talking to a lot of wa people, they'd say, yeah, if you get really sick or something, you would, you know, smoke opium. You can actually eat opium. So I think people don't really know what to imagine when they think of opium because you can't really buy it on the street anymore. Mm-hmm. Picture this like red, scarlet red or white flower.

And under the flower, there's like a pod. And it's really hard. It's about the size of an egg. And you can get a knife and like scrape the pod and wait. And this goopy brown stuff kind of oozes to the surface. Oh, wow. Yeah. These are pretty, actually.

Yeah. And you scrape. Yeah. There you go. On the left. Those pods right there. Yeah, those big pods right there. On the left, Crestos?

Yeah, that one. Yeah. Okay. Somebody has scraped it. See that goop? Yes. It's like tawny brown molasses scoop. Mm-hmm.

You scrape that stuff out and then you wait long enough, it actually turns milky white. Did you watch Game of Thrones? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're talking milk of the poppy. Oh, right, right, right. I think that's an allusion to that. Yeah, that makes sense. So it turns like latexy.

It's pretty on the nose illusion. A little bit. Yeah. Not really an illusion, it's just what it is. And then you can scrape that stuff into like a clay pot and put a lid on it. And it actually becomes more potent with time. So like wine in ages. It almost like for ments in a way.

I think it dries out. Interesting. So the water weight, whatever, I'm not an opium trafficker, but this is what I've been told. It becomes more distilled in some way. Yes, and it's highly transportable. So imagine the wae wake up one day and they're like, you know what? We really want to interface with the outside world will grow to make. Or whatever.

Well, that wouldn't work because the closest city is a zillion miles away. And just by the time you transported tomatoes or whatever, they'd be rotten. But if you're transporting this stuff, the longer it takes to get there, the more fire it is. Yeah, exactly. Wow. Yeah. And so they're realizing this from, you know, a couple hundred years ago and they're starting to trade at a small scale. Like, hey, we got this good stuff.

People are using it for medicine. Maybe some people are getting high. Maybe it's used for food in some capacity. And then how does it evolve from that into like an actual broad scale drug trade? Sure. Well, this is where the CIA comes in. Yeah, eyes light up. So.

And again, a year on this, like timelines are really helpful for me to kind of like understand what's happening. Right. We have like, you know, 1800s trading with the Chinese and they're developing their own thing. They start to get some money. They build some infrastructure. They get some weapons. And then, you know, the British come in. They resist them.

They're still trading. opium. And then after World War II, I imagine the CIA, you know, has more interest. Yes. Okay. So forgive the tangent, but we'll get back to where we are now. Probably the most momentous thing that's happened in semi-modern Asian history has been the Chinese civil war. So this is the war for what China would become today between the communist and let's just call them anti-communist, chairman Mao, all that stuff. So in the late 1940s, that war is being won by the communist, and they kicked the crap out of the anti-communist Chinese, and most of them flee to Taiwan. That's the root of the Taiwan-China beef now.

However, China is a big country. And on the far, on the far other end, there's kind of like, it's kind of like cowboy country. and it's dry, it's poor, and all the anti-communist Chinese there would be landowners, opium farmers. Communists do not like opium. The opium wars, all that stuff. No, no, no, bad.

So landowners, opium farmers, merchants, and all of their, you know, assorted hangers on. They're trying to fight the communists because they don't want to live in a communist country. And finally, they get pushed with all their horses and all their, weapons and everything, into Burma, around sort of where the Wa live. At first, they're kind of wasting away in the jungles of Burma.

They're far from home. They're pissed off because the communists have won and they don't know what to do. The CIA connects with them and says, hey, what if we send you some weapons, medicine, rice, by airdrops and caravans running up through Thailand and get you back up to fighting strength, and you guys go back into China and... Fight those damn communists. Fight the communist. Nice.

And how do you think that worked out? We're not great, if I'd imagine. It didn't work out. Okay. I mean, the CIA, this is after World War II. We're in, like, early 50s. And these guys with literally, like, they've got CIA weapons that have dropped in wooden crates with parachutes from them, dropped from airplanes, littered around the jungle.

of Burma. They collect them. They go back into China and they try to fight and they just, you know, they get mowed down shot to bits. They come back to Burma and the CIA is still egging them on. Like, you're, you know, the anti-communist Chinese force. This is great, right? And they say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we are. But they shift gears. They look around and they realize, wow, a lot of opium around here. And it grows really well here. And we can't dominate the wa for reasons that we've covered. They're pretty tough. But we can dominate sort of people around them and other ethnic groups that are growing opium. And they set up essentially a drug cartel, trafficking opium. So think about who has been pushed out by the communist. It's merchants. It's opium traders and people who know

how to do business. And so while maintaining the guise of an anti-communist force, they really become a major drug cartel. And the CIA doesn't say, oh, no, no, no, well, let's not be friends anymore, the relationship continues. So this is the CIA not working with the Waugh directly. It's with the former Chinese sort of defectors that have occupied nearby territory. Yeah. And now I'll bring us back to where we started this tangent. This, you know, exiled Chinese anti-communist drug cartel, they really start farming

poppies on an industrial scale. So they press gang all of these. indigenous groups into farming opium. They're trafficking it around the region. They're really covetous of what the wa have. And so, again, they can't dominate them, but they start buying their opium. The wa are not just going to give it to them. This CIA propped up drug trafficking organization has to give them something, and what they give them are high-end weapons. So now you would see formerly why headhunters would have assault rifles, you know, steel assault rifles stamped USA and a steady supply of ammo too because the next time they come up

to buy the opium from the Wa, they can buy bullets, they can buy all sorts of things. So this is the CIA giving weapons and ammunition to the people around the Wa that then those people are trading with the Waugh. Yeah, it's like a B-to-B relationship. The Wao supply primo opium to the cartel and the CIA props up the cartel so that it can, And, well, you know, what the CIA really wanted was they saw the world as like a big game of risk. And they wanted their people, anti-communist, occupying as many points on the globe as possible. And this cartel did a really good job of occupying this part of the globe, these wild and woolly mountains of Burma.

And so it was their job to make sure it didn't fall to communism. Additionally, drug traffickers, they're really good at creeping across borders. And so what the CIA would do with this cartel group, it would give them big backpacks with like antennas and send them out sort of close to the Chinese border to spy, to relay information. Remember, these guys are Chinese. They speak Chinese. They're good at spying on communist Chinese. and they start, you know, transmitting information back to the CIA.

So it was very useful for the CIA to have a window into this backdoor of China through this cartel. One more thing. At one point, the CIA figures out the wa are there. And I found this old CIA document that says, man, these wa, they're great warriors. You know, I think what they really want is to be ruled by white men. I kind of doubt it. I don't know anything about this whole British colonization story. Yeah.

They've resisted the white dudes for a while. They've resisted everybody. Yeah. So they've never seen white guys. So this was fanciful and it didn't work out that way. Eventually, the CIA was able to make some inroads with some, like, kind of local Wa warlords to do some missions for them. So do you think the CIA at this point see the Wa as, hey, maybe we can, get in good with them and just turn them onto our side so that they don't fall to the communist

Chinese. Precisely, if you are worried about communist China and this is a, at this point, the largest communist country on earth, racing towards getting a nuclear weapon and the CIA had very, very poor visibility into what was happening, wouldn't it be cool if there was this group of, like, headhunter guys with a warrior ethos right on the back door of China that could slip and spy on them, make mischief. Cause problems and just distract them, cause a multi-front war, whatever it may be. Absolutely.

So they see them as a useful ends to, or a useful means rather to, you know, just sort of aggressing the Chinese. Yeah, but ultimately the, you know, they found some like badass wah dudes to carry out some missions, but ultimately those warlords were doing it for gold and weapons. and it was purely for their own benefit. I mean, they weren't doing it for freedom and democracy. And so, yeah. So is the CIA at this point dropping U.S. operatives into Burma and around Waugh territory

to go and, you know, mingle with the locals? No, it was a very difficult place for, like, you know, a guy that looks like me to just wander into. I can imagine. What they did do is they relied on Taiwanese. people. So Taiwan at the time was, their intelligence service was sort of like a little brother or a junior operative to the CIA. And they would go in and they would set up listening stations along the border and they would, you know, listen to military radio transmissions, eking out from communist Chinese military bases. And really they ran it through, you know, these like Yahoo Taiwanese guys who would go in there and live. And, really, they ran it through, you know, these like Yahoo Taiwanese guys who would go in there and, liaise alongside the drug cartel who also liaised with with the wa. What's up guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I have a story to tell you. Fun fact, after you have a child, your testosterone naturally goes down. It's a way for you to

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It is a natural support for your testosterone. Look, you can buy all of these supplements separately, or you can just go to Mars Men and get it all in one case. Now, let's get back to the show. And now the drug cartel is distributing this opium throughout all of Southeast Asia. Yeah, and, you know, pretty soon they start distributing heroin. They start processing it into heroin. And, you know, before long we have the Vietnam War.

And they played a role in that as well. In what way? Is that the next step in our story or are we jumping? I think it's a key part of the story because it's going to lead to the war on drugs. I found CIA documents that they were looking at this car. and how they were building these new drug refineries in their territory. And the CIA was looking at it. What are these new drug refineries for?

And it said, oh, they're specifically to produce heroin for this new emerging market in South Vietnam. And that was Vietnam War was raging. And that market was U.S. troops. Wait, what? Well, they're putting heroin into U.S. troops. Well, it's not like the CIA sat down one day and said, we would love to put heroin into the arms of U.S. troops. What it did do is it had a longstanding relationship with this drug cartel, which it wanted to use to spy on China.

And then a drug cartel being a drug cartel in the truest sense of the word, like they're just trying to make money. They're trafficking drugs to whoever's buying. And it just so happened that, you know, by the 60s, the U.S. was. transplanted planting hundreds of thousands of young American men into the neighborhood. Right. To Vietnam, to fight the Vietnam War. Now, if you look at who can buy heroin at that time, a rice farming peasant doesn't have any money, can't sustain a drug habit, it's not happening. A US GI gets a stipend from the U.S. Army.

I think it was like 80 bucks a month. There's probably a, you know, Vietnam vet screaming right now. No, it was less than that. But it was a decent amount of money. And really pure heroin could be bought for like two bucks. So this was a really juicy market for any heroin trafficking group in the region, all of these, you know, American guys. Like I said, in the neighborhood. Wow.

And how much of a role does that play in the actual conflict? Like, are a lot of soldiers getting access to heroin? Are they a lot of them doing heroin? Do we know about that? A lot where I think there's sort of an argument about how many. I mean, at one point, I saw an old article that said one in six had used it at one point. I'm skeptical of a lot of drug figures because these things are really hard to measure. Right.

Anyone who wanted it could get it. Right. And it was such a big deal that USGIs that started going home from Vietnam were going back home to like Ohio, California, Florida, wherever. Hooked on heroin. Hooked on heroin with track marks. Whoa. So they're actually shooting it up. Oh, they were shooting it up in in Vietnam for sure.

Yeah. If you get really, really pure heroin, you can snort it. But still the best way to get high is to shoot it up. is intravenous. Yeah, absolutely. Interesting. So now moms and dads and sisters and brothers of the vets, I'm like, what the hell happened over there?

Is the CIA aware that this cartel that they were kind of propping up is now selling drugs to their own armed forces? I would argue that this document that I looked at is stone cold proof of that. Did they try to stop it or were they just like, whoops, didn't see that going? I think, I've been the history of the CIA is whoops, didn't say, that coming. Yeah. It's an organization that's extremely powerful and a lot of very bright people work for them, but is really bad at predicting the outcome of its interventions. Right. So this was, again, when somebody tells you like, bro, the CIA runs the drug trade, and that's really

dumb and hyperbole, it's usually something like this where, look, we thought this was a good idea to fight communism and look, we had a fighting force that paid for itself. We didn't have to spend a single U.S. taxpayer dollar. They were funding themselves. But then, you know, something funny happens and they start selling to U.S. troops. And, you know, this cartel was just releasing heroin on the market. It was going through several steps before it reached the arms of GIs. Wow.

So it's like the cartel was out dealing it or anything. But they were finding their local guys. and then their local guys would find another local guy and they would get into the hands of USGIs as well as many other people throughout the region. Absolutely, yeah. With USGIs being the primary buyers at that point because they had money.

Right. Wow. I wonder if that played a role in Vietnam. Like, I wonder as far as like a fighting force. Is that why we lost it? Like, I don't know. I recognize that there's been drugs. I mean, you've heard of the book Blitzed, obviously.

Yeah. You know, drugs been used in warfare for years. I mean, Nazi Germany in the specific example, you have, you know, I think they called it Pansir Chocolat, tank chocolate. And they would give these, like, tank operators, like these 17-year-old kids, they would just give them meth. And they would just do meth while they're driving their tanks, stayed up all night. I'm pretty sure, this is a random detour.

But, like, when the Nazis had invaded France through the Belgian forest, they had to do this insane trek through this piece of territory that they didn't think they could get through. And part of the reason some people speculate that they were able to go for such long hours. They drove these tanks quite literally nonstop for like 18 hours, is that they were just on meth. And so they were able to power through. So drugs have been used in warfare for a long time. But in this case, I wonder if it's the inverse where you have these guys that are there. They're deployed on this thing. They don't even understand why they're in Vietnam.

They've never heard of these people. They're depressed. They're seeing their friends get blown up and falling into these booby traps. They're drafted. Yeah. They don't want to be there. You know, maybe a little bit of heroin would be good. And then I wonder if that affects the fighting force.

If you have your force all in heroin, does it have the inverse effect? It doesn't help. Yeah. I mean, meth actually, I can understand the case for using meth and warfare. Fighter pilots take stimulants as well to stay up. I mean, this is just strategically, I think, wise. Heroin does not enhance your fighting ability whatsoever. Morphine, which is on the road to making heroin, can treat you if you've had your leg blown off.

Right. I don't think that's why they were using it. That's not why they were using it. They were traumatized. I mean, as the son of a draft dodger, you know, my father was trying to avoid that hell that his friends were telling him about. And it was just a, it was a nasty experience. And they were looking for an escape. So now what happens to this cartel and the Waugh after Vietnam?

Ah, okay. So eventually the cartel sort of fizzles out. You know, there's two, if we had to come up with two big eras. for the CIA, the Cold War was really a wacky time. Yeah. And that's where you hear about your M.K. Ultra and you're really like, throw it against the wall and see if it works type of stuff. I think we can firmly put it into that category.

We're in that era, not kind of like, you know, the post-Cold War era when things are a little bit different. Okay. So, you know, this is the time when you prop up a drug cartel and see what happens. See what happens. Yeah. happens. What really happens actually is there is a moral panic back here in the U.S. at what the hell happened in Vietnam. Why is my brother on drugs or why is he such a wasteoid?

And then Nixon is in power and he starts the war on drugs. So when everyone thinks about the war on drugs, I think they think about like probably Pablo is the first person they think of. Sure. But really the origins was this backlash to what happened in Vietnam. Because you have all these guys coming back. They're hooked on heroin. And that's really what starts the panic. Yes. And so Nixon, the U.S., president comes up with this idea, which is really quite novel. It's a globe-trotting super police that will go after the root of, you know, where drugs are produced and stop them from coming to the U.S. pretty wild idea actually it really was without precedent and so the DEA is formed and they start going after the root cause and they say um these guys are in bed with the CIA and so you start to see this clash between the DEA and the CIA where the DEA really wants to do something about this

cartel and the CIA continues to protect them. Now, when you say this cartel, you mean specifically in South Asia. Yes. And the story of DEA versus CIA, them getting into feuds is a worldwide story, but specifically I'm referring to this. Because you have the DEA saying, hey, we identified a group in, you know, near the mountains, near China and, you know, Myanmar that they're selling drugs to all these people. They got all of our soldiers in Vietnam hooked on drugs on the CIA. It's like, actually we're using them. So back off.

And the DA is like, no, the president told us to go get them. And now the CIA and the DEA are in this conflict. Yes. So the DEA is actually a precursor to the DEA, but federal drug agents, they go to Thailand and they sort of summon the leaders of this cartel. Remember, these are just now aging anti-communist Chinese guys. and they work out an agreement and they say, look, we're going to get everybody out of this

spick and span, no one needs to be embarrassed. Just give us all of your opium and we'll pay you for it. It's a million US dollars. And they say, okay, so they give all the opium up and in a grand spectacle, all the opium is piled high and doused in jet fuel and torched. Is there an image of this?

I never found an image of this, but there's plenty of descriptions of it because they invited the press to watch. Wow. And this is the DEA. This is, it's actually just before the DEA, they had another agency called the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, if I'm not mistaken. But this is a part of Nixon's wand drugs. Yeah, they're about to become the DEA. It's kind of a technicality. Let's just call them the DEA. And it's a big spectacle. And, okay, we all wash our hands.

No one needs to be embarrassed. And look, we got these guys to burn all. their drugs. And then the next season, when they are meant to go out and collect the next crop of opium poppies and opium to turn it to heroin, the mules go out to collect and this cartel continues business as usual. And these, you know, anti-narcotics feds are like, what the hell? And that's really the beginning of the DEA-CIA beef. And, and I mean, we can get into why the DEA and the CIA continue to beef, but it's sort of a baked-in struggle that I don't think can be resolved.

Now, even in this era, we have this war on drugs from Nixon, the CIA is still in some ways trying to utilize this, this cartel. Yeah. At some point, the cartel becomes kind of old and decrepit and lame. Mm-hmm. And so it kind of outlives its usefulness, and it takes sort of a graceful, ble. I mean, the story doesn't end with a bad. bang, it just ends with kind of like a, er.

And they become kind of lame, basically. The quality of their intelligence is not good. They start getting bullied around by other drug cartels who are not aligned with the CIA, and they just kind of fizzle. You can go and look at all these old CIA documents that are sort of lamenting, like, man, these guys are real has-beens. Yeah. Grandpa's not, wow, this guy, it was really the man, you know, in 1962 is pretty, pretty lame

in 1978, 1988. It's like Jordan on the Wizards. Like, oh, man, what happened? Worse than that. Yeah. So now it seems like everyone gets what they want, right? At this point, this cartel kind of fizzles. The CIA is like, well, we tried, but now these people are gone.

And the DA is like, hey, we got rid of this, you know, drug threat in, you know, Myanmar. Well, the problem is that the cartel, aforementioned cartel just gets bullied out by a new guy. And his name is Kunza. He's sort of the Pablo Escobar of Southeast Asia. He actually started out as sort of an acolyte of one of the cartel leaders. He is himself ethnic Chinese. And he comes along and says, you guys are a bunch of has-bens. I can do this better.

Screw it. I'm going to start my own country. And he starts trafficking drugs and starts pulling in a lot more people because he says, join me. I'll start my own country and will be freedom fighters and will fight for the oppressed peoples of the mountains of Myanmar. and that was a much better message than, you know. That's all the CIA.

Totally, totally. And so he just sort of comes in and turfs them out and dominates their area. And now we're in the well into the 1980s. And what was his name? Kunsa. Koon sah. Yeah. Okay.

Pretty hilarious guy. I mean, I've actually gotten quite close with some of his former people, his former top aide. I'm on good speaking terms with. his cousin. He was a big loudmouth. Basically, he saw himself as like a George Washington type figure and he would threaten the U.S. openly. He would always say, oh, I know the CIA's dirty laundry, I'm going to spill it. But he kept coming back to like, look, I'm a businessman. You paid these other cartel guys money if they handed over their opium. You could do the same

with me, although my rate's going to be a little higher. Wow. So he's trying to broker deals with whomever, even the CIA, just whoever wants to do business. DEA, CIA, he's like, look, you know this is a joke. Come on in and let's make a deal. I mean, at one point the State Department called him the worst enemy the world has. So he was a big, big figure. He was a big, big target. And at this point, as often happens, the CIA and the DEA are aligned. They saw him the same way. They both did not like him. And so they were now working together. All because of heroin? How do you mean? Like, all because he's trafficking heroin into these other countries. Like, is that the only reason? Or is it because he's now leading like a political task force and he's trying to form a government and, like,

why does the CIA care about a drug warlord and a disparate country? Ah, okay. So I think it's important to look at what the agenda of the DEA is and what the CIA is. We'll do the DEA first. It's really simple. Drugs are bad. Get rid of drugs. Get rid of drugs. That makes sense.

At this point, a lot of the heroin from this region is coming to the U.S. So that luscious, creamy heroin that the guys were doing in Vietnam, they know how great it is, the best in the world. And it's not easy to, I mean, it's very easy to market it to the U.S. you just have to figure out the supply lines. And now, do you know how that worked? So this guy comes around in the 80s, or not the 80s, but he's kind of peaking in the 80s and is able to get all his heroin and bring it from, you know, these mountains in Myanmar through, you know, Thailand, I'm sure.

And then they're getting on boats and coming to the U.S. Yeah, he has a sort of a trafficker brainchild under him. So his right-hand man is a guy named Wei. We will come back to him because I believe he is the most successful and the great. greatest drug trafficker in the history of the world, and he does not get his due. And here on Camp Gagnon, finally, finally get his due. So he's going to come up later because he is wa. He's half-wa.

And this guy is obviously, he's ethnically Chinese. He's a Han Chinese person that is not Wa. He's interesting. He's ethnically Chinese. He's also ethnically Shan. So in the mountains of Myanmar, there's a group called the Shan. They're kind of like the mountain cousins of Thai people. So what he said is Sean people and all oppressed ethnic people rally under me and I will save you.

And yes, we're going to sell drugs to the stupid Americans and make a bunch of money, but, you know, use it to enrich our lives. Was he successful in developing this country? He got pretty far. He got pretty far. So, but he's kind of like the swaggering face of the operation. His little brainchild is Wei, and this is a younger guy. He plucked from the headhunter country in Wa State. Wei had been someone who was in one of these U.S. intelligence listening stations along the border.

When he was a teenager, he would actually be the one listening to Chinese military transmissions, and he could read and write, and so he would type it out, and that filtered into the U.S. intelligence system. So he had been a part of the U.S. spying apparatus, just a tiny little cog in the machine. So he was a really smart guy. Kun Sa saw him, scouted him, saw that he was really bright, brought him into his operation. And this guy, Wei, you know, he's like five, six, definitely has OCD, like compulsively washes his hands all of the time. Um, uh, someone who knew him told me he would brush his teeth six times a day. Um, hated germs, which is a really interesting quality for a guy. Yeah, it was like a drug trafficker. Yeah. Um, singular did not was not into gold was not into women really. He just was singularly focused on trafficking drugs and he was really, really, really good at it. He's like the Zuckerberg, you know, of, of drug trafficking. Um, so he's the one that to answer your question. Um, he's the one that to answer your question. I know we're doing a lot of tangents here.

No, this is good. Figures out how to or really orchestrates the trafficking to the United States. And what he did is he just put it on cargo ships, cargo planes, mixed it in with everyday items being traffic. I'm not traffic, but being shipped, exported, that's the word I want. Out of Myanmar? Out of Thailand. Thailand, that part of Myanmar is locked up in the mountains. Thailand has ports.

It's a U.S. ally. You can put anything on a boat. It'll make it to port of L.A. This is how drugs are trafficked these days. So he's an early adopter of the mix it in with normal goods way of smuggling, you know, instead of having, you know, a pirate ship go across Pacific. Right, of course. And you have these cargo ships. I mean, if you've ever seen an image of one, there's like thousands of these giant units that are just full of stuff.

And they're all, all these ships are coming with all sorts of different, you know, mixed in goods from the region. And if you have one of these containers that, you know, you put some, you know, linens or books. And the other half of it is, you know, heroin. You might be able to sneak it in. And then if you're able to sneak it in, there's a lot of money. And if you lose 10, 15% of it, you don't really care. Right. So, Wei is really the brainchild of this.

And yes, he gets pretty far along. Okay. Why does the DEA hate him? He traffics a lot of drugs. Right. And it's going to the U.S. Why does the CIA not like him? Well, he's not one of theirs.

And he doesn't play ball. And as far as I could tell, he's not providing them with any intent. And the CIA in general frowns on wily drug traffickers starting their own countries. It likes to maintain things the way they are unless it's going to really benefit the United States. And this is in the late 80s? We're well into the 80s, mid 80s, late 80s, yeah. Now you just say the early 90s if you want to. Let's just say this, we're in the grunge era at this point.

Yeah, hell yeah. Nirvana's going crazy. The kids are pissed off. Yes. And I guess at this point, the CIA is no longer, you know, doing this sort of soft power battle against the communists that they were in, like, you know, post-World War II. That it seems like their goals have shifted a little bit. They're definitely shifting at this point. Yeah. This kind of wild and kooky lets send headhunters into China to make mischief. That ideas like that are not really happening so much anymore. So now up until this point, we, you know, have this cartel of Chinese people that the CIA have worked with and they're trafficking drugs into the U.S. But what exactly have the law people been doing? It seems like they've been trading against some weapons and some guns,

but they're still just fortified on their own little island just chilling, right? Well, in the late 80s, a lot of interesting things start happening. The Berlin Wall goes down, Eastern Europe. Communism starts to fall there. And general, we get a worldwide feeling that communism, like old school Mao style communism, Soviet-style communism is not the jam. The Wa, while they're up in their mountain refuge, while all this other stuff has been going on, they do get infiltrated by communists who are under the sway of China. And it doesn't last very long because at some point the Wa are like, this sucks. Wah people in general, all the Wa people I've known are very independent-minded.

and the idea of just getting them all to think the same way. I mean, look, I'm from Appalachian descent. I know how mountain people think. Like, you're not going to. Communism is not going to fly. Yeah, especially communism. Like, I feel like to get these people to, like, support a basketball team would be tough. You know what I mean?

And trying to convince them like, hey, give up private ownership. They're going to be like, what are you talking about? Yeah. So they have been infiltrated by communists, but it doesn't last very long. And they have an uprising, too. We all hear about the Berlin Wall. We hear about, you know, like Prague going anti-communists, right? But this actually happens with the Waugh as well. And they say, okay, you know, we've got dicked around by U.S. intelligence. We got screwed around with the communist. Enough. We're going to start our own state called Wa State. That happens in April of 1989. So they're starting their own state and they look around and they're trying to figure out how they're going to. to fund themselves and they say, well, gosh, we sure do have a lot of opium. Yeah.

And they've seen the success of these other cartels that are making crazy money that are giving them guns throughout the 70s and 80s. They're like, yeah, let's just do that. Yes. And so they say, okay, well, we'll start trafficking narcotics. We're going to produce our own heroin in house now. And we're going to become a sort of a narco state up. They wouldn't have called it that.

But again, the point is we're wa people. We want to defend ourselves. We want our own weapons. We want our own borders. We don't want anyone to mess with us. And the pathway to that is by producing and selling narcotics. And as they come online as, again, a cartel, not my favorite word, but for Americans, they understand it better. They're looking at the competition and they see Mr. Kunza down here.

As Kunza is being beaten up on by the CIA and the DEA, he's becoming weaker and weaker. In fact, at one point, I was told by a former CIA officer, they had plans to shoot Kunza to assassinate him. Then it was on the desk of President George H.W. Bush. Then Clinton came into power and Clinton said, so he almost got a bullet if President Clinton hadn't won. Whoa. I'm just trying to show you how much the CIA hated this guy. Yeah. And the DEA hated him too.

So they start grinding him down and grinding him down and grinding him down mostly by going after his traffickers and eventually Kunza is in a very weakened state and the Waa come down and finish him off. So now they're the big bad boys controlling the mountains of Burma. They take over all of his territory. Do they kill him? No, they didn't kill him. He escaped. He went to the Burmese military and said, save me. Wow, because he was afraid of the law.

Yeah, they would have. And the CIA and everyone else were trying to take him out. Yes, exactly. So the DEA said, we won, we beat him. Not exactly. He ran off and the Waugh took over his territory. And now we're pretty much into the status quo today, Wa State being the major drug trafficking organization, the major operator.

I mentioned this OCD super duper drug trafficker guy, way. He defects to the WA state, and he becomes their drug trafficker in chief, and then things really take off. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick, because you know what time it is. It's time to level up, and Bluchew just dropped something wild. Okay? Blue Choo's been rocking with us from the beginning, so, of course, we have to hold. Rock, pun intended, with them, all right? And what they've just done is changing the game.

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Mm-hmm. So you, most countries are sort of contiguous. But down south here, close to Thailand, that's Kunsa's old territory. I see. They wipe him out. You want, if you're a drug trafficking organization, you want that real estate. Mm-hmm. You want to produce drugs in that area because you're close to the Thai border. You're going to send it through Thailand. and that's your portal to the outside world.

You can send them anywhere around the world that you want. Up north here is the original OG where the Wa people are really from, up in the mountains. And you can see it's right next to China. And that's really the original homeland. Got it. Now, this seems like it seems like a challenging position to be in, right? Like if you're the Wa people and they're just like,

okay, what do we have that we can sell in order to form our own, you know, ethno state of, people that are independent. And again, I understand their position. Like, you know, the, you know, Portuguese make cork. And, you know, Ethiopians might sell coffee. And they're like, yeah, we sell poppies. That's what we do. We sell heroin. It's just one of the products that we export. And we're going to build our entire economy on this product. But trying to declare independence from, you know, the Burmese or the Myanmarians is going to be difficult. And then more importantly, trying to create a new country on the border with Daddy China is going to cause a ton of problems. So what they do is.

is they go down to the Burmese military and they say, we're not going to declare our own country. We're not going to run to the UN and say, please put our flag on your wall, none of that. We won't beat that drum. However, let's be very clear. You're not coming uninvited. Your laws don't apply here.

You tell us to jump. We don't do it. You can do that to the other indigenous groups that you bully and they'll say, how high. Not us. We're doing our own thing. Stay in your lane. And the Burmese military junta said, okay.

Wow. So China, they say that Maoist thing that you guys had going on wasn't working for us and it's not going to work for us. At this point, China is becoming more of a market economy like we know it today. They're experimenting with free market reforms. The Wa say, yeah, we'll get in on that. We would like to be peaceful brothers and partners with you. And so, you know, again, everyone thinks of the wah at this time as savage headhunting hillbillies who don't know anything. I would argue that they're pretty savvy, sophisticated.

It's not easy to start your own state. Yeah. And they did it. Yeah. And what is the calculation from the government in Myanmar? Are they thinking like, oh, these guys are too small to start a war with? Are they saying they're too fierce? Are they saying the territory is unimportant?

Too fierce. Really? Oh, they're not happy about this. Because like, say like Appalachia, right? Let's say there's a mountain town that's like, hey, we're actually independent. Yeah. The U.S. government would be like, no, you're not. Right.

They would come in and they would swoop in and take the land back. Yeah, the U.S. government, the U.S. military is much more competent than that of, than that of Myanmar. Myanmar, like I said, it's in constant state of chaos. They're fighting this group over here, this group over here. They've got people in the cities being like, give me democracy. They're like, no, we don't want to. So when the wa say, we're not going to cause you guys any trouble, but you're not going to cause us any trouble either. Right.

Then they say, okay. Do you want peace or war? Exactly. And they said, well, we had enough stuff going on so you guys can have it. Precisely. Wow. That's the case until today. Wow.

Yeah. Okay. So how do they go from this sort of like rogue ethnic group of people with some guns to actually developing an economy in hospitals and basically like, basically like, developing. Yeah. So starting in the early 90s, a sort of war for the soul of the wa breaks out. And it's really personified in two people. We have Wei, our drug trafficker in chief, Mr. OCD.

He is pushing for a narco economy. He's like, look, let's follow the protocol here. we produce drugs, we produce really good drugs, we traffic drugs, we make money, we buy weapons, no one messes with us, we want to be feared. The DEA will come after us, fine, that's what they do, we're going to be so well fortified that they're not going to achieve their goals. So that's his sort of dark vision for Wa State. On the other hand, we have someone who is the protagonist of my book and a huge figure in the history of Wastate, a founding father, who says, no, we're going to do this a different way. We're going to form a relationship with the United States, which is a noble Christian

nation that wants to uphold the meek, and we're going to invite Americans in, and they're going to build us roads and schools and highways and all this great stuff, and they're going to civilize us, and will slowly wind down the drug trafficking and replace the drug money with good old American aid. If this sounds like a weird thing for someone, a weird agenda to push, it's because this guy whose name was Saul, Saul Lewis's full name, as in the biblical Saul,

he was Christianized, his family was, by American missionaries long, long ago. And not many Wa have been Christian. But he was. So he was sort of an odd duck in that respect. He believed that he was sent by God to deliver his people from the darkness and to civilize them. And so he's trying to take his country in this direction and Wei is trying to take it

in the other direction. Sitting on top of them are the leaders of Wa State who have to decide which way to go. Now, the local politics of Waugh. state at this time. Was it sort of like, you know, a patriarchal tribal leadership or they had like a chief? Was it like a complicated political system? Was it like a bunch of, did they have a religion? Like, what can you tell me about the culture of this people? Yeah, again, you talk to the average average wa person, pretty fiercely independent. So, but however, they had been, you know, gelled into this polity where they're now in a state and everybody starts to develop a

real sense of law pride. The government is essentially a one-party state. So even though they didn't like hardcore communism, they did like the idea of like having a single party to run everything. Authoritarian, yeah, but I mean, you could talk crap about the leaders. It's not like they had an all-seeing eye into everybody's bedroom or anything. It wasn't like North Korea or anything. Just kind of a...

poorly run one party state. Poorly run compared to say, I don't know, Denmark, but a functioning government nonetheless. And how many people roughly this time? About a half a million WHA people. Wow. Yeah. So it's a big country. And I have to put air quotes around country because even if you were to ask the leadership

at the time, are you guys a country? They're like, no, next. Nothing to see here. They don't want to play the game of, you know, going on the world stage and saying, rah, rah, rah. You know, we're a country. They just, they realize that attracts more attention than they wanted. Right.

So they just, they say they're not a country, but they act exactly like a country. I mean, half a million people, I'm sure they have like some type of road infrastructure. They have markets. Do they have like an organized religion? Like obviously there's like a few people that are Christian. Yeah. Missionaries. But like, do they have like a folk religion?

They do have a folk religion. I would say that most why people sort of find. follows sort of like a spirit-based religion. But it's not super orthodox, and it really varies from mountain to mountain. Is it almost like a Native American style religion, like the mountains or God or something like that? I think that's probably a decent analog if you're looking for a way to imagine it. I mean, they have their own origin story about how there was a hole in the ground, and the first people to come out of the hole were Wa people. And then they sort of developed civilization and humanity.

And then all these other people started coming out of the hole. And it was like Chinese people and Burmese people and Europeans and Indians and everybody you can think of. And then they all went their own separate ways. But the Wa really are the first man, the first pure man and all these other people are lesser lowlanders. So now they're coming together basically. Okay, who's going to take our country? Who's going to lead it? which what type of economy is it going to have right and so the leadership looks over to

mr drug trafficker way and says well we know this is going to work and they look over to Saul saw law and they say okay you've got a point yes if we become a big bad dirty cartel like this kun sa guy we saw what happened to him it didn't end well so we will tolerate your idea for now. But you really better deliver. And Saul says, okay. And he goes down and he makes contact with the DEA at the U.S. embassy in the capital of Myanmar, which at the time was a city called Yangon, and starts talking to the DEA.

And at first, he's not telling them about his grand ambition. He's saying, hey, would you like? some documents from inside of Wa State. And of course, they're, like, thrilled, like, yeah. From one of the scariest drug cartels, yeah, we would like to. So he would give them, like, profit and loss sheets. He would say, oh, there's opium grown on this mountain, but not on this mountain. And so he was giving them, like, this golden material.

And the DEA was really, really excited about this. so much so that they had a code name for him. So they called him Superstar. When I met Sauloo, and he told me some of this stuff, and I met him as an old man later in life, and he told me this stuff. He told me that he was a former top three leader in Wa State, and that he had been a DEA asset,

and of course I had to check that out. And I said, all right, you got to give me a name. He's like, oh, just go ask the DEA. I'm like, I can talk to me. That's not how this works. You can ask the DA stuff. I'm not in a cartel. He said, all right, well, my handler was a guy named Bruce.

Last name. Something. So I, with that information, I found Bruce, but he had passed away. And so then I looked for Bruce's partner. And to make a very long story short of me just like scrounging around to find old DEA, guys that had worked with this dude. I found someone named Angelo Saladino.

He was a DEA, former DEA agent, and I described this guy to him, and he goes, ah, superstar. I said, huh? Superstar, that's what we called him. He's like, he's still alive? And I said, yeah, I've got his nose. I was just in his living room.

And so he was highly, highly valued by the DEA because of the information he was giving them. So how does that work? though because the DA is trying to control or fully stop this narco wa state but he's trying to establish goodwill with the US government by giving some information meanwhile way is over here being like hey let's just be a cartel and make crazy money and you know live fast die young type vibes so what exactly is is saul's angle here if he's just giving up all this information yeah this is why the the

the story of this aspect of the drug war happening in Southeast Asia is so mind-blowing because it just breaks all of the paradigms that you think about happening in Latin America. Saul, and I know this from personal experience because he spent a lot of time with him, he is like a figure from the Old Testament. Like he is so compelling and good at convincing people to do stuff. I mean, he came from a Southern Baptist background. That's who Christianized him. And, man, he could really preach it.

And so he also had a giant ego. Again, he thought he was sent by God to do this. So he's like, I'm going to convince the DEA, not to go after us, not to lock us up, but to be friends with us. I'm going to convince the DEA to join forces with a drug cartel. It's absolutely a crazy idea and even crazier still. And I know this because I talked to all the agents that handled him. They said, okay. And so the idea was, all right, the DEA through the UN would try to deliver these things to why people that they needed.

Good education, good roads, good hospitals. It was a really poor area. I mean, they'd really never had anything. and under this agreement, the wall would slowly wind down and slowly wind down as the money, aid money comes in. And the agents in the field had to take this idea to DEA headquarters. And I talked to the DEA head of global operations at the time, and I'm like, did you think that this was a crazy idea? They did at first, and then they kind of came around to the logic of it. imagine you can get a drug cartel to stop being a drug cartel,

simply by cooperating with them. I can see. You don't have to shoot anyone in the head. Yeah, the DA's position is like, we want these guys to stop trafficking drugs. Yeah. But if we cut them out, they'll become more poor, more desperate, and traffic more drugs. Yeah. If we help them and civilize them, then they will traffic less drugs, literacy goes up, less drugs,

you know, democracy, less drugs, and then they're just a fully formed state. on the border with China and... That's pro-American. That's pro-American. So you put a giant hole in the drug trade. People might not understand this now, but at the time, more than half of the heroin being sold in, like, Seattle, L.A., all over the U.S., was coming from Myanmar, coming from Burma. And, you know, we're full-throated drug war era, too. We're in the early 90s.

This is, like I said, grunge era, like, rock stars. are dropping dead from heroin. Heroin chic is the look. Heroin chic. Some of those models with the heroin sheik probably doing wah heroin. Wow.

Yeah. I mean, China White? China White. Is this from this time? Yes. Mr. Way's prime product was in fact China White. It should have been called

Wa White. Wow. The reason it's called China White is because in the pipeline that takes heroin from the mountains of Burma to the U.S., it goes through Chinese drug traffickers. So in Asia, the lingua franca of the drug trade is Chinese because, you know, look, the Wa couldn't do it themselves.

There's a Chinatown in every major city on earth, but there's not a Wa town. So you really, you pass it off to Chinese drug. drug traffickers who can get it all the way to the U.S. And actually, they had packaging so the next trafficker down the line would know it was really good stuff. Way was somebody who was very innovative in that he and others, but mainly him, would stamp logos on the heroin, like on the packaging. One of them was two red lions kind of like mounting the earth.

It was called W-U-O-O- Globe was the brand of him. heroin. So by the time it gets to L.A., San Francisco, no one's ever heard of a WAA person, but they might see Chinese letters on the packaging, and it would be initially distributed by Chinese, ethnic Chinese gangs or syndicates in the U.S., and so they're like, well, I guess it's from China. And did Wei have the context with the American recipients of this, or was that done through a disconnected network? Disconnected network, primarily No, I mean, that would be too far down the food chain for him. He would be focused on a production.

So he does the production. He's got a guy that's like, I can get this to America. I need my cut. He gives it to another guy. He takes his cut, gives it to another guy that knows a guy in Seattle, in Chinatown over there or whatever. He gets his cut and then it gets distributed to local dealers and they all get their cuts. Yes.

White, the white part of China white. There's different types of heroin. Maybe you've heard of like tar. Mm-hmm. That's the worst kind. It's like a rat turd. You have to put it on a spoon and heat it and turns into liquid and put it in your arm and it sucks. There's another type of heroin that is not fully pure that's kind of brown.

And it's kind of like a gritty brown texture, just not as good. You would have to shoot that up as well. China White is purified up into the 90th, like 95, 96, 97%. you could do a line of it. So that's really good for marketing in the U.S. because who wants to stick a needle in their arm? If you can snort it, all the better. And so China White is hitting the East Coast of the U.S.

in the early 90s in a really big way. And so now these people... West Coast, I mean. And these people are snorting the heroin. Or maybe it's getting cut, you know, and turn into black tar heroin that then people are shooting up down at lower levels, but it's all originating from the same China White that is all

originating in Wa State. Yeah. And as Mr. Superstars' DEA handler was explaining to me, it's like, yeah, it sounded like a crazy idea. Let's commingle with a drug cartel. He was like, but think about it. Wah heroin is so pure that by the time it gets to the U.S., you at least cut it into four pieces and make it another kilo.

If that makes sense. So you got the one kilo of pure white, chop that into four pieces, and you can make four new kilos of pretty good heroin that you can sell on the street. He's like, so if the stuff is that pure, we had to think outside the box to stop it from coming to the U.S. And, well, remember when the British tried to go in and conquer the Wa and tame them? That didn't work. Nobody has ever tamed these people. You can't make them do what you want, and so you had to work with them.

Now, the DEA is aware of it. They're not necessarily facilitating it, but they're helping the local people while aware that they're, you know, trafficking these drugs. Did they ever try to just intercept all of these, you know, these drug shipments? Or was it too far down the line at that point that they couldn't trace it? If you wanted to intercept, that would be through many different stages before it actually reached the U.S. No, at this point, the DEA is just gathering intelligence with Superstar providing in-exempting. inside information on how Wa State works and how they traffic drugs. I mean, he's giving them like the keys to the kingdom. And slowly, Superstar, Saul is, you know, feeding them this idea of, let's actually deeply cooperate. So at this point, that idea now has buy-in at the highest levels of the DEA and they're ready to move forward and actually hand over a big pot of money to the Wa for aid. And this is in 93.

Wow. Now, the Wa must be pretty stoked about this, because now they've kind of got both things. They have the drug money coming in from Wei, but then they also have aid coming in from Saul. Way would not be so stoked. Why? Well, this is the death of his business.

And he sees this. Oh, yeah. This is the war I'm talking about. Within the Waa leadership, do we go the route of Superstar? Do we really let this happen? that we really like kill the golden goose

because you know we know this drug stuff is very profitable so Wei is seeing his empire with a big crosshairs on it and so they hate each other oh absolutely hate each other yes

way being you know kind of a spectrumy you know he's not somebody that you could sit down and have a debate with I mean he's kind of a quiet cold guy

Saul Liu, on the other hand, being like this powerful force. I mean, I'm telling you if he was here right now, he could convince you to, like, cluck like a chicken. I mean, he's just, he's got, he's got the, he's got it. So do they try to take each other out? I don't see Saul trying to take out Way because, again, he's trying to bring them out and he thinks that he's going to eventually win because he has the back in the U.S.

But way must be like, I have to take matters in my own hands and get rid of Saul. Well, what actually happens is the CIA intervenes. Again. They love the, love the, that intervening thing. What happens? The CIA doesn't think the DEA has any right to pull off stunts like this. What are you going to, you're going to rewrite the map? You're going to have the U.S. ally with a narco state. This is, the DEA is getting way too big for its britches. Like, this is, this is not what the CIA can do that, by the way, but the DEA is not allowed to do

things like this. Furthermore, they're supposed to stop drugs and they're not doing it. Yes. The CIA was watching this play out and trying to talk the local DEA guys out of it the whole time. Along the way, according to the DEA agents I talk to, they're also like tapping their phones at their residences in Burma. You're not allowed to do that. The CIA can spy on foreigners. The CIA can't spy on U.S. citizens. It's not supposed to. I think later the argument was, no, but they weren't in the U.S. at the time, but that's not a loophole. You're not supposed to spy on us. But they're doing that to see what's going on with this whole superstar DEA crazy, let's ally with a drug cartel project. The CIA is against this for a couple reasons. One, DEA, too big for your britches, stay in your lane. You're getting crazy. Two, I think generally it was just decided from the local CIA station chief that the Wa were weren't to be trusted and they just thought it was kind of a stupid idea and they didn't think it would work. Fair enough.

Additionally, it would have screwed up one of the CIA's major agendas. So at this point, Burma is a military dictatorship that is trampling on this cry for democracy. There's big rallies and uprisings for democracy, and the CIA has put all of their weight behind the pro-democratic forces to sweep the military junta into the dustbin of history and establish Burma as a big, beautiful pro-U.S. democracy. So the DEA comes along and wants to pull up this kooky ally with a drug cartel thing. The reason that doesn't work for the CIA is because Burma has to, the Burmese military junta has to buy into this. So they have to sort of go along with this. And they do start going along with this because it actually can get the U.S. off their back. They can say, okay, sure, we're the big bad military junta, but we're going to help you win this huge victory in the war on drugs.

And then they look like the good guys. Right? So if they let the DEA do their thing, then when people start hearing that they'll see headlines, oh, Burma Backs' greatest U.S. drug war victory ever. And the CIA doesn't like that. And so they decide that they are going to step in and put it into it. And how long does this DEA operation go before the CIA steps in? That's a really good question.

Is it like five years, 10 years? Oh, no, no. It's within a year or so. Okay. It's a short span of time. Because it gradually builds. I mean, at first, I'm sure the CIA looked at it and like, this is so, this is not going to happen. And then the DEA headquarters gets buy in and they're like, oh, my God, they're really going to try this.

And then they're like, okay, we have to squash this. I mean, how much money has the law state made up until this point? I don't even think they know. Like, are they printing? Like, part of the reason why Escobar is so notorious because just the mass amounts of money that he acquired. Well, then, well, today, WOS state has 30,000 troops with sophisticated military equipment. At the time, they had fewer than that, but they did have in the tens of thousands of troops. And each of these troops needs to be fed.

They need ammo. They need uniforms. You need diesel to put in the trucks to get them to move around between the checkpoints. So they're bringing in a lot of money, but running a state when you really have an economy only, based on drugs, a lot of that drug money is getting soaked up into just running the state. So, yeah, of course, there's a couple guys on the high end living pretty decently, but... It's going right into defense, and the average person is not necessarily being uplifted out of poverty. Not at all. I mean, even mid-tier, high-tier, we're not talking about, like, pet hippos running around

the backyard, like Escobar. I mean, I've seen their homes. They're pretty, pretty big. Airbones. Got it. Okay. So now the CIA steps in and what do they do? They screwed over our boy, superstar in a major way. They, there was a one day where the DEA was supposed to fly in on a black helicopter with UN representatives and land on a Waugh mountain top.

And it was going to be the great unveiling of this relationship. and Superstar got all the Wa leadership, minus away, chose not to attend, to come to this mountain top and they put up like these big arches and they made it look very festive, gathered a lot of villages and Wa big shots and it's all going to be this grand day. This is biblical. This is deliverance, Ultima.

This is it. This is the big day. This is everything that he's, he's, worked for. And Superstar, it's like, okay, they're going to write. I don't forget what time it is. Let's say noon. They're going to show up at noon. I was like, okay.

And he waits, any waits, any waits, any waits, any waits, any waits, any waits. And he's waiting for that speck in the distance with that black helicopter to come. And it never comes. And what the CIA did is they went behind his back. and they blackmailed him to the Burmese military junta, who would have been piloting the helicopters? I mean, it's their country after all. And they convinced them that this was a bad idea

and that Superstar was a major threat to them and that he'd been talking shit behind their back, which he had. And they had pilfered documents where Superstar, you know, had been talking askance about Burma's military junta, and they pulled the plug on it. And the DEA couldn't do it by themselves. Again, the DEA cooperates with the local law enforcement.

So in Colombia, when you arrest a drug trafficker, it's the Colombians that arrest the guy and the DEA is just there supplying intelligence or backup or whatever, but they don't really slap the cuffs on people. They're not really supposed to do that. Same thing in Burma. And so the DEA has this tight relationship with law enforcement with the military junta there. And so they're doing everything with the military junta there. And so they're doing everything with the military junta.

So they can't execute this grand plan without their buy-in. So the CIA sabotaged it. And this really fascinating, you know, potential avenue that the war on drugs could have gone down, where, you know, you take down a cartel without firing a single bullet, just blew up. And from then on out, Wa State went. the drug trafficking route. Allying with the U.S. turned out to be a farce, and Superstars' prestige among his own people plummeted,

and it all fell apart. Wow. So now a superstar just lives amongst the people kind of as like a guy that couldn't do it? It gets worse than that. Now Way has the upper hand, and Wei and Team Way are able to really put the screws to him, and at points he has to go into hiding, and he's put into house arrest,

and he becomes almost like a pauper, living, you know, wearing rags, just a pariah among his people. Because he really embarrassed them. This is a proud people. And he got everybody on the mountain ready for the day of deliverance, and nothing happened, and it made them all look like jackasses. Wow.

Yeah. So now it's just a full-on narco state, no more trying to make. at work with America and Way is in charge. Yes. And, you know, at this point, as a former CIA station chief explained to me, way is a big target of the CIA. They have an anti-narcotics division within the CIA.

The CIA is just interested in whoever has power. So if somebody is very powerful as a drug lord, they want to know about it. I mean, the CIA wants to know what, you know, grain production in Kazakhstan is because that will tell you, like, help you understand which way the country is going. So they really care about the drug trade, too. And they have their own anti-narcotics division in part to compete with the DEA. But Wei is a big target. And among the DEA, they kind of go back to classic DEA. They treat the wall like a big drug cartel and the guys that were advocated.

for an allieship with the U.S. are put out to pasture, basically. So what happens next? Well, WAA state gets bigger and better than ever, and the DEA is trying to come up with ways to stop it now, and the CIA is cooperative, so they're on the same page. The WAA, with ways guidance, do something that I think is tactically brilliant. They do realize that continuing to traffic heroin to the United States. States is a bad idea, okay? It is going to cause more problems for them.

So they come out and say, we're mowing down all of the poppy fields. Whoa. That's a problem. What a change of heart. But they replace them with meth labs. Way is a visionary. He sees that the future of drugs is synthetic. And the wa are among the first in the world, I think even earlier than the Mexican

cartels to go all synthetic. Growing poppies and producing heroin is very labor intensive. And you have to have an army of peasant laborers to grow the opium poppy and, you know, get the goop out and process it into heroin. Furthermore, the CIA with its satellites and the DEA with its people, they can spy on you from above. So the CIA can look down with satellite imagery and try to figure out exactly how much opium you're growing that year and how much heroin you can produce. They got eyes all over you. Meth is not like that. Meth is produced inside, indoors, with chemicals, and they can't really pay attention to you or they can't really spy on you from above. Additionally, you don't need an army of people to produce it. You just need a handful of

chemists. As long as you get your hands on the chemicals, then you can make loads and loads and loads of meth. Additionally, they realize now we're getting into the late 90s, early 2000s, Southeast Asia, the economy is really picking up. This isn't the Vietnam War era anymore where people are just, you know, in rice patties. We're talking about a big economy and people are starting to move away from the farms, move to cities. Bangkok is a proper city right nearby.

100%. Oh, growing very, very fast. skyscrapers are going up. People don't want to like nod out on heroin. They want meth. Do you think Way is noticing that profits are drying up from heroin? I think that it was a multi-factor decision to move away from heroin to get the U.S. off its back and to off his back and to shift towards meth, which is primarily going to be sold to other Asians.

That's the key part of it. And so if you look down the line, why would the DEA, really the CIA, pour all of its effort into destroying you, especially when you're in ensconced in a heavily militarized mountain state? When your meth actually isn't going to California, it's going into taxi drivers, construction workers, people stitching sneakers for export to the U.S., fishermen. and they decide to orient towards Asia, don't need to ship heroin across the Pacific anymore. So it's a bunch of things that are all kind of converging. Like, look, we can get America off or back. We can do this more cheaply in smaller landmass.

It's more productive. It's going to the people in Southeast Asia. It seems like there's a bunch of reasons in a way sees all this and goes, all right, meth time. Meth time. Oh, man, it's still meth time. It's incredible how much meth is continues to be made. One of the other innovations at the time is, so they produce crystal meth, which is like, you know, you've seen Breaking Bad.

That's not blue, by the way. It's crystal. So that is for the discerning meth user. I don't know what the prices were when they started cranking this stuff out initially 20, 25 years ago. Now a gram of crystal meth would go for maybe 80 bucks or something. It's kind of a lot of money for people in Southeast Asia. So you're not going to move as much of that as you would like. So they come up with this new product.

It's a pink pill. It's about the size of a baby aspirin. And it's got 20% meth. And the rest is patted out with like caffeine powder. And it sells for a couple bucks. You can swallow it. You can put it on a strip. of tinfoil and put a lighter under it and freebase it, if you want to get more high.

I guess you could inject it, but you probably wouldn't. And this stuff just starts selling like crazy. It even, I don't know whose idea this was, they start putting vanilla scent in it. So it's a little like Barbie pink pill that smells like vanilla. And honestly, Mark, like, I still haven't figured out why they did this other than maybe it's just cool. I've been in rooms with narcotics officers where they've just seized like a big bundle of stuff and someone pulls out a knife and cuts it open and it's like, whew, geez, it smells like a candy store in here. Wow.

I mean, vanilla's expensive, too. I guess so. Wow. So I would think you wouldn't want to make your narcotics smell like anything. Right. The whole beauty of meth is that you can traffic it without anyone detecting. It doesn't smell like anything, right? This stuff smells like now and later, so I don't know what.

Anyway, they continue to make it. And that is really the modern story of Wastate. So much meth is produced on their territory that, I mean, it's insane. Billions of pills. I mean, I tried to run the numbers. I think more meth pills are produced than Big Macs are sold around the world. Wow. It's extremely popular.

And this has basically been just how the economy has been run since like the early 2000s until now. Until now, yeah. I mean, they're not the only ones making it. Others have started making it too. But they're really at the center of it. And they really occupy the prime real estate where all these meth labs are and just enormous volumes of this stuff. It's kind of weird. So my friends in Thailand, it's like I would have mentioned.

Imagine 90% of your peers in your social group if you asked, have you ever smoked weed? They'd be like, yeah. And maybe only a few times, I didn't like it, but they've tried it. And I would say like my Thai friends, my Burmese friends, they've like, yeah, I've tried it. So it's- They've tried meth. Wow. In these little vanilla pills.

Yeah. You would have tried it at some point. Because it's so ubiquitous. Yeah. Well, I mean, I know I grew up on like meth, not even once, all these scare ads. Right. And like it's a, this is like a crackheads drug and it's like, you know, yeah, I strung out on the street and like, oh, you did meth. That's crazy. I don't, I guess that's not the case in Thailand where it's so ubiquitous. It's, you know, kind of looks nice. You're getting it relatively cheap. And so people will be like, hey, you want to have a fun night. Let's stay up all night and party and let's do one of these little pills and you'll stay. You'll feel great. Not even that. We have to stitch sneakers in the factory and I can pull a double shift and I can make more money for my family. family. Wow.

If I'm on a little bit of speed. I'm not encouraging people to do meth. Yes, it can absolutely ruin your life. And there are plenty of stories in Southeast Asia of people ruining their lives on meth. I think it's probably the same percentage of people who you have people who can casually drink and people who will be fall down drunks. I mean, I know a lot of people who are good moms and dads who have tried meth before in this form. So it's extremely prominent and popular and cheap. Now, if you had to estimate as far as like the modern day, how like what percentage of like the global meth trade or like in this part of the world like how much of it is coming from wa state.

Okay. Which I know the drug estimates are nearly impossible, but just to try to put, you know, just to grasp it as much as best as we can. Yeah. I'm always skeptical of estimates of how big the drug economy is. The United Nations has an office called the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, and they try to come up with this number. The Asian meth economy, which Wa State really sits at the center of it, the estimate that this Asian meth economy is $30 to $60 billion. Now, just to show you how imprecise that is, you know, you could drive a truck through the difference between $30 and $60 billion.

Yeah. Let's go with their low estimate, $30 billion. That's still more than the GDP of a lot of small countries. And if it's $30 billion, I mean, that's incredible. It's a lot of money. I mean, what is the GDP of Myanmar? Can we look that up? Like, I'm curious if like the WOS state is making more money.

I think I know, but I'm afraid to be wrong. Somewhere between $50 and $70 billion. Oh, look, they had a little spike. You're right on the top in $74 billion. So, I mean, it seems like this tiny little mountain range in the middle of Myanmar is on the low end producing as much GDP as the entire country. If those estimates are correct, I mean, I don't know what the GDP of law state is. Probably no one does to an extent. I'm not sure that they know exactly what that is.

You know, GDP is hard to calculate and they're not just like running wild with economics. missed over there. There's no university. They must be making crazy money, though. Some people are making crazy money. And I've talked to some

DEA agents that have really gone after this way guy. And, you know, one of them told me that he's swimming in it. That he's like, you know, his treasury is like a treasury.

Like it's a giant safe with a bunch of cash in it. I imagine he's more sophisticated than that and that he probably has some, Probably owns a lot of things through shell companies and things like that. Have you ever met him?

No. In fact, there's only two photographs of him in the public sphere. Can we get one of these? Yeah. Pull him up. His name is Wei, W-E-I. The last name is H-S-E-H-K-A-N-G. Several different spellings, but that should pull him up.

How would you generally pronounce that? Wei Suk-Kang. Wei Sukang. Wei is a Chinese last name. So you'll meet probably a guy named Wei up the block here. Yeah, there's actually a great Chinese restaurant not far away called Ways. There you go. All right.

But there's a lot of ways in the world. I see. Tsukang is a Chinese name too. He goes by several different names. But Wei is the most prominent one. And he lives in Wa State. Yeah. That photo is pretty old.

He's a, must be in his late 70s now. I'm extremely photo shy. So if you take a picture of this guy, you're in trouble. He does not want his photo out there. He does not come out and make big speeches. He wants to exist behind the scenes. So he's not one of these sort of ostentatious, flamboyant drug lords that, you know, have tigers and priceless art and women. What did I say?

I think that he is the most. successful, impressive drug lord in human history. He's the Bezos in a way. Like he's not, I mean, Bezos now is a little bit more flashy, but, you know, Bezos built the entirety of Amazon just kind of as like a, you know, a quiet billionaire, just slowly accruing wealth and, you know. Yeah. Logistics. We learned from the example of Pablo and from Kunza, his former boss, you don't need to go out there and run your mouth actually existing in the shadows, it makes it harder for the DEA to make you a target.

And I should explain how the DEA approaches this. The DEA has what they call kingpins. And the theory goes that if you take out a kingpin, this is somebody who's so essential to the drug economy that you take them out and the whole thing, not the whole thing, or a big part of it kind of topples. I think the theory is wrong because, well, they've tried it over and over and it's not worked. But they would consider him a kingpin. Right. And what you have to do, first is you have to build up his persona in the public sphere. So if I tell you, you know, the DEA just arrested

Jimmy Bananas, you're going to be like, who the hell is that? But if I've spent 10 years telling you Jimmy Bananas is the biggest, baddest, scariest, scariest drug trafficker ever, he eats babies, blah, blah, blah. Then when I take down Jimmy bananas, Congress is hype about it, the press is all over it. You get some honors. You get a book tour. Life is good. Oh, man, you get a bigger budget.

Yeah. Let's give more money to the DEA. They took down Jimmy bananas. So you can't turn way into a figure of big interest and he gives you so little. I'm telling you, Mark, this guy was so hard to research. It was so hard to get people who knew him to openly talk to me. about him. If there's one person I could interview on earth, it would be him.

But I never will. He's not stupid. He wouldn't talk to me. So what do we know about him? Well, he doesn't like the finer things in life. He just wants to rack up money, I think. I think money is sort of like points in a game, and he wants to get the high score. So he racks up a lot of money, but he's also strategic in that he does shower it onto the people that keep him safe.

So he's not a tough guy per se. I mean, you know, like in my book I said he dresses like an accountant. I mean, he looks pretty, pretty modest in person for what I'm told. But he also has, he always has to be in the shadow or behind a big badass. And so the real leaders of Wa State who are public facing, who hold military parades, who trot out all of their military hardware and the ferocity of their troops, yeah, he's useful to them. He'll make sure that they're fed and they're happy. But is he the leader of Wa State? No, he's the, and I think he's in semi-retirement now, but he's the chief financial officer, I would say.

Wow. Has been his role mostly through its history. Wow. And so who's the actual leader of law state? That's a guy named Bao, B-A-O. B-A-O. B-A-O. B-A-O, in his youth, was a headhunter,

or at least he claims to have severed a head back in the day, as one does. So you, there he is. He's the leader. He's getting up in years, so he won't be around much longer, but I know a lot more about him. I've talked to a lot more people that have served under him and think pretty highly of him. You can call him a savage headhunting guy if you want.

He certainly emerged from that world. But he was able to help piece together a sovereign nation with many people trying to stop him. And he's still on top of it. The DEA calls him a drug lord. I think that's a misnomer. One thing, he's just kind of running the state day to day, and he's not overseeing logistics of sending heroin from points A to B. But he's really widely respected among the Wa. They really, they love him.

Wow. And now he works with Way because Way is like obviously this historical elder that got all the money into Wa State. But he's the figurehead and handles all of the day to day. So they work together? Yeah. It's funny, after the DEA really did a hard press on Way and they tried to nab him in the 2000s, law state came out and Bao came out and said,

oh, we don't know where he is, he disappeared. Anyway. Wonderwell. Yeah. So they would claim, oh, we have no idea where he is. Wow. I mean, nobody believes that. Do these people ever travel?

Like, do they go to Vegas? Do they go to, you know, party? Like, no. So, I mean, the, this is, Having the CIA up your ass means that it is hard to travel. The CIA and the State Department, who they really work in concert, and we can get into that if you want to, have made sure that there is something called the Kingpin Act, which was passed by Congress. This is an act that says if you have any sort of dealing whatsoever with anyone in Wa State,

not just big daddy here, but down to like a truck driver in uniform or a grunt soldier, you can go to prison. So if I were to open a coffee shop with a Wa soldier, and I am good friends with a former Wao soldier, a person who formerly served under him, I could go to prison for that. Wow. So the idea is you cannot pollute the global financial system, specifically the U.S. financial system with dirty wa drug money and any wa money in the eyes of the U.S. is dirty drug money.

Right, because their entire economy basically as far as export goes is built on this meth money. Yeah. So, no, he can't go to Vegas. Don't worry. The capital of Wa State has some pretty hardcore party zones. Have you ever been to Waugh State? I have been to a part of Wa State. I haven't gone as deep as. I would like. In fact, very few people have gone there. I'm talking about, like, journalist or public figures.

If you want to compare it to North Korea, it's, like, I don't know, 100 times harder to go to Wa State. North Korea has a tourist visa. Right. Wa State, no. What is the day-to-day life for the average Waugh citizen? It's not that great. There's a lot of illiteracy.

Most are farming. small plot of land. If you want to climb the ladder a little bit, you can join the United Wa State Army. It's basically like a militarized state. Every family has to cough up one son anyway. So everyone

has to serve. Every family has to spit out like one soldier. But I see a lot of women joining too because three square meals a day. And the funny thing is, I mean, they're so feared, they don't actually have to fight very much. Yeah, have they had any skirmishes in the last like 25 years?

Yeah, they have. I mean, they took over Kunza's territory and expanded their terrain. And then they get in little scraps here and there. It is an expansionist power. I think that they would like to expand their territory and they have tried. But very few other groups want to pick a fight with them. I mean, I think it wouldn't go well. Thailand is a U.S. ally with F-16s and tanks and all that stuff.

And they share a border with Wa state. And at times, some Thai leader will kind of thump his chest and we've got to go after the Wa. And then they ultimately decide, eh, maybe not. Wow. Yeah. And China's kind of cool with them right now? Like, why doesn't China just come in and be like, all right, bye? This is a big ball yarn.

So, Waw State is the world's most powerful narco state, the most powerful drug trafficking organization on planet Earth. And China supports them. So you can find photos online where senior diplomats appointed by Xi Jinping are sitting next to the leader of Waw State who's wanted by the DEA. So I'm not even in conspiracy land here. China supports Wa State with weapons, with health care. If you get on the 5G network in Wa State, it goes to the Chinese telecom system, which means Facebook, Twitter, all that's banned. Not that they give a shit about that stuff anyway.

Right. Um, Waa state is essentially a client state of China. And that seems so controversial, it seems like such a like a hot allegation, right? Um, it's pretty out in the open. And China, I think if you asked them directly, a Chinese diplomat, they'd say, oh, we don't believe that the wa produced drugs. From all of my reporting, and again, I talk to people, uh, who had very senior within the Wa hierarchy and a lot of anti-narcotics agents too.

The deal is this. China looks to Wa State and says, you can produce drugs, but none of them, not a single kilo, is going to flow back into China. That's the deal. And that deal is respected. So if you could imagine,

imagine the U.S. could go to the Sinolawa cartel and say, produce all the drugs you want, but those babies are going south. They're not going north. We'd have a lot fewer drugs in this country. Right. And is that the only terms of the deal? Like, does China benefit by proxy from meth going into Southeast Asia? Is there any? I don't think so, no. They, you know, we talked earlier about the CIA having its own proxy group that self-funded through drugs saves spending tax money on that. China has Wa State. Again, 30,000 troops. I should add that some more troops or about as many troops as like the country of Sweden has. So that's a big deal. They have them as a reliant attack dog inside of Myanmar who pretty much does what they want.

And there's self-financing. All this drugs have to go somewhere. And that's why they all dump into mainland Southeast Asia. And they do go as far as Australia. Oh, wow. Yeah. Like you could get one of these blue or pink vanilla pills in Australia. Australian's got a little bit more money.

They would spring for the crystal meth. Wow. Does any of it make it to the United States? The DEA has said that it does. I challenge you to find a wa pink pill. If you find one, Mark, let me know. I challenge you to find one. I'm sure it's come through the mail here and there.

If you're smoking meth in the U.S., it's probably coming up from Mexico. Right. The Waq can support themselves by selling to other Asians. So what Saul was trying to do with the United States, the Wa people basically did with China in a way. You know, they get some funding from China. They get some protection from China. They're able to kind of, you know, operate without, you know, Chinese interference.

And all they have to do is just not push drugs into China. Yeah, except for the Chinese interference part. So when, so China has something called the Ministry of State Security. It's kind of the FBI and CIA rolled into one organization. And they are very close with the Wa leadership. And when they tell them to do something, the Wa have to do it. Sometimes they'll grumble, but they will do it because when you're a friendless narco state, you know, you're going to do what the superpower next door tells you to do.

So, I mean, I'll give you an example. Someone I'm very close to who was high up in the WAA state government was chatting with someone on the senior WAA leadership just over like voice chat. And he was asking for something really simple. He was interested in setting up a charitable organization in WA state. And it was going to have a Christian backing. And, you know, I could hear the WA leader coming back. to him and being like, ah, we have to think about what China would say. They might not like that.

So maybe not. Wow. So the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, kind of lives in the Wa leadership's head, running interference before they ever make a move. Right. And they have much more leverage just because they're directly next door. They have so much leverage. I mean, they can really tell them what to do.

And the Wa, by and, large are not happy about this, but that's the situation that they're in. Wow. I mean, this is wild. Can we get some pictures of the Wast-Aid in general? I would just love to see, like, what someone's house looks like. Do they have cities? Yeah, they do. They do. The main city, the capital is called Pang-Sang, P-A-N-G-H. I think I spelled that right. It's pretty nice. They have gridded streets, electricity, there's a bowling alley. This is it? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, like, if you look at a certain angle, you could almost, you'd think you're in, like, a third-tier Chinese city. And from certain angles, you would think you're in Hong Kong. And so the people speak Mandarin? Yeah, they do these days. That's kind of the, oh, man, there are some really valiant to why people. trying to uphold their own culture and language and make sure that everybody can speak wa. And they do at home. But when you go to do anything, conduct business, the Chinese comes out.

And they can all speak really good Chinese. Now, is this the Chinese government forcing them to do that? Or is it just by, you know, the means of how they trade and just life that they kind of adopted Mandarin and started becoming more Chinese-ish? It's an organic thing. But the Chinese government, like if you go to Wa middle school, go to Wa elementary school, you're learning in the Wa language. You get to Wa middle school, you're learning in Chinese. And China would support that. You know, the U.S. has its own client states as well. And I'm sure the leaders of those countries have to think before they do anything, is this going to piss off the White House? We know that's true. Right. So it's kind of like that. But. Yeah, they really do want to hold on to their own culture. I mean, that's the whole point of Wastate. I mean, that justifies the narcotics to a degree.

They don't want anyone's boot on their neck. What's up, people? We're going to take a break really quick because I have amazing news. I'm coming on the road. That's right, my very first headlining tour where I'm going to every city that will possibly allow me to go there. Hoboken, New Jersey. I'm going to Salt Lake City.

I'm going to Washington, D.C., and Charlotte, North Carolina in February. Those tickets will be announced soon. And of course, I'm doing my monthly show at Mary Lou in New York City on December 16th. The best comics in the city will be coming out and I'll be working out some new material. It is a grand old time. You can get all the tickets at Mark Yagnon live and I'll see you guys there. Let's get back to the show. What's up, people?

We're going to take a break because we got new merch. That's right. It is the holiday season and the good folks over at Camp R&D have been cooking up in the lab. We got the Christmas sweaters with the aliens. We got the Christmas sweaters with the conspiracy vibes. You already know. I mean, this one might be my favorite. favorite one, a Christmas tree full of aliens, full Christmas sweater energy. And then, of course,

if you just want something simple, you know, you bust out the camp logo tea with the little Christmas lights on it. Come on, bro. Get cute for Christmas. Okay, it is a holiday season. All right, we're celebrating the birth of the savior, okay? And what better way to do it than a cop a couple threads for the person in your life that you know that loves a campsite that loves hanging with us every single week? And right now, we're running a promo through the holidays. That's right. use the promo code Christmas camp for 15% off

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Check it out Thank you guys so much for support in the show. I love you all. God bless and Merry Christmas. And so how do they get all the materials to build and how do they get all the chemicals to make meth? Like where does all that come from? China, China, China, China. The weapons, China. Like, they have some pretty badass weapons. There's a shoulder-fired missile that they have that can take down a fighter jet. They did not make that in house. Of course. That is something the People's Liberation Army of China uses and they got their hands on it. I wonder how. Wow. And now, Myanmar lets this happen? What are they going to do? Yeah.

Send a fighter jet in and see what happens. Right. And then as soon as they went after the Waan and said, you're in our country, you should act like it, China's going to come to Myanmar's army and say, back off our little bro. Right. Now, does the Wa State do anything else for China other than not put drugs in there? I mean, they obviously work as like a proxy, but like what else does China get out of this? expansion? They get a lot. Myanmar is torn to pieces and the military government doesn't control the entire

country. It's once especially when you get into the mountains it shatters into different indigenous armed groups and there's a lot of trade that goes through there. Myanmar also has a lot of resources. Copper gems, rare earths. That's a new booming one and there's rare earths in Wa State. So I don't know how many people understand how important these are. I mean, this is key, key, key to U.S.-China relations. So if you want to make an electric vehicle, if you want to make even the new U.S. fighter jet, you need these metals called

rare earths. China mostly gets them from rogue areas of Myanmar. And increasingly they're getting them from WOS state. So I think it's highly plausible that metal scrape from the ground in Waa state would end up like in the nose cone of a new U.S. fighter jet, although they would say it's from China. And I don't know how well the U.S. government is tracking this. But, you know, you've got a rogue narco state. The U.S. wants to lock up its leaders. And on the other hand, you're probably relying on them for the metals you need to supply some of our more advanced. advanced weapons, so it's pretty tangled. Wow.

Is the closest prox of this, like North Korea? Like, is there anything else like this on Earth? No. Especially having a narco state that is this independent. No, I don't think there's any good animal. I'm racking my brain and I can't come up with anything. Wow. Yeah.

So where did you go in Wast it? Ah. So I tried many times to get an invite to the capital. At one point, I did get invited by Wa State to come visit their capital when they were holding a celebration. Every five years, they trot out their military equipment. And although I don't like the North Korea comparison, it is kind of a North Korea style. You know, let's show all of our badass weapons. and scare the crap out of everybody type of parade.

So they gave me permission to go, but the only way I could get access to Wa State was through Myanmar, and the Myanmar government told me directly, no, we're not going to let you go. Wow. So I tried many other ways to go. COVID happened.

That wasn't helpful. They adopted the China-style COVID policy of a total lockdown. So that wasn't helpful. happened right during the middle of my reporting on this book, Narcotopia. Finally, finally, finally, I found some guides. I'm trying to think how many details I want to give here. All right, let me keep it simple.

I found some people native to the mountains that separate Thailand and Wa State, and they were willing to bring me across to a part of Wausau. state that is currently being conquered. So the Wa, like I said, they're an expansionist power, and they're always kind of pushing their border a little bit, if they can. They had pushed out some members of another indigenous group and basically had it to the point where this group was surrounded by Wao fortifications up in the hills, and they could come down the mountain and tell them what to do.

they weren't downright like in their village every day, but they were in the process of dominating them. So it was a part of Wa State, and I was able to get smuggled in and talk to the people there about how badly they were faring. The reason I was able to do that is because if I were to go to a place where Wa soldiers were just walking around, they would have seen me, and I would have been in really bad trouble.

Yeah. Really bad trouble. What would they have done? Minimum I'm getting detained. And you got invited to the Capitol. Like, why? That would have been fine. That would have been fine because I was invited by the government proper.

But you're sneaking in, basically. Yeah. I mean, I've gone in without permission. They take that really seriously. So no one immigrates. No one goes there. There's kind of a racial system. Someone who is a Chinese speaker or who is Southeast Asian probably can get in with an invite

and they would wave you through if you had a number of someone like in the capital, like a businessman saying, oh yeah, he's coming in to help me with my business, let him in. And there are people that would bring you in. And you could probably get away with that. There's pretty much a total block on Caucasians coming in. Because CIA, DEA. I see. When I have communicated with the Wa government and met officials in their offices outside of Wa state,

because they have like an embassy in Burma, I think I'm suspected of being intelligence. I don't think they know for sure, but it's smart of them to just assume. They're weary. Yeah, I mean, they should be. They should be. It got around to the Wa government that I was buddy buddy with Superstar, the famed DEA asset. That didn't help. I don't think that helped.

I see. So, yeah. So where does Superstar live now? Superstar died while I was writing this book from COVID. Oh, wow. COVID got him. And where was he living in at that point? He was living in a city in Myanmar about 50 miles outside of Wa State.

Ultimately, he was such a pariah to the pro-drug trafficking wing of Wa-State that he needed to leave. He was tortured severely. And died in exile. Yeah. And so he's still a hero to many Wao who, not only Christians, but non-Christian Wao, who think that Wa people get pushed around by China and should quit trafficking drugs

and become more of a normal state. Wow. Yeah, so I met him there, spent a lot of time in his home. And, you know, he was in his mid-70s when we became close. And, yeah, walk into his, like, dusty old house and he had a gigantic picture of white Jesus on the wall who,

sorry to say, quite a resemblance to Mark Gagnon. Hell yeah. And I think his openness to me came from the fact that he had this idealized vision of America. I mean, he never dropped it. He still thought, despite all the CIA shenanigans, that America was this great country that, would uplift the meek. I mean, he bought into the whole package that we sell.

Mm-hmm. And he died a Christian. Oh, the Christian. Staunch Christian. Oh, my goodness. Because Myanmar is not a predominantly Christian nation. No, they have Christians there, but no, it's not predominantly Christian. And why people especially, there's not many Christians.

Mm-hmm. But he kind of talked in a raspy voice like this. And he didn't really laugh much. And when he, like, locked eyes, it's like dark, dark eyes. Been through some shit. Well, I saw the scars on his body from the torture. So, yeah, he had been through some shit. But he was just, like, as one DEA, one of his DEA handlers told me, like, just tough as nails.

Can people leave Wastate? Yeah, they can go to China and they can work. They can find jobs in China. They can go across that border. Wa people, I mean, they have their own ID cards. They have their own license plates. They have their own everything. Right.

But the Wa people can also get a Myanmar passport. They can go wherever they want. And the children of the Wa leadership, you know, they go to boarding school in Singapore and probably don't tell people their Wa. Wow. Do they have Western media? Do they understand what's happening in the world? These days, their window to the world is, do you know what Doyen is?

Oh, yeah, yeah, it's like Chinese TikTok. Chinese TikTok. So, like, if you Google this like BBC's like, Wa, the most secretive people in place in the world, well, actually, you can go in Doyen all day and see, like, you know, Wa soldiers in uniform, like doing the TikTok dances. and goofing off and kind of acting like normal kids. Are the why people happy? That's a way too general of a question.

They deserve more. That's what I'll say. They deserve more. I would like to see more of those drug profits go into a welfare state. I think I would like that for most countries, for more profits not to get locked. into the pockets of the highest earners and to build more hospitals and schools

and stuff like that. Are people dying of disease and poverty every day? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't want to be sick there. If you get cancer, you're done. Unless you have some money, you can get your ass to China and go to the hospital there. And then Chinese would let you in. You could do that.

But yeah, there's no real middle class. Like you're either a dirt poor farmer, or you join the military either by force. Interestingly, they have a lot of child soldiers. So one of my good buddies, his job at one point was teaching like nine-year-olds who had been brought into the Waugh Army training them and then just teaching them to read and things like that. And there's all these videos where you can see them on parade

and it's like really young kids holding guns, they don't really have a taboo about that. They don't think it's wrong. Right. What is the future of Wa state? What happens to these people? I think the future of Waa state as a state is pretty bright. And what I mean is the state is not going anywhere.

You asked me the future of Myanmar or Burma as a state. I have no idea. No one knows. It could have different leadership next year or in five years. It's in a raging war. Wa State is stable. It's propped up by China. China's, you know, its fortunes are rising.

If anything, I think it will get bigger. I don't know what I hope. I mean, obviously, I want people to read my book and find this all very interesting. I don't have a particular agenda. and I consider myself really grateful that so many WAA people like opened up their lives to me and told me their stories. And I'm not a ambassador or spokesman for them.

I'm really, I really just focused on my government's relationship with these people and how weird and zany it's been. Do you speak Mandarin? No, I just speak Thai. So how are you able to communicate with like a WAA person that doesn't speak English? Some speak English.

And other than that, through translation. Wow. Someone out there should pick up where I've left off and do a book that really gets into what it's like to be wah today in 2025. That person will not look like me and they will need to speak minimum. They'll need to speak Mandarin.

What do the odds like I could run into a Wa person in America? Virtually zero. Like, is there one, you think? Yeah, I'm sure it's some rich kid who is the son of one of the leaders and he wouldn't tell you he was Wa. He would say, oh, I'm from Myanmar. Really? Has anyone reached out to him been like, dude, read your book, I'm Waugh and I live in Charlottesville. Everything except the I live in Charlottesville part. The book has been translated into multiple languages. So we've got, it really popped in Italy. I think they just like mafia organized crime stuff. Yeah. So the book sold really well in Italy.

There's Spanish. Japanese is coming out soon. Russian is coming out soon. Mandarin? Yes. Well, a Taiwanese publisher picked it up. And they translated it into, you know, like written Chinese in mainland China and in Taiwan is different.

So in Taiwan, they use the old school, older form of writing. It's mutually intelligible, but they use a simplified form of Chinese in mainland China. That said, some copies have made their way to Wa people, and I've gotten a few emails in English, so they must be somewhat cosmopolitan or using Google Translate saying I really liked your book. I mean, that meant more to me than, like, you know, Rolling Stone saying it was a good book, or Amazon said it was one of the best books of 2024. Pretty cool. But that email from like a wah dude totally made my day.

I mean, that is crazy. Is it possible that this could happen? That basically the Wa people work out of relationship with China and they say, hey, we're going to declare independence. We will ultimately be a Manchurian kind of puppet state for you guys, but you guys are going to protect us. We're going to declare independence from Myanmar. And we'll do more or less what you guys want, but we're going to be our own self-governing state similar to North Korea.

What China would say is, no, you're not going to do that. And the reason is China plays a complex game in Myanmar where it tries to prop up all sides. So it sells weapons to the military junta. It gives weapons to people fighting the military junta. They need chaos and disorder. Well, if you want, I think they would like some form of stability, but they don't know who's going to win. So when the dust settles, whoever wins, they want to make sure that they have a relationship with them, especially armed groups along trade routes are near resources in Myanmar. They will prop them up.

And, you know, the military junta in Myanmar will be like, what are you doing? And China will say, this is the game that they're playing. So if the Waa said, hey, we are going where they are, an independent sovereign country, as I see it. But if they were to trumpet that to the world and declare it and send their leader to the UN General Assembly, China would say you don't need to do all that. They'd probably also have to clean up the Meth Act. Well, if you look at the party line of the Wa leaders, they say that they don't produce any meth at all. Yeah. Actually, the system that they have now is quite sophisticated.

Once upon a time they were producing their own meth pills in-house. Now what they'll do is use what I call a landlord model, or as a person from Wa State explained to me, they want to be rent masters. What that means is they've got primo real estate on the drug trafficking corridors of Southeast Asia. So you bring in Chinese organized crime syndicates, and you say,

this would be a nice place to build a meth lab. It's right next to this stream because you actually need a lot of water to make meth. You guys make a meth lab and we're going to take a cut of your proceeds 10, 15, 20%. We will also introduce you to this criminal gang who is allowed to come through our territory.

They'll pick up your meth and they'll deliver it to somebody else down the pipeline. We will be taking a cut of their payment as well and let's just sit back, passive income. I see. That's how they do it. And they're becoming, I mean, more legitimate in that way that their hands are kind of clean.

I mean, they're facilitating it, but they're not making it like they used to. Yeah, it's just, I don't think it's for image. I think it's just for, it's financial sophistication. Would you like to get your hands dirty in a meth lab or would you like to take a cut of the guy getting his hands dirty?

Right. And then if the meth gets lost or sees somewhere, it's like, that's on you. You already paid us like. Totally. Totally not their problem. One thing they will do. So the chemicals that make meth come from generally the same place as the chemicals that make fentanyl. And I just want to emphasize fentanyl, you cannot buy fentanyl in Asia, Southeast Asia, maybe in a hospital. You don't see people nodding out on Fent in Bangkok. Not happening. It's all meth, meth, meth. China has a giant pharmaceutical chemical complex that produces all sorts of chemicals that make a lot of the medicines that we take. Certain chemicals are siphoned off and they go to Mexico to make fentanyl. Other chemicals, not the same chemicals, but other chemicals from that general industry are siphoned off to go to WAA state to make methamphetamine. And so the WAA may facilitate or put you in touch with somebody who has access to those chemicals and that can bring them into their, into their area.

So they're, you know, they will help you liaise and kind of do like a turnkey meth lab business. And then they just collect a cut. How did they not get their own citizens hooked on heroin or meth? Well, if you do meth in Watt state, they will put you in jail. Wow. So it is illegal. That is hilarious. Yeah.

Now, I don't think they have this anymore, but not that long ago. Instead of building a prison, they would just dig a hole and they would put you in the meth hole or the heroin hole. And the hole in the ground has to be so deep that, like you could put three guys in the hole, but not four because if you do four, you could like stand on each. other shoulders and like maybe reach the top of the hole, you would just see sort of like a portal in the ground and you look down, it's this like gourd shaped pit where guys are in there, no daylight, tie some food to a rope, drop it down to them once a day. And that's what would happen to you if you use drugs. That is crazy. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And you don't think they do that now? I don't know, actually.

Probably they still do in really remote parts, but in the Wa towns and cities, no, from my understanding, they have a proper prison, which is still no pony ride. Wow. I mean, this is crazy. I mean, I feel like my brain is spinning. This is like so much. From a place that I've never heard of to now understanding like a sophisticated government and political structure and military regime that operates at the behest of China in order to traffic meth around the world. It's a lot. Well, people who are firmly entrenched in the narrative that they see in like Narcos, the show Narcos, which I really like.

That narrative is really well-trod and well-known. And so when you bring this to people who are used to the Latin American style of drug war and how it works, yeah, you just have to start from square one. It works totally differently. But the power and the scale of the narcotics, I think, is superior to that in Latin America. I mean, crazy. And you wrote about all of this and more, I imagine, in Narcotopia. Yeah, Narcotopia is, man, Mark, I had a pile of notes like high as my head, and I just had to leave so much on the cutting room floor. because what I wanted to do is tell a narrative story

and see this country through the eyes of one of its top leaders who is also a DEA asset, superstar. And he's sort of, he's our man that we follow to tell the story of Wastate. So it reads like a narrative. The other option would just be hitting you over the head with crazy facts, but by the time you get halfway through the book, you're like, I'm sorry, I'm lost.

Yeah. You need to follow a man story. That's what I did. Absolutely. Well, people can go check out the book. It's available in all the bookstores, I imagine, Kindle, everything like that, Italian, evidently. If you want to read it in Italian, yeah, let me know if the translation's good because I have no idea what it says. Wow.

Well, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it. Is there anything that we didn't cover on Wastate that I should look into? No, I think that's a great primer to the wonderful world of Wastate. Thank you so much, brother. Thanks, Mark.