Stuff You Should Know - How Narco States Work

Episode Date: December 15, 2009

In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck discuss Narco States, places where illegal drugs are traded openly with government support -- or without government interference. Learn more a...bout your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Starting point is 00:00:24 launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark with me as always is Charles W. Zonkers Bryant. Zonkers? Yeah. I'm always, I just sit here wondering what you're going to call me. How's it going? Good sir.
Starting point is 00:01:25 You? Pretty good. You look good. You're as good as you were 10 minutes ago when you recorded that other podcast. Charles, have you ever been to Mexico? I have been to Mexico. Have you been to TJ? I've been to TJ.
Starting point is 00:01:36 Have you been to Juarez? No. Just TJ in like the Baja area. Okay. Well, had you gone a little further east along the border to Juarez, you would have been in a narco state. Yes. And you know what, I'm ashamed to say, Josh, that I did not know what a narco state was.
Starting point is 00:01:54 Really? I've heard of it, but I didn't really know what it was. I can't remember if I pitched this one or if Chanel did, but it's a good one. Well done, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you. How's that? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:02:07 Well, Chuck and I are talking about narco states as you probably were tipped off by the title of this podcast. Sure. And for those of you who don't know what a narco state it is. Josh, I'm just going to give my own definition. Okay. So this is a country where they sort of allow drug trafficking and in some cases even participate in the drug trafficking.
Starting point is 00:02:28 Yeah. And it's very, very rarely an entire country. Okay. Most of the time it's like a region of a country, a very small area city, although there are cases where there have been narco states like fully functioning countries that are run by drugs, like their gross domestic product is almost fully funded by drugs, the government's in on it, the military's in on it. And right now, as far as I could tell, there's only one functioning narco state in the world.
Starting point is 00:03:00 Afghanistan? No. It's close though. Guinea-Bissau. Oh, yeah. Sure. In Africa. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:03:08 West Africa. I can't wait to tell that story. It's a good one. Yeah. It's basically any area where the government is either directly involved or turning a blind eye to drug trafficking. Yes. In Central Mexico, Central America, South America, always known as being rife with this
Starting point is 00:03:25 kind of thing because chances are, if you're doing drugs in the U.S., chances are it did not come from inside the United States. No. Unless it was meth, sure. Or pot. Yeah. And even then chances are it probably didn't, although there's a lot of domestic meth labs and pot farms and stuff like that.
Starting point is 00:03:43 Yeah. But yeah, the chances are it came through Mexico. Sure. If not from Mexico. Right. Mexico didn't used to be nearly as violent. You know, Juarez, which we were talking about, had, I think, 300 murders in 2007. And then all of a sudden there was a drug war started that's still going on now.
Starting point is 00:04:02 Right. And in 2008, they had 1,500 murders. Yeah. That's a heck of a stat. Yeah. They had, like, less than 300 murders in 2007. So Detroit's safer than someplace? It's safer than Juarez, believe it or not.
Starting point is 00:04:15 Well, thank God for that. Yeah. I didn't get the stats on Tempe, though, so I can't say. Right. Yeah. So one of the reasons why, and we'll see that American intervention one way or another usually has an impact on the formation of a narco state, one of the reasons why Juarez and some of the other border towns along Mexico have turned into narco states is because
Starting point is 00:04:38 the Coast Guard and the DEA effectively shut down the Caribbean in the 90s. Right. That was the main route from South America to the U.S. for Coke. Yeah. And Americans love Coke. A lot of the world does. And one thing that I learned from reading this article and just by living as a human in the world is that drugs will find a way to get into the country.
Starting point is 00:05:03 They definitely will. Like, for example, when the Caribbean was shut down, they started moving it through Central America and up through Mexico. Came another route. One way or another. And the reason why is, well, like I said, Americans love cocaine. We consume 40% of the global supply of it every year. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:05:18 Europe does a lot of cocaine, too. Europe loves the junk, too. Oh, no. Europe is the heroin. Yeah. They have 11% of the global population in Europe. Right. But they have one third of the world's heroin addicts.
Starting point is 00:05:31 Yeah. Big deal. Europe does localize like that. It is. But think about it. Think about how much closer Europe is to the heroin-producing countries of South Asia. Yeah, yeah. And think about how close we are to the cocaine-producing countries of South America.
Starting point is 00:05:44 Yeah. Which affects the price, of course. It definitely does. You want to give them that stat? Josh, a kilogram of uncut cocaine, as you hear on the cop shows, goes for $22,000. That same kilo fetches about $120,000 in Moscow. That's a big markup. Oh, it's a huge markup.
Starting point is 00:06:05 Is that street value, as they call it? And I'm sure those are way off. I'm sure you could get a kilo for a lot less or pay a lot more or whatever. But one of the things the feds like to do is pump up their numbers. Yeah, yeah. So that they can get more funding. Yeah. Makes sense.
Starting point is 00:06:20 But yeah, you can definitely get a kilo of cocaine in America a lot cheaper than you can. In Russia? In Russia. Yeah. So Chuck, all of those kilos add up pretty quickly and the drug trade, the global drug trade, makes an estimated $300 billion a year. Yeah, that's nuts.
Starting point is 00:06:39 That is a lot of cash. You could bail out two AIGs for that. So Chuck, we talked about the narcosate being an area where governments either look in the other way or selling drugs directly. Right. Or helping them out, maybe, just aiding them. There's a big problem with this. I would say so.
Starting point is 00:06:57 But, well, I mean, you just think about it, you're like, oh, the government's not supposed to do that. Right. You have to stop and think, why? Why the government's not supposed to do that? Yeah. Well, because they're supposed to protect their citizens. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:08 There's something that Thomas Hobbs called the social contract, right? And basically it said, like, in exchange for certain freedoms, like, we can't just do anything we want to, that we give to the government, we're going to give that power to the government. And one of those things is the state monopoly on violence. Right. If the government can put you in jail, the government can kill you, execute you. Yeah. But the government's supposed to be the only one who does it.
Starting point is 00:07:33 So if somebody, you know, shoots your kid, you don't go shoot them in the head, you get the government to go after this guy and incarcerate or kill him. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And in the civilized world, the social contract is kind of how we've developed as nations of the world. And it works pretty well for the most part.
Starting point is 00:07:48 We'll say, I mean, that's a whole other podcast right there. But in narco states, it's a little different because that's a little bit of a sham. They kind of have that contract as long as it doesn't interfere with the drug trade. Right. The government's given its power to drug traffickers at the expense of the people they're supposed to be protecting and representing. So that's number one. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:08:09 Right? Sure. So how does this happen, right? Well, one reason why that might happen, there's a bunch of different ways that could happen. But one reason is if, let's say you're in Columbia and all of a sudden you've heard the term Colombian necktie. I have. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:08:27 All of a sudden your judges and your council people and your politicians are getting knifed and executed in back alleys. By the dozens, all of a sudden the government might say, wait a minute, we might want to not go after these drug traffickers. Right. Because if the state doesn't have a monopoly on violence any longer, if paramilitary groups affiliated with drug traffickers do, then yeah, apparently in Columbia, they came at the justice building with tanks.
Starting point is 00:08:53 Yeah. This wasn't the military. This was a rebel faction. Yeah. I think it was FARC that did it. Right, Josh. FARC. That is F-A-R-C. That stands for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia, translated into
Starting point is 00:09:06 English. Right. And they're actually a communist guerrilla group. They're an army. They are. And they actually got into drug trafficking in the 80s, I think. Indeed. So okay, so you have a huge armed guerrilla army attacking your justice department in
Starting point is 00:09:25 the country's capital. That's a good way to get a narco state started, right? Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes you're bribed into it. That's another one, too. All of a sudden, if your coffers are being filled, a lot of politicians are willing to look the other way.
Starting point is 00:09:39 And also, if your intelligence services become compromised by drug traffickers, you're in big trouble. Yeah. Yeah, because the intelligence services are usually toward the top of the military hierarchy. And if they're corrupted, they can turn the entire military against, you know, the government, which there is a division. And after that happens, again, you're in big trouble and a narco state can form. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:10:07 Plus, they know a lot about smuggling the intelligence community. And if all of a sudden they're on your side, then all of a sudden you know a lot about smuggling. Right. But you have to know how to get people or arms or something in and out of countries without being detected. Sure. So you know where all the airfields are.
Starting point is 00:10:24 Yeah. You have access to planes and boats and stuff. You just start throwing kilos of coke in there and all of a sudden you're a drug smuggler. Yep. Boom. Done. Yeah. And it's kind of tough for us to think about this in the United States because we've had
Starting point is 00:10:35 a pretty stable government for the last couple hundred years. But in areas, in countries where there's been high government turnover and lots of internal conflict, let's say infrastructure like roads, bridges, water, electricity, these things have been cut throughout these civil wars. And the government's too poor to fix them, all of a sudden the government's delegitimized. Yeah. And another like a rebel faction can step in and say, hey, we're taking over. And by the way, we love drug trafficking.
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Starting point is 00:13:49 I got a couple of stats for you along those lines. Guatemala endured a 36 year long civil war, El Salvador in a 12 year long civil war and Nicaragua had one that lasted 19 years. What this means is it's a very unstable region, easily swayed by whoever has the power, drug traffickers or the government and it also means there's a lot of guns. A lot of former veterans that are out of work but know how to use those guns and can serve as a guerrilla army. A lot of times these are poor countries too.
Starting point is 00:14:23 In fact, I would say almost every time it's a poor country and you don't have to be a genius to figure out. You got guns, you got these former military guys, you got really poor people and you have loads of drugs that's worth a lot of money. It's really not too hard to devolve into a narco state. No, it's not. And of course the root of all narco states is money. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:14:43 Either like Chuck said, bribes, that kind of thing or the GDP, Afghanistan. Apparently their GDP is like six billion annually, which the United States I think has 14 trillion GDP. Yeah. Something like that. So it's kind of like holy cow. How do you live like that? They've been doing pretty good but half of that has been through heroin.
Starting point is 00:15:07 Right. Poppies. So Karzai, Hamid Karzai who was, I'm going to make air quotes, elected president of Afghanistan twice. I made air quotes again. You've just reelected, right? Yeah. Reelected.
Starting point is 00:15:22 He is well known for turning a blind eye while saying we need to get rid of these poppies. And the U.S. is like, okay, well, let us spray and he's like, no, no, we have to do it all by hand. Right. And apparently the American forces over there have to, well, the DEA is over there as well. But the American commanders of the armed forces in Afghanistan don't let the DEA in at all. Yeah. And they're frustrated pulling their hair out because they're not getting any support
Starting point is 00:15:51 whatsoever. And it's kind of one of those things like everybody knows that Afghanistan produces poppies. As a matter of fact, in 2006, they produced the highest poppy harvest in recorded human history. Yeah. Just a couple of years ago. It was double what it had been the year before.
Starting point is 00:16:11 So clearly they're not pulling enough by hand. No. Because Karzai won't let them spray overhead. Yeah. Which is, I should explain, that's a common method to, like you crop dust fields to put chemicals on them. You do the same thing if you want to eradicate and kill them. Right.
Starting point is 00:16:26 It's very effective. It's worked in Columbia. Columbia finally has a president, I shouldn't say finally, but Columbia as a president is very sympathetic and friendly to the U.S. and these are the DEA in there. And they have eradicated a lot of cocoa fields using that method. So it does work, but Karzai's like, no. And apparently there's been more and more and more reports of the people who are involved in the central government are all drug lords, or most of them are drug lords too.
Starting point is 00:16:55 So Afghanistan is teetering right on the edge of being a narco state if it's not already. So contributing to half your GDP, that's another reason for a narco state to develop. Yeah. And well, since we're on money, another thing that money brings is bribes and corruption like we were talking about. And I have to mention this because you uncovered this great fact from Guatemala. The federal judge, that's just hard to believe. Federal judge was accused of accepting thousands of dollars in bribes to dismiss a drug trafficking
Starting point is 00:17:26 case and at the end of the, see, dismiss the case at the end of this trial, this judge was seen driving the defendant from court. Yeah. So it goes pretty deep. Yeah. And Guatemala is a de facto narco state right now. Yeah, big time. And in Central America itself, which is like we said, since the Caribbean's been shut
Starting point is 00:17:47 down, Central America started to play a really key role as a supply line between South America and North America. Yeah. Yeah. And actually because of all those conflicts that you mentioned earlier, there's now a ratio of five to one illegal unregistered guns to guns held by legitimate police and armed forces. Not good.
Starting point is 00:18:10 No. So let's keep an eye on Central America. Yeah. That means trouble is coming. Okay. So again, we talked about how it's been destabilized by conflict. There's tons of guns. There's terrible infrastructure, but there's plenty of drugs and narco states.
Starting point is 00:18:26 And you know what else, dude? What? In Guatemala, they have corrupt government officials there have drafted legislation that prevents extradition. Yeah. And as we know, extradition is a really valuable tool for us when we're trying to prosecute these drug lords. Right.
Starting point is 00:18:43 And they said, you can't do it. So that kind of says right there, let us make our money, US, stay out of our hair. Yeah. Once you have the Congress and the judiciary in your pocket, that's even more valuable in the military. Yeah. Although the military is a really good first step. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:18:58 That's true. All right. So Chuck, one of the reasons why you might notice that Central and South America keep popping up. Right. One of the reasons why is because Central America specifically was a Cold War battleground where the US and the USSR fought one another in proxy wars throughout the Cold War, basically both countries just completely used nations in Central and South America to fight one another.
Starting point is 00:19:26 Yeah. Try to bleed one another out. And you know what that means? What? That means that these people that live there are being trained by either Russian or American military. Mm-hmm. They're being supplied with guns and ammunition and all the things that you need once you
Starting point is 00:19:41 stop and say, Cold War's over, all those guns and trained dudes are still there. Right. And they're like, well, what should we do with all this stuff? Yeah. Let's run drugs. And not only that, we are not getting funding from the Soviets or the Americans anymore. Exactly. But we still, the war didn't end for them.
Starting point is 00:19:57 The conflict didn't end for them. The power struggle didn't end for them just because the Americans and the Soviets suddenly lost interest. Right. It's still going on and they are funding it through drugs, right? Yeah. And also, the U.S. backed right-wing paramilitary groups or right-wing dictatorships. And the Soviets, of course, backed left-wing groups like FARC.
Starting point is 00:20:18 Right. And FARC has a reputation for being extremely brutal. They used child soldiers. They engaged in kidnappings, bombings. They killed their own people. Sure. At one point, they offered $1,000 to anybody who killed the government official. Wow.
Starting point is 00:20:35 So they were outsourcing their terrorism. And they're communists and they were supported by the Soviets. So of course, they're horrible. The U.S. supported equally brutal regimes and groups like Lackofrieda. You know about them? They're Guatemala. Yes. They were very much supported by the U.S. and they helped kill as many as 200,000 of
Starting point is 00:20:54 their own people during that civil war. Yep. Josh, Lackofrieda wasn't the only one. Right. Remember the 1980s when President Reagan launched the war on drugs? You know what was going on at the same time? We were providing funding and weapons for the same anti-communist paramilitary groups that were producing and distributing this cocaine.
Starting point is 00:21:15 Yeah. Right at the same time. Yep. Yet we were fighting a war on drugs. Yeah. Doesn't add up, does it? Not only that. You remember Manuel Noriega?
Starting point is 00:21:23 We went down to Panama in 1989. Delta Force was there. Special Forces was there. And we captured him and then put him in prison in Miami for a couple decades. He was a CIA asset for eight years. Yeah. He was operating in Narco State under our supervision. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:21:41 You could say. Yep. And then once news leaked out to the general public that he was a drug dealer, we went down and moved him from power. Right. And gave, I believe he's still in prison, right? Certainly. No, he just got out.
Starting point is 00:21:53 Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. Like a year ago or something like that. Not good for him. And again, this is the same thing that's going on right now in Afghanistan. We're well aware that Karzai is totally cool with the heroin production in that nation. Right.
Starting point is 00:22:06 Which, by the way, is far and away the largest producer of heroin or opium poppies in the world. So it's still going on. Yeah. Although we donated a lot or donated, I guess that's not the right word, but we gave them close to $800 million for counter-narcotics operations and measures. I'm sure. Every penny went to that thing.
Starting point is 00:22:26 Yeah, sure. But it's still going on, but the reason why it's really disturbing that this is still going on is because we haven't learned a very clear lesson from this, and that's when we support groups that engage in drug trafficking, it invariably comes back to bite us in the ass. Yeah. Like I mentioned La Cofrida in Guatemala. The two guys who are running that show, running Guatemala as an Arco state, were both trained
Starting point is 00:22:55 by the United States at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, I think. Yeah, right here in Georgia. Yeah. It's where they train foreign people. No, specifically Latin Americans. Oh, Latin Americans? Yeah, specifically to train them. Yeah, pretty controversial.
Starting point is 00:23:11 Yeah, because they train them in assassination, in assembling guerrilla armies and destabilizing central governments, that kind of stuff. So we're training these guys to go fight the Soviets, but then again, after the Cold War, these guys are still around. The Mexican Gulf Cartel, which has become hugely violent and kind of big, is run by a couple of guys who were also trained at the School of the Americas. So basically, the world's biggest drug dealers were trained by the United States in the art of smuggling and all sorts of other stuff.
Starting point is 00:23:43 They were trained in their craft. Yeah, and I think the Russians used Escobar, right, to help guard their poppy fields. Was that right? Or the cocoa? Yeah, FARC actually started out guarding Escobar's cocoa fields in Colombia for the Medellin Cartel, right? Yeah, Medellin. And then apparently they're like, wow, this guy's making a bunch of money.
Starting point is 00:24:04 We're going to go out on our own, and they became rivals. And then again, Delta Force goes down there and oversees the assassination of Escobar. Yeah. Which I don't mean to sound paranoid. I really researched this article, and all this is fact. Something that isn't fact I've made like verbal air quotes with, like this is documented stuff. Yeah, so much money going around.
Starting point is 00:24:27 And it's documented in legitimate publications, you know? It's all about the greenbacks. Yes, it is. So much money at stake. So let's talk about Africa, man. That's the place to be these days. Well. If you're in the narco state.
Starting point is 00:24:38 Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Africa's really risen since the mid-80s. That was the first sign of a drug presence in Africa in Zambia, although it was marijuana in Zambia at the time. That's how it started out, at least. The gateway drug, even when you're talking narco state. Sure, yeah. It's funny.
Starting point is 00:24:55 So Zambia goes, exposes a narco state. Apparently the government wasn't aware of this one, but a group of prominent citizens were operating like a sub-state, a sub-narco state, just under the noses of the functioning government. And again, very poor people, which is key. That's a... Yeah, if people don't have any money, and all of a sudden people come and give them gobs of money, they'll, you know, say, oh, okay. You want to be a drug mule?
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Starting point is 00:27:34 ask your doctor if Vitamic cream is right for you. You deserve more from your topical. To learn more, visit TopicalUpRising.com. So Zambia was the first to start it in Africa and then the 90s, the reason why it picked up speed in the 90s was because it was the end of colonialism, it just ended within the last decade or so and this European influence and influx of money and exploitation left the vacuum economically, financially and often times with central governments. There's just a vacuum and nobody's doing anything, there's no way to make any money
Starting point is 00:28:21 or anything so Narco States are setting up. Senegal was another one in the 90s, I believe heroin and cocaine really were on the rise and here's a stat that you dug up that was pretty good, in 2008 the telegraph newspaper in England reported that the cost of a bribe to look the other way at the airport when you're flying in to car with drugs, 9 grand per kilo of cocaine. Right and Chuck just mentioned a little funny little word and it was cocaine, you know associate Africa with cocaine normally. Well yeah, that's true.
Starting point is 00:28:52 You do now though. Yeah, big time. And one of the reasons why it's popped up in Africa is because West Africa is a perfect stop for cocaine en route to Europe. Right. We talked about Europe having a huge problem with heroin, one of the reasons they didn't have a big problem with cocaine is because the Colombians and other South Americans hadn't figured out how to get it to them.
Starting point is 00:29:14 Now all of a sudden West Africa is devolving into Narco States because they finally figured out we need a port and West Africa is it. Right, specifically Guinea-Bissau. This is like we said earlier the one true functioning Narco State right now. The $150 million worth of cocaine passes through the borders of Guinea-Bissau each month and that was in 2007. And what is the $150 million times two to them? Their gross domestic product, it's half of their gross domestic product.
Starting point is 00:29:46 So the entire nation, all of the goods and services produced in Guinea-Bissau and above the boards equals $300 million a year. Right. And they have half of that coming through their country in cocaine a month. Tell the story of how this started there. This is so interesting. It is. What year was it?
Starting point is 00:30:09 2005. 2005. Yeah. They're a group of Guinea-Bissau and fishermen who were out in their boats and there was a big old package floating or maybe several smaller packages is floating there. So they haul them in with their nets and they took them back to land. They open them up and there is this white powder inside. They'd never seen before.
Starting point is 00:30:28 Right. They didn't know what to do with it. So they actually used it as fertilizer on their crops, which they killed their crops very quickly. Did they really? Yeah. I didn't know that. And then finally one day, well, they're still puzzling over this stuff.
Starting point is 00:30:38 God knows what else they did with it. Yeah. A man, a South American man shows up and says, hey. I believe you have something that belongs to us. Yeah. And that's cocaine. That's our cocaine. It'll give you a million dollars for it.
Starting point is 00:30:52 Yeah. Yeah, which is 1,300th of the entire gross domestic product, remember? Yeah. Of Guinea-Bissau. And so they say, okay. And by the way, can we do this again? Yeah. And that was the birth of the Guinea-Bissau and Narcos.
Starting point is 00:31:05 Yep. It completely happened by accident. It did. I mean, can you imagine that? And Guinea-Bissau is a perfect Narcos state. The cops literally in the capital, Bissau, it's the capital city of the country, the cops have five cop cars and they almost never have gasoline to fuel them. And they have $150 million worth of cocaine going through the borders with five cop cars.
Starting point is 00:31:28 Right. It was a former Portuguese colony. The Portuguese left and Guinea-Bissau, there's not an airplane associated with that country, but they have airfields out on like barrier islands that are just totally unused, unpatrolled. And what's more, the military is completely in the pocket of the, I think they're mostly Colombians that took the place over, built stucco mansions. They have direct TV antennas on their roofs in this incredibly poverty-stricken country. They stick out like sore thumbs.
Starting point is 00:32:01 They don't care. One of the reasons why is, like I said, the military is on their side. How do we know that, Chuck? Josh, in September of 2006, cops there arrested two Colombian guys in a house. With 700 kilos of cocaine. And the soldiers came. They showed up at the police station, surrounded it and said, give me the cocaine and the men. And they did so.
Starting point is 00:32:26 And they got in their cars, loaded up the coke and drove away. The cops watched the military load up the coke and just leave with the guys. Said, thank you for your time. Yeah. And that was it. That was the beginning of the end. The military engaged in an all-out war with the government and ended up assassinating the president after laying siege to his mansion for several hours.
Starting point is 00:32:47 Yeah. Just this year, right? March? Uh-huh. He was assassinated in March. Yep. So there's no central government in Guinea-Bissau. The Colombians are there selling drugs, using it as, actually, they're not selling it in
Starting point is 00:32:59 Guinea-Bissau as far as I know. They're using Guinea-Bissau as mules who, they're even more perfect. Because it was a Portuguese colony, they don't have to have visas to get into Europe. Right. Yeah. I mean, it's like Pablo Escobar went, God, I need you to do me a favor. I got some friends back there on Earth, and they need a place in West Africa. They need a perfect narco state.
Starting point is 00:33:20 Can you give us a perfect narco state? And God's like, Guinea-Bissau. Sure. And I think you said the average annual income there is like 500 bucks a year. For a civil servant's job. Yeah. So it's clear that if you start waving just small amounts of money under their nose that they're going to be at your beck and call.
Starting point is 00:33:35 Yeah. So Guinea-Bissau won your watch. Yeah. I mean, it's just insane right there. Sure. It's not a safe place to be. No. No.
Starting point is 00:33:43 So that's narco states. I have a headache just from talking about it. How about you, Chuck? I do. Kind of dense, isn't it? It is. It was a really good article, though. Thanks, man.
Starting point is 00:33:52 If you want to read the article that I wrote and pour my blood, sweat, and tears into, you can type narco states. That's two words in the handy search bar at howstuffworks.com. And that means it's time for Listener Mail. Yeah. You know what's funny is this morning, Emily asked me while we were getting ready for our day what we're going to podcast on. I said, narco states.
Starting point is 00:34:16 She said, what's a narco state? No. I don't know. And here, like eight hours later, my mind is mush or at least enough to talk about it for 25 minutes. Yeah. Has it only been 25 minutes? 35 minutes.
Starting point is 00:34:29 Jerry says 35. Josh, I'm going to call this... ...DNA Database London email. Hello, Josh and Chuck. Love your show. Thought you may be interested in a little story in regards to the podcast about crime databases. I am from Yakima, Washington, but I've lived in the UK for the last decade.
Starting point is 00:34:48 I'm a train driver engineer. Lisa is 30. She's an American train engineer living in England. Isn't that interesting? So a friend of mine who is also a conductor had a recent experience with the British transport police in regards to this. He was spat on by a member of the public who was abusive while carrying out ticket duties, so the police were called.
Starting point is 00:35:11 On the day and for weeks after, my friend was pretty much harassed by the police because they wanted a DNA sample from him for, quote, exclusion purposes. He steadfastly declined each request to the point where he put it in writing to the police that he would get a solicitor involved to ensure he never had to submit a sample. That outcome is basically that the offender went unpunished because the police won't follow it up anymore, because the guy who was attacked and spit upon won't surrender his DNA for exclusion purposes. So just thought you may want to know here in England, even victims of crime are being
Starting point is 00:35:45 coerced into giving samples. Keep up the great work from Lisa, XXX from Lisa. Wow. Not an XO, buddy. Triple X. Yeah. And Stoke Hammond fucking Hampshire. And I guess that's a place.
Starting point is 00:36:01 Yeah. You know, I've been spit on before and spit back. Did you get spit on? Mm-hmm. By who? Cab driver and niece. Really? Oh, he's such a jerk.
Starting point is 00:36:11 He tried to charge me 20 bucks for like an eight-block cab ride. Uh-huh. And I was like, I'm not giving you that much. And he was like, yes you will, f-f-f-f-f-f-f, and I just like blinked and like put my hand in my face, and sure enough, there was a spit, and I just spit right back in his face. This is in France. I thought he was going to explode. Not even in a narco state.
Starting point is 00:36:29 It was in Nice. Did you pay him? I paid him some. I didn't pay him 20 bucks. What a jerk. Yeah. Spit on Josh. No doubt.
Starting point is 00:36:37 Yeah, he's got a meeting with me scheduled. Thanks, buddy. I'm going to go find this guy. Yeah, let's go to Nice. All right. All right. Well, if you have any stories about spitting on or being spit upon, you can send an email to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com.
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