Stuff You Should Know - How Narco States Work
Episode Date: December 15, 2009In 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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Afghanistan?
No.
It's close though.
Guinea-Bissau.
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
In Africa.
Yeah.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
We'll give you this much money.
No problem.
Sure.
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What do other people see?
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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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.
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Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage.
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The South Dakota Stories, Volume 2.
I could see beyond the black hills and the way they called for exploration.
I could feel the air, the way it paints against skin and fills hungry lungs.
I could hear the way the water ran for miles and the way the bison grazed, the way our
boots meet the earth as we step past expected.
I could imagine my time in South Dakota, and I wish to go back because there's so much
South Dakota, so little time.