The President's Daily Brief - May 12th, 2022. The Worst Drug in the West...

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

It’s May 12th. You’re listening to the President’s Daily Brief. I’m your host and former CIA Officer Bryan Dean Wright. Your morning intel starts now. Today is a special brief, and that's because the CDC just announced that the number one cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18-45, is drug overdose, All up next on the President’s Daily Brief. ------ Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this episode of the President's Daily Brief. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's May 12th. You're listening to the President's Daily Brief. I'm your host and former CIA officer Brian Dean Wright. Your morning intel starts now. The brief you're about to hear is in the same spirit of the actual President's Daily Brief, which is a top secret summary of the most critical events in the past 24 hours, all delivered to the president each day by the nation's spy masters. And so, ladies and gentlemen, I am your spy and this is your brief. And today, it's a special brief. That's because the U.S. government announced, yes, that if you're between the ages of 18 and 45, there's one thing that's killing your generation more than any other, and that's fentanyl. That is a drug, and it's setting records for the death that it's leaving behind. And so today we're going to do a deep dive into what this killer drug is, who's peddling it, and whether we can stop it. That's up next on this special edition of the President's Daily Brief. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention yesterday released some very sobering data. Drug overdoses killed more than 107,000 Americans last

year, and that I'm sorry to say is a record. It's up 15% from the last year. To think of it differently, that averages to one person dead of an overdose every five minutes. And that means that overdoses are now the leading cause of death in adults age 18 to 45. That's more than COVID, more than car accidents, more than cancer, more than suicide, all of it. Now, Of the 107,000 dead, 70% come from one drug, fentanyl. Now, fentanyl is a drug that can be used in medical settings for pain. It's usually in a pill, sometimes in a shot, and it can be incredibly helpful and very powerful. It's about 100 times stronger than morphine.

But it can be and is very deadly when not taken with very careful medical oversight. And that is what's exactly happening to so many, most of whom who are buying it illegally, or sometimes it's mixed in with marijuana or other legal recreational drugs, but people aren't aware that it's actually been mixed in. And then it kills them within minutes of consumption. Now, most of the illegal fentanyl in this country isn't actually cooked up in some dingy drug lab in a back alley. It actually starts in China, and then it snakes its way through Mexico and eventually into our country. Now, if you wanted fentanyl before 2019, all you had to do was go online and order it.

Chinese manufacturers incredibly just had websites and Twitter accounts all very much in the opened and very easy to purchase. You simply selected the drug and then they shipped it via UPS or good old-fashioned postal service. Now, American politicians, as you might remember, were outraged by this and they complained loudly to the president of China and President Xi. And his response was either one of two things. First, he said that the accusations were fake news. It was a lie created by Americans to smear his country. Or the second response was that neither he nor his government could actually do anything about it. So let me give you an example.

About five years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice, they indicted a number of Chinese nationals for their roles in distributing fentanyl within the United States. Now, when the Chinese government was asked for a comment, well, they protest about the whole thing. They said that the charges were, quote, harmful to a cooperative atmosphere between our two countries. Now, as an aside, you should know that this denying tactic is actually very common for Beijing on lots of issues. For example, there's a man named Carl Lee, who for the past 15 years has resided in China,

and he sells weapons of mass destruction equipment to lots of nations around the world. Beijing has always denied that this is true, but every Western government knows that they're lying. At any rate, China hasn't done anything about Carl Lee, and they weren't going to do anything about fentanyl, either until President Trump, well, he did what President Trump does, which is he raised a stink. He waged a trade war. And so, in response back in 2019, China reluctantly agreed to a crackdown on those direct sales from China to the U.S. via the mail system. Now, what's important to note here is that while they banned the finished drug that is fentanyl, they didn't ban the precursor chemicals

that make it. To create a very rough analogy here, they banned the dessert, but not the ingredients to make it. So not surprisingly, all those Chinese drug companies started selling the ingredients instead, those precursor chemicals. Now, initially, some of those ingredients or chemicals came directly to the U.S. where some people cooked up the final product, that is, the fentanyl. But the big change came when Mexican cartels figured out that there was a lot of money to be made. You see, the cartels were intrigued by this stuff because fentanyl can be cooked up in very small batches and transported very, very easily. And just the smallest amount of fentanyl, just grains of sand, can actually get someone very,

very high or can kill them. So it was a much easier drug for these cartels to manufacture and transport and then ultimately profit from. And so over the past three or four years, companies in China, these chemical companies, both legitimate and criminal, while they joined forces with a whole bunch of Mexican cartel partners. All right, let me put some names and numbers to this, and let's start with China. There are around 5,000 pharmaceutical manufacturers that currently operate either legally or illegally in China. The industry itself is very poorly regulated, which means that the drug

ingredients for fentanyl are very easy to divert to clandescent labs or buyers, for instance, in Mexico. And by the way, I should mention that even if those drug ingredients were ever to be found by, say, the Chinese authorities, there are some very sneaky chemists who have slightly modified the molecules of those ingredients such that they actually become legal. And so off all those ingredients, illicit and otherwise, go from China to Mexico, with the transactions between the Chinese and Mexicans paid mostly in cryptocurrencies. or, as I actually briefed you on previously, they swap those drug ingredients for endangered Mexican animals. Now, there are several cartels that receive these chemicals, those ingredients.

One is called the Halisco New Generation Cartel, and the other is called the Sinaloa Cartel. Both are very well known to the U.S. government for doing all sorts of terrible things, from human trafficking to obviously drug running. Now, here's one of the most incredible parts of this story that you should know. Those cartels don't have any trouble shipping the ingredients from China to Mexico because they actually control and operate some of the ports along Mexico's West Coast. It would be like a gang controlling the ports of Los Angeles or Seattle. It's that audacious.

Let me give you a specific example. the port of Lazaro Cardenas. It's in the state of Michoacan. A few years ago, the president of Mexico admitted that the cartels controlled that entire port. The Mexican government said that it had no ability to stop anything coming in or going out of that port. Now, the president of Mexico has since claimed that he's cleaned a place up, but a lot of DEA agents aren't exactly convinced. Regardless, once those chemical ingredients arrive in Mexico from China, the cartels send them to relatively small, hard to find, and in some cases, portable labs. Now, occasionally, the U.S. and Mexico can gin up some operations to bust those labs. In fact, the DEA has seized about 2,000 pounds of

those precursor chemicals just in the past year. And that's enough for one billion lethal doses of fentanyl. I want to repeat that. In the past year, the DEA has seized, in effect, one billion lethal doses of fentanyl. But even the DEA acknowledges that it's struggling to stop the shipments of both the chemicals and the cooked fentanyl. And that's obviously true, given that there are 107,000 dead Americans that we buried last year. But clearly there is a step missing here, and that's the shipment from Mexico to our cities, to those victims. Now, for a few years, almost all the fentanyl in America was coming up in through Southern California. And that's the shipment. still largely the case, but it's increasingly coming through Arizona, too. And remember,

the packages of this stuff are very small, easy to conceal in cars, inside of people, or even buried in big shipments of legitimate goods. Now, we're also seeing it come through private jets, often landing in smaller airports. One was actually recently seasoned Gary, Indiana. And that underlines the scope of this problem. It's not just a border state issue here. These drugs are being trafficked all throughout America. And that leads to a question that I have for you. What state do you think was the hardest hit last year in terms of the greatest percentage increase of drug deaths? What state in the union would you choose? Because here's the answer. Alaska experienced the biggest increase in overdose deaths in 2021, roughly 75% increase. That's all according to federal data.

All right, this is when we take a deep breath and we shake our heads because all of this is just so infuriating, so outrageous, and so unbelievable. But I want us to recap the five things that we now know, to really understand and process the magnitude of this problem. First, the greatest cause of death right now in America for people aged 18 to 45 is a drug overdose. and 70% of those deaths are from fentanyl. Second, almost all fentanyl comes from China and then Mexico. Third, China absolutely knows who's producing those precursor chemicals, those ingredients for fentanyl. But just like that Carl Lee fellow that I mentioned earlier who sells the WMD material, all of those drug producers are protected by the Chinese government.

Fourth, the Mexican government knows which car, and which people are cooking and shipping the drugs. Now, sometimes the Mexican government is helpful, but mostly not. I mean, the cartels are so powerful that they control their own ports. And that leaves the fifth thing that we know. The thing that we talk about so often on the president's daily brief, we have our border. It's our last line of defense.

And given what we know, it's the only thing that's really within our power to do anything about, to control and stop what is now the greatest killer of America's young and middle-aged people. So if you were the president this morning, and I briefed you on the scope and the scale of this problem, we'd now need to discuss solutions. The first would be solutions with China. Now, it'd be great if we had a collaborative partner in Beijing, but we don't. What's clear is that China isn't interested in solving this problem, and much like the Carl Lee case, they're actually happy to let it flourish.

maybe because they're actually happy to see a suffering, or maybe it's because, like the Carl Lee fellow, they have very powerful friends. Now, it's important to acknowledge what happened in 2019, because whether you like Trump or not, he got President Xi's attention, and, for a short time, it helped. But fundamentally, my counsel to you is this.

Is China a friend or foe? Is there any hope that any amount of dialogue or demands will ever really change their behavior. That's what we all need to be wrestling with this morning, and I'm going to let you decide how to answer those questions. All right, now second, let's talk Mexico. We have to decide whether the Mexican government, even if led by the most courageous and noble man or woman,

can ever clean up that corrupt country. And if so, to what extent? And how long will that take? And at what ultimate cost to America until they eventually do? again, I'm going to let you wrestle with those questions this morning, and I'm going to let you think about how you might respond if you were president. And that leads to the final question. How serious do we want to be about securing our border? Because if we can't do much about China, and we can't fix Mexico, our border is all we've got left. That's the only thing we have to hold

a line against a whole bunch of people and a whole bunch of drugs that are killing this country. So as you think this morning on all those questions, once you have your answers, I'm going to encourage you to reach out to your governor and your senators, your representatives, and your president, and you tell them that you now have a pretty good sense of this problem. And then I encourage you to demand the solutions that you want. I have one final thought for you. We've talked a lot about how things with fentanyl have gone in the past and how bad they are in the present. But what about the future? What's this going to look like in a year or two or five?

I'm going to leave you with a quote from a man named Keith Humphreys. He's a drug policy researcher at Stanford University. He was asked about these latest number of Americans who were killed because of drugs, fentanyl, and particular. And here's what he said. As horrible as 2021 was, the record numbers of dead Americans, 2022 will quite possibly be worse. Own it all. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari.

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Tap the banner to learn more and get a quote at usa.com slash bundle. Restrictions apply. And with that, ladies and gentlemen, you have your morning brief. Now, normally this is when we talk about other stories that I'm watching and have you put one on your radar. But this morning, I think we need a little bit of happiness to conclude the show. Maybe some hope, a little bit of joy. Thankfully, I've got some to share. And it has to do with people thriving because of medicine, not hurt by it.

Scientists at the University of California and Northwestern University offered up some very good news this week to a very special group of cancer patients. You see, there's a certain type of brain tumor. It's actually the most common type of brain tumor. It accounts for about 30% of all cases. Now, normally these tumors are removed and a patient undergoes radiation, and generally, it's successful. But in about 20% of cases, the tumor, unfortunately, comes back. And sadly, up until now, people were out of luck.

They'd end up with some pretty horrific disabilities or death. But those scientists at Northwestern and University of California at San Francisco, had discovered that an existing drug called Verzenio offers some hope. It's an existing cancer drug that's often used in breast cancers. Now, they were studying whether it might work for brain tumors. They actually had done a bit of studying with mice and some cell cultures, but it wasn't really ready for full trials. Yet they saw some early signs of promise, so they got permission to use it off-label and a number of patients under compassion it use protocols. Now, these patients had reoccurrent brain tumors, and they were out of options,

and it was the end of the road. Instead, the drug worked. The tumors shrank, and their lives were saved. Now, the next step is more robust trials. There needs to be some more science done, but for many folks with recurrent brain tumors this morning, who had lost all hope, they now have something to smile about. They have another chance. at life. And what a great way to close out our show, reminding each other of why we are here, talking about our country and our world. It's the creed of every good spy and every smart American. It's from John chapter 8, verse 32. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. Good thing. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headlock

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