00:00may i tell you a story i hope you will when i was the senior investigator on the senate foreign
00:04relations committee 2009 to 2011 end of 2011 uh i told the then chairman john carey i wanted to
00:14go to afghanistan to do a formal senate study on the heroin poppy crop right afghanistan at the
00:23time was producing 93 percent of the world's heroin and so i flew to afghanistan went to bagram air
00:29base i told them i needed to fly to kandahar and then to lashkar ga which is the capital of
00:36helman
00:37province and i was doing this study now as a as a senior congressional staff member i had the rank
00:43of brigadier general this is the only time in my life i ever pulled rank on somebody
00:47and i said they wouldn't take me down there and i said i'm not asking you i'm telling you you
00:53are
00:53going to fly me to kandahar and then we will fly to lashkar ga and then we'll fly back to
00:59bagram
01:00so they they relented we went to kandahar did some meetings when we got to lashkar ga as your landing
01:08for as far as the eye could see all you see is heroin poppy and so i said i want
01:14to go into the
01:15poppy fields and i want to find a farmer and i want to talk to him so i had security
01:20i had a translator
01:22pashto translator we just drive out into the fields and sure enough we stumble on a poppy farmer and i
01:29asked him a very naive question i said instead of poppy why don't you grow things that have two
01:35growing seasons like tomatoes or onions or pomegranates and he goes like this
01:42the americans told me in 2001 that if i told them where the arabs were i could grow all the
01:48poppy i
01:49wanted i said what americans told you you could grow poppy and just as i said the question my military
01:55handler pulls me by the arm and he says we're under threat we have to go back to the base
01:59i never got
02:00an answer we got back into the jeep and they took me back to the helicopter i flew back to
02:05bagram
02:05actually actually like out of a movie so i come back to washington and i said to to the chief
02:14investigator i said i'm i'm on to something here this is not good so i wrote it all up just
02:19as i collected
02:20it well i had a friend at dea the drug enforcement uh administration and i i called him i said
02:28listen
02:28i'm going to send you a paper eyes only i just want your thoughts on it before i send it
02:32to john
02:32carey so he calls me back a couple days later and he says buddy you know you're not going to
02:38get this
02:38paper published right i said why not he said afghanistan produces 93 of the world's heroin almost
02:47all of that heroin goes to iran and russia and we want them to be addicted to heroin it weakens
02:55their
02:55societies and i never got it published well fast forward years later that's disgusting we've got a
03:03fentanyl epidemic in this country that fentanyl is coming from china and mexico they want us to be
03:12addicted to fentanyl because it weakens our society and that's why we're in the predicament that we're
03:18in so you believe that the us government allowed poppy production in afghanistan in order to weaken
03:24iran russia i do and the reason i have come to that conclusion is not because i'm any smarter than
03:30anybody else but do you know how much of the world's heroin was produced in afghanistan in the
03:37last year of taliban rule 2000 not too much zero none they didn't grow any not only did they not
03:45grow any heroin poppy in 2000 they were a net food exporter to iran and to pakistan and as soon
03:53as we
03:54took over it was all about the heroin so the idea that it's um that's quite amazing that is a
04:03quite
04:04amazing statistic terrible does anyone in a meeting where these plans were formulated say you know
04:11we're the united states like we can't flood other people's countries with heroin that's just so immoral
04:16i never sat in a meeting like that the meetings were all about how do we win how do we
04:22get a leg up
04:23how do we implement the policy that we want whatever country to follow that was it but if you
04:30intentionally flood other people's countries with heroin it's kind of hard to tell yourself you're
04:36the good guy like that's oh tucker that was something that i struggled with for at least half of my
04:42career
04:42at the cia we're supposed to be the good guys so why are we doing so much of this i
04:48just never understood
04:49it and what was what do you think the answer is the answer was that i uh had the stars
04:54in my eyes that
04:55that i just i was not fully understanding of rail politic that you're a liberal well i'm not a
05:03liberal at all and i find that disgusting i find it disgusting i don't want my government to be
05:09involved in any way in heroin trafficking no nor do i and i also don't know why russia's our enemy
05:15but
05:15big picture but even if it there was a good reason to have russia's enemy i still wouldn't be for
05:19flooding
