9/11 happened, and the United States
invaded one of the largest opium producers in the world.
George W. Bush: These terrorists must be pursued, defeated,
and brought to justice.
The net effect of the PATRIOT Act
is that it refueled the War on Drugs.
I helped murder families in Columbia.
We were willing to do whatever it took.
If that meant supporting a known drug trafficker,
that was not of tantamount concern.
Mexican cops would go out and carry out a hit,
and then they'll come back a couple hours later
and investigate the murder they just committed.
They lied to us about this plant.
Cloaked in many innocent...
It's an invitation to your own murder.
You smoked it and you suddenly said, "Wait a minute.
This stuff isn't so bad."
Got some legal weed!
They're working with one cartel
to take out another cartel.
We're going to be ruthless in that fight.
We're all concerned about cocaine and heroin.
We're legally killing you and we're getting away with it.
What I think is really interesting
that we've seen happen in the last 15 or 20 years
is that this so-called War on Drugs
and the so-called War on Terror have collided.
It's been nearly 30 years
since Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs.
But nearly 16 million Americans
are regularly getting high on illegal narcotics each month.
George W. Bush: Illegal drugs
are the enemies of ambition and hope.
And I intend to do something about them.
"Smiled."
-What word? -"Smiled."
Yes, "smiled."
Read these words the fast way. Get ready.
"Smiled."
Yes, "smiled." Get ready.
-"More." -Yes, "more." Get ready.
-"Light." -Yes, "light." Get ready.
-"Must." -Yes, "must."
Boys and girls, pick your reader up.
60 on page 153.
Oh. Oh, my God!
-Give me that. -Oh, my God.
George W. Bush: On my orders, the United States military
has begun strikes
against Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps
and military installations
of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
America had just suffered this catastrophic loss.
The CIA took it as an intelligence failure
and took the war in Afghanistan as -- That was their baby.
There was incredible pressure on the CIA
to find and capture bin Laden.
That was the CIA's mission,
and -- and they wanted to do it right.
Two American Hercules C-130 aircraft
take off from an air base in Uzbekistan.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Green light.
The CIA's just dropped 19 half-ton crates
full of weapons and supplies.
-Clear. -It's clear.
On the ground to receive the drop --
a CIA-backed insurgent army...
...led by this man...
Hamid Karzai, Western educated,
sworn enemy of the Taliban.
In the 1980s, Karzai joined the CIA-backed war
against Soviet invaders,
fighting alongside fellow mujahideen Osama bin Laden.
He's been a CIA asset ever since.
The CIA wanted to get our guy positioned in power,
someone that we could work with,
someone that we knew would work toward
the aims of the United States.
And that guy was Hamid Karzai.
Karzai and his men must traverse hundreds of miles
through Taliban-controlled territory
in order to seize power.
But on a mountain pass, they're ambushed.
They're ambushed, and the agency
doesn't know if Karzai is alive or dead.
Okay, then, what's the coordinates?
Man #2: North 1506, west 8319.
At least 10 people.
Man #3: Signal down. We've lost visual.
Signal down. We've lost visual.
Are you there? Do you copy? Do you copy?
Karzai, are you there?
Please respond.
Karzai's men have prevailed.
Hamid Karzai has survived
one of the greatest challenges of his life,
and the American-led coalition installs Karzai
as Afghanistan's interim leader.
We got our guy in power.
We got the lesser of all the evils in power.
As he secures his grip on power,
one of his first acts as president
is to give control of Afghanistan's strategic south
to his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai,
He's one of Afghanistan's
best-connected heroin traffickers.
Now, thanks to his brother, he's on the CIA payroll.
Afghanistan produces the vast majority
of the world's heroin supply --
by some estimates, upwards of 90%.
Located at the center
of the so-called Golden Crescent,
there's a saying here --
"Whoever controls the poppy controls the country."
We were willing to do whatever it took.
If that meant turning a blind eye to
or even implicitly supporting a known drug trafficker,
that was really not of tantamount concern.
At a checkpoint in Kandahar,
Afghan security forces are on high alert for car bombs.
But when they stop a truck and search the vehicle...
...they find a huge stash of heroin.
Before the checkpoint commander can make an arrest,
he receives a call.
It's the brother of the president.
I think that the Karzai family put one son in politics,
they put one son in business, they put one son in a mosque.
And this is how you have control over
all the elements of state.
And the notion that, um,
those brothers aren't all working together
for the benefit of the family is ludicrous.
Ahmed Wali Karzai,
newly appointed ruler of the south,
orders the truck to be given safe passage.
Ahmed Wali Karzai,
the role he played in the drug trade,
was to provide protection,
to provide political cover for major drug traffickers.
He was the guy that made sure those trucks got through.
The CIA thinks that we're really fighting
the important war, the War on Terror.
We're the ones keeping Americans safe.
And this War on Drugs, it's a losing battle
that we don't want to concern ourselves with.
As Afghan heroin floods the market,
back at home, the Bush administration
pushes through a new anti-terror law
that will change the face of the domestic War on Drugs.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the President of the United States,
accompanied by the Vice President.
The changes, effective today, will help counter a threat
like no other our nation has ever faced.
We've seen the enemy and the murder
of thousands of innocent, unsuspecting people.
They recognize no barrier of morality.
They have no conscience.
These terrorists must be pursued.
They must be defeated.
And they must be brought to justice.
It is now my honor to sign into law
the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001.
The PATRIOT Act passed 98 in favor,
one Senator against, in the name of fighting terrorism.
Actually, some of its main provisions
are more often used for drug prosecutions.
Police will now be able to search and seize
without probable cause and even without your knowledge.
Over the coming years, the U.S. government will issue
thousands of so-called sneak-and-peek warrants.
Less than 1% will have to do with terrorism,
and over 75% will be for drugs.
The net effect, really, of -- of the PATRIOT Act
and the War on Terror is that it refueled the War on Drugs.
Super Bowl XXXVI.
86 million Americans watch the Patriots battle the Rams.
It's the most-watched TV event of the year
and the perfect opportunity for the government to premiere
a new anti-drug ad campaign.
I helped murder families in Colombia.
It was just innocent fun.
I helped kidnap people's dads.
Hey, some harmless fun.
I helped kids learn how to kill.
I was just having some fun, you know.
During the first Super Bowl after 9/11,
we have this ad come out that shows the desperation
of the mentality behind the War on Terror --
that if you use drugs,
you're not hurting yourself, you're helping terrorists.
I helped the bomber get a fake passport.
All the kids do it.
I helped kill a judge.
I helped blow up buildings.
The irony of this is that throughout history,
the U.S. government has been entrenched
and at least peripherally involved
with the drug trade to a much greater degree
than any teenager experimenting with drugs
in the United States is ever going to be.
While America is preoccupied
with a drug-fueled War on Terror...
...right at our doorstep, another drug war
is about to create the most powerful
and violent cartels the world has ever known.
31 years after America declared the War on Drugs,
the U.S. now consumes as much as 40% of the world's cocaine
and spends approximately $25 billion on marijuana.
Being close to the world's biggest consumer
of illegal drugs has been a good thing
for the Mexican cartels -- not for Mexico itself,
but for its criminal organizations, this is a gift.
A decade after NAFTA helped turn Mexico
into the key transshipment point
for the North American drug trade,
four major Mexican cartels
battle for control of the border.
The most dominant is the Juárez Cartel,
once led by Amado Carrillo Fuentes.
His mysterious death led to a power struggle
for the most valuable turf in the drug game --
the critical border town Ciudad Juárez,
directly across from El Paso.
When you dig into it underneath the surface,
that's when you started seeing how it really worked.
And there was a lot of, uh, you know,
pretty ugly stuff going on.
U.S. law enforcement
are about to infiltrate the cartel,
blurring the lines between good guys and bad.
Crossing the bridge that divides the two countries
is a man on the inside of it all.
Guillermo Ramirez Peyro, also known as "Lalo,"
a former Mexican highway patrolman
turned Juárez Cartel lieutenant.
He knew that sooner or later,
he will be arrested or killed.
Lalo heads to a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol office
to offer his services as an informant.
Lalo believed, as an informant,
that he will have some protection
by the federal U.S. government.
I understand you have some information.
Can you protect me?
Depends.
After extensive vetting, Lalo begins to talk.
What do you know about the cartel?
The cops in Mexico are the cartel, Señor.
We're listening.
I was one of them.
He makes a shocking claim --
Numerous Mexican state police officers
are also working for the Juárez Cartel.
But I need assurances.
Lalo, he's typical of so many of these "rats."
It's a matter of survival.
It's a matter of playing both ends towards the middle
to protect yourself.
It's a very dangerous world and a very violent world.
U.S. Customs agents register Lalo
as informant number 913
and put him to work undercover inside the cartel.
Lalo's heading to a cartel safe house
for a meeting with a small-time drug smuggler, Fernando Reyes.
Reyes is looking for help moving a half-ton of marijuana
across the border.
But the cartel leaders are not happy
Reyes is operating on their turf.
While Lalo pretends to facilitate the deal,
two Juárez cops on the cartel payroll...
emerge from another room.
They ripped off a cord from a lamp
and they're trying to choke him to death.
This guy's just not dying.
And they said, "We need your help."
Finally killed him by hitting him on the back of the head
and broke his neck.
Lalo has recorded the entire murder
and turns it over to his Customs and Border Control handlers.
There were rumors about Mexican law enforcement.
You know, people assume that they were corrupt.
But he was really the first guy to bring out just how it worked.
The Mexican government and the Mexican law enforcement
werepart of the cartel.
There's stories that'll just blow your mind.
Mexican cops would go out and carry out a hit.
And then they'll come back
in a police uniform a couple hours later
and investigate the murder they just committed.
That's how it worked.
They call it the color of law, right?
When are you cartel?
When are you law enforcement?
There is no line, really.
It's all one fluid thing.
In Mexico, less than 1% of serious crimes
end up in any kind of conviction.
When the U.S. Customs agents tell their bosses
in Washington about the murder,
they receive a directive -- continue working with Lalo.
They had so much invested in this case.
They were trying to get after the big fish
in the Juárez Cartel, and so he went back.
And he participated in subsequent murders.
He even told 'em ahead of time
that he was opening up the house,
he was gonna have a barbecue,
and they would bring someone over
and torture and murder 'em there.
They were making deals with the devil,
because Lalo was one of the devils of the Juárez Cartel.
He was a blood killer.
This guy was actually given a license to kill.
You don't want to believe
that you have American law enforcement involved.
January 2004, the Mexican military move in
on the house where Fernando Reyes was killed.
They find 12 bodies buried in the backyard,
including Reyes.
The press will call it the "House of Death."
The House of Death was the first evidence
how violent was the drug business in Mexico,
how deeply the Mexican police, the Mexican government,
and some U.S. federal agencies were involved.
This is a really tragic and a really dark foretelling
of what we would start to see with the drug war later on.
You think of mass graves, and you think of genocide
in Eastern Europe, in, uh -- in Southeast Asia,
and all of a sudden this is happening
just south of our border.
Lalo will escape all prosecution.
The Juárez Cartel will soon face an enemy
far more ruthless than the U.S. or Mexican governments --
the man who will become the most notorious
drug trafficker in the Western Hemisphere.
El Chapo.
200 Mexican soldiers
are on their way to make a high-profile arrest.
They intend to nab an elusive drug lord
popular with the locals.
So popular, they've already tipped him off.
And he's long gone.
Joaquín Guzmán Loera, nicknamed "El Chapo," or "Shorty."
By age 9, he's already got his start in the drug trade
and then rises to become the most powerful drug lord
in the Western Hemisphere.
Head of the infamous Sinaloa Cartel
and known to carry a gold diamond-encrusted handgun,
his net worth will grow to over an estimated billion dollars,
earning him a spot on the Forbeslist
of the world's richest people.
He's not the stereotypical drug lord
who dresses flashy.
He's a jeans-and-baseball-cap kind of guy.
He's a very romanticized figure.
In Mexico, you have songs that are written about him.
You have entire communities that are rooting for him.
Still unknown to most of the world
but ready to make his mark,
El Chapo's strategy is to take out the cartels
that control the eastern and western border crossings
and build a power base
before taking the geographically critical Juárez Cartel.
El Chapo's Sinaloa Cartel wants to corner the market
by destroying the competition.
One major competitor -- the Tijuana Cartel,
also known as the Arellano-Félix Organization.
They control much of the border crossings to the west,
with a distribution route from Baja California to San Diego.
Both El Chapo and the DEA
have a common interest in their demise.
At a certain point, the Tijuana Cartel became more violent.
People were being killed left and right.
People were disappearing.
Chapo Guzmán and the Sinaloa organization that he was growing
was basically at war with the Tijuana Cartel.
Chapo's organization whacked
one of the Tijuana organization's top guys.
In return, Chapo's brother got murdered in prison.
It was like revenge killings -- "You killed one of mine,
I'm going to go kill one of yours."
A man walks into a DEA field office in Tijuana, Mexico.
This is Humberto Loya-Castro...
Sinaloa Cartel lawyer and DEA informant.
He'll meet secretly with the DEA on 50 occasions,
providing critical information on drug trafficking
and other organized crime across Mexico.
The DEA is at the mercy of their informants.
Chapo's lawyer was using DEA to do Chapo's dirty work for him.
Castro tells the DEA he has vital information
about Sinaloa's rival, the Tijuana Cartel.
The power of these cartels
is not to be reckoned with.
There is no line that they won't cross.
DEA agents have been killed in Mexico before.
The DEA acts fast against the threat,
securing its personnel,
then launches a preemptive strike
against the Tijuana Cartel.
They're working with one cartel to take out another cartel.
It's almost like moving chess pieces around.
The DEA cracks down on the Tijuana Cartel,
leaving an opening for their rivals.
The Sinaloa Cartel's now coming for Tijuana's turf.
And Loya-Castro's information plays a critical role.
There's certain people in the drug war.
They play in this gray area.
They're the informants and the assets and the snitches.
And they can play one side against the other.
They play in this narrow bridge that's incredibly dangerous.
They would snitch on their rivals.
And in exchange, the leadership of the Sinaloa organization
was provided essential immunity from prosecution,
and they would be left alone and allowed to operate.
But to truly dominate the drug trade,
it will come down to controlling the entire supply chain
to the streets of America.
So El Chapo sets his sights on Chicago.
A day's drive from 70% of the U.S. population,
Chicago's a transportation hub
crossed by seven major interstate highways
with extensive rail and air-travel infrastructure.
We saw Chicago being a larger and larger hub
in order to move drugs into other parts of the country.
This is Chicago's 22nd ward...
a heavily Hispanic neighborhood
where Mexican cartel members can blend in.
El Chapo's drawn to these two brothers.
The Flores twins inherited
the family's small-time drug business
when they were still in high school
and grew it to be one of the top cocaine distributors in Chicago
with an annual income of $700 million.
Chapo arranges a meeting at his mountaintop compound
to talk expansion with the two brothers,
who have deep roots in Mexico.
Trust is only one component of making the deal.
El Chapo wants to know, can they deliver?
The brothers turn over their books.
They show a strong hold on the market...
...and the potential for a solid investment.
Having those lines of distribution
is key any time that a Mexican criminal organization
wants to expand in the United States.
It was an ideal business solution.
But El Chapo's just getting started.
He's looking to expand his control of the border,
so he turns to the eastern crossings,
controlled by the Gulf Cartel.
The Sinaloa Federation
really wanted control of this major corridor.
After years of attempts
at the Gulf's territory,
El Chapo goes in to take it all.
Gulf Cartel sent its enforcers, Los Zetas --
these are trained killers, they're trained assassins,
most of them were former military special forces --
to go out and fight to keep this plaza.
That paves the way for violence
to absolutely skyrocket in not only the level,
but the characteristics of the violence.
That was when we first started seeing
the beheadings happen in Mexico, the dismemberments.
"If you're gonna cut off somebody's head,
well, we have to be able to do it, too,
to show our commitment to taking over this piece of territory."
That really was the epicenter for the expansion
of the levels of violence
that we would come to see in future years in the drug war.
The cartels' extreme violence becomes political fuel.
Eight days after his inauguration,
President Felipe Calderón echoes Richard Nixon,
declaring Mexico's War on Drugs,
but he takes it one step further --
calling on the military.
20,000 soldiers are deployed into cartel territory.
Every market that Calderón sent the military into
to ostensibly end the drug war,
the violence didn't go down, it escalated.
Despite Calderón's declaration of a War on Drugs,
Sinaloa persists.
The El Paso-Juárez corridor --
one of the most lucrative corridors in the drug trade.
Chapo Guzmán, he sees the El Paso-Juárez corridor
as the gold mine of the drug world.
After going for the border crossings
in the west and east,
Chapo's Sinaloa Cartel has come for the ultimate prize --
Juárez, controlled by the most powerful
and stSinaloa was basicallyartel killing off the police force
that was loyal to the Juárez Cartel.
They started picking 'em off one at a time,
trying to one-up each other to show who is the most powerful,
who is the most capable of inciting fear.
The control over the police force
was really the key to taking Juárez.
The Sinaloa Cartel is victorious,
earning El Chapo exclusive control of the border crossings.
But back in the U.S., the Mexican cartels
are about to face powerful new competitors...
legal narcotics with deadly consequences.
The actor Heath Ledger was found dead today.
O0 C1drug abuse by talk-show host into the Rush Limbaughcription
has ended in a plea deal.
He was booked Friday in Florida on a charge
of getting multiple prescriptions from more than one doctor.
The actor Heath Ledger was found dead today
in an apartment here in New York City.
The investigation now focuses on the theory
that an accidental overdose of prescription medication
killed Heath Ledger.
Officials say the death of the actor
highlights the growing danger of prescription-drug abuse.
When I'm asked what I think about the War on Drugs,
I often say that I think
that we're focusing on the wrong problem.
We're all concerned about illegal drugs
like cocaine and heroin,
but they're diverting attention to the real problem,
the big elephant in the room,
which is that we're legally killing you
and we're getting away with it.
And nobody's watching.
The pharmaceutical industry,
also known as Big Pharma.
They have hundreds of thousands of doctors on their payroll.
In the last decade, they've spent
over $2 billion on lobbying,
exceeding any other industry.
The U.S. is one of the only countries in the world
that allows drug companies to advertise
directly to potential customers.
$3 billion is spent on drug ads every year.
And in some states, loopholes will open the door
for a new kind of outlaw entrepreneur.
In a wealthy neighborhood, two young entrepreneurs tee off,
unaware that FBI surveillance is watching their every move.
The men are brothers. Chris and Jeff George.
In their late 20s, they got their start
selling steroids online...
before becoming game-changers in the drug industry,
dispensing thousands of pills a day,
all in the name of pain management
and wrapped in a doctor's stamp of approval.
The George brothers
really exploited this loophole
in pain-management clinics,
because there was virtually no oversight
in Florida at the time.
Anybody could start a pain clinic.
Chris George started his operation in a strip mall
with a single pain-management clinic.
The small staff of doctors were sourced from Craigslist
and were compensated on a per-patient basis,
given incentives for large and frequent prescriptions.
Whatever ailments the patients came in with,
the script the doctors were pushing was OxyContin,
also known as oxycodone --
synthesized from the opium poppy,
prescribed for the treatment of moderate to severe pain,
advertised a non-addictive substitute to morphine.
Reality -- highly addictive,
binding to the same brain receptors as heroin.
For me, it was like -- Felt like a big warm hug.
I felt kind of invincible when I took it,
but at some point, the feeling good stopped
and I turned into an addict.
This stupid, little pill has control of my life,
and there's nothing I can do about it.
Man #1: What did you have?
Man #2: The Oxy 30s.
Many of these addicts
were supporting their habit through pop-up pain clinics
that soon became known as pill mills...
...a pharmacy, clinic, or doctor's office
that dispenses hardcore narcotics
without a legitimate medical need.
Sometimes we even called them "doc in the box."
They're heavy on advertising
and light on service.
You know, "Hey, come get your pills, come get your pills."
Recreational drug dealers is what they were.
It wasn't long before the lucrative business
drew Jeff's brother, Chris, in.
Their operation was a well-oiled machine,
designed for maximum efficiency
with a constant stream of patients.
Copycat pain clinics begin to pop up --
89 in Broward County alone.
Then Chris George makes a big move
and invests in a 20,000-square-foot property,
creating the largest pill mill in the U.S.
The American Pain Clinic --
they were probably seeing in excess
of 500 patients a day at $100 a pop.
The line wraps around the building and the parking lot,
with an average doctor/patient interaction
under four minutes.
These guys had so many people coming through their doors
that they actually gave the doctors a rubber stamp
with their autograph on it so they just, bam, stamped it
and just sent people on their way.
They had strippers working in the pain clinics.
They had bodyguards in golf carts
patrolling parking lots.
Some of the doctors even carried guns
because it was such a risky business
dealing with all of these addicts.
In the parking lot behind the strip club,
they set up a mobile MRI Unit.
After a while, they just started
giving people other people's MRIs
because why do the test if -- if you don't have to?
You can just hand somebody a piece of film.
The George brothers were obviously doctoring records
and doing whatever they had to do
in order to make the money.
The George brothers were raking in the profits,
making $40 million in two years.
They were living a very lavish lifestyle.
It's all about the money.
It definitely has the same ear markings
of, you know, an illegal and illicit drug trade.
The George brothers are on their way
to meet an associate, Robert Eddy,
at a vacant house in their upscale neighborhood.
They suspect Eddy is stealing from them.
God!
The bullet just misses Eddy,
and he continues to plead his innocence.
The brothers eventually come around to his story
and pay him $10,000 to keep silent about the incident.
This is just like the Mexican drug cartel.
The George brothers were the kingpins
of the oxycodone drug trafficking.
This erratic driver
catches the attention of police and is forced off the road.
Inside the car,
OxyContin bottles cover the passenger seat.
9 out of 10 George brothers' patients
are from out of state.
There were so many people
driving from West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee
down to Florida to get their pills
that they actually nicknamed the stretch of I-75 "Oxy Alley."
There was a-a large number of overdose deaths
that started taking place
in these people that were coming in
from other states to source their drugs,
and they would end up in car accidents
or overdosing on the side of the road
after they had been to the pain clinic.
The rise in prescription-drug overdose deaths
catches national attention.
And of the top doctors
dispensing prescription painkillers,
five of them are from American Pain,
and so the clinics become a target.
Too many patients died.
They weren't able to fly under the radar anymore.
After months under surveillance,
an FBI-DEA task force decide to bring formal charges
against Chris and Jeff George.
On my command, we'll -- we'll basically --
We'll gear up, we'll line up, and we'll go ahead and --
and knock, announce, and make entry on the clinic.
Everybody sees here on the opsum we have the address.
Group 13 has the entry tools.
And, the rest of the guys, I'll tell you
where you're gonna fall in on the perimeter.
Hands up! FBI!
-Hands up! -Hands up! FBI!
-DEA! -DEA!
-FBI! Hands up!
Hands up! DEA!
As the SWAT teams were breaking down the doors,
the patients were also fighting with the receptionist
trying to get in so they could get
that last script before the doors were closed.
Come on back!
Over their two-year run,
the George brothers sold over 20 million OxyContin pills.
Prosecutors have traced over 50 overdose deaths
back to their clinics.
Jeff George is sentenced to 15 1/2 years.
Chris George receives a reduced sentence
for his testimony against some of his own physicians
and is serving a 14-year sentence.
The crackdown sends a message
to pill mills and over-prescribers.
From 2010 to 2011, the oxycodone market
decreased by 97% in Florida.
But the opioids continue to be prescribed.
In 2012, 259 million scripts are written,
enough for every American adult to have a bottle.
But the crackdown will also have severe consequences.
The DEA, they hold these press conferences.
"We've taken this, X number of pills off the street.
We've arrested these doctors. Everybody's gonna face justice."
And, of course, the thing that no one ever talks about
is demand remains constant.
So when you take away one source,
those people that are inclined to addiction
are going to turn to another source.
Drug lords in Afghanistan and Mexico
are poised to meet the demand.
An epidemic is coming --
heroin.
While a heroin epidemic grows at home...
in Afghanistan, the War on Terror rages on
with an enemy fueled by the drug trade.
Now the DEA joins the fight.
The Drug Enforcement Administration --
created by Nixon in 1973
to fight the federal government's
war on drugs at home and abroad.
Follis: DEA is the only agency in the world
that can enter into hostile zones
and develop an investigation.
Loaded. There's a bunch of mags in here.
-Reeks like hash down here. -Yeah, you can smell it.
Oh, that's hash.
The opium and heroin trade in Afghanistan
is the principal source of funding
for the Taliban's continued insurgency.
At a bazaar in Jalalabad, Afghanistan,
known for its drug trade...
...a man approaches a stall
looking to make a large purchase of high-quality opium.
Jalalabad is the epicenter
of heroin and opium exportation,
well-known as hosting overt opium bazaars.
One of Afghanistan's top drug lords, Haji Bagcho,
produces nearly 20% of the world's supply.
But this isn't business as usual.
The buyer's an undercover DEA agent.
As we began to develop our investigations,
a trafficker named Haji Bagcho was identified
as the dominant trafficking figure
in the entire southeast region of Afghanistan.
Move across. Let's go.
A team of DEA agents
in full combat gear move into position.
All right, hey, tuck up against the wall.
The agent signals payment has been made.
-Handcuffs.
Relax.
We're placing your husband under arrest
for narcotics, illegal possession of narcotics.
Agents confiscate Bagcho's ledgers.
Those ledgers gave us a treasure trove
of straight-up payments that were made
to other traffickers, government officials,
but most striking of all that were the payments to the Taliban
in the amounts that well moved into the millions of dollars.
The operation proves drug money
is being used to finance the Taliban
in their war against coalition forces.
Now Afghan heroin
and opium was an enemy of the United States.
The U.S. government makes a major policy shift,
taking on drug traffickers in Afghanistan.
And they give the DEA new ammunition
by creating a new crime --
narco-terrorism.
Haji Bagcho is one the first convicted under the new law,
created to pursue offenders
who have one hand in drug trafficking
and another in terror.
DEA always functions within the guidelines,
restrictions, the policy mandates.
It's been said that other agencies with different agendas
will work with wily and corrupt figures
within any given government.
Does it happen?
I'm sure it does.
But it doesn't happen within DEA.
The DEA and the CIA can often butt heads.
The DEA wants to arrest drug kingpins
or drug narco traffickers.
A lot of times these are precisely the people
that the CIA might want to recruit
to accomplish their loftier mission
of keeping America safe from terrorists.
Three years earlier,
one of Afghanistan's largest opium fields.
No country has ever been as addicted to drugs
from an economic standpoint as Afghanistan has been.
How anyone will ever undo that is really hard to imagine.
Haji Juma Khan, an illiterate tribesman
with 14 wives, 29 children,
and a personal army of 1,500 men.
He's also a founding member of the Taliban.
Haji Juma Khan was one of the world's
leading heroin traffickers
and supplied the Taliban
with an enormous amount of weaponry.
He really was a principal financier of the Taliban.
Workers test the new crop of raw opium for quality.
This batch is grade "A."
This opium will produce two pounds of pure heroin.
Street value in the U.S. -- over $100,000.
Juma Khan is now alleged to be on the DEA's target list.
Agents work to deepen their relationship and gain access.
One agent gets Khan to confide about a medical condition.
Haji Juma Khan came to the United States
believing he had a life-threatening form of cancer.
Using his health as a bargaining chip,
agents broker a trade...
medical care for intel.
Am I going to die?
Not in this case, Mr. Khan.
While a doctor prescribes a course of treatment,
Juma Khan is allegedly debriefed by both the DEA and the CIA.
The mission -- to gather intelligence
from the drug lord on Islamic terrorist activity
and its connection to the heroin trade.
Somebody like Haji Juma Khan for the agency
would represent a confidential source and potential operative
who could get to very high levels of the Taliban.
They flipped him, and he was put on a plane
and -- and sent back to Afghanistan in return
for getting information about the Taliban.
This is not the first time the CIA
has been in bed with drug lords.
In Cuba, the CIA forges an alliance with mob boss
and heroin trafficker Santo Trafficante
to plot the assassination of Fidel Castro.
In Laos, the agency aligns with local war lord
and opium producer Vang Pao to fight Communist insurgents,
and again in Nicaragua,
where cocaine helps fund an illegal CIA war.
The CIA will take any person, no matter how
morally, ethically,
situationally challenged they may be,
and if they think there's a use for that person,
they will try to exploit that.
The U.S. government allows Central Asia's largest
drug trafficker, Haji Juma Khan, to walk.
Agents decide having a mole inside the Taliban's network
is more valuable than stopping one of their money sources.
Many people might look at drug traffickers as the villains.
I think from the optic of the agency,
the benefit of working with narco traffickers
is they're largely apolitical,
and they are very motivated by money
and can be manipulated, potentially,
to achieve a-a higher mission.
Ultimately we're going to have to look at the War on Drugs
in a different optic.
It's an un-winnable war
and always will be an exploitable tool
that we can use.
While U.S. casualties in Afghanistan grow,
the Taliban insurgency gains strength by the day,
and the pressure to capture
or kill Osama bin Laden intensifies.
The Taliban's strategic objectives
made a lot of sense from the standpoint
of wanting to grow their heroin empir
as opposed to trying to retake Kabul,
which was the political capital of the country.
Farmers prepare bags of opium poppies
to be shipped to a heroin lab.
This field is owned by Haji Juma Khan.
For years, he's allegedly been a U.S. government informant
even though much of the money he makes
goes directly to America's enemies.
Haji Juma Khan was considered to be
one of the -- the closest traffickers to the Taliban.
He was well-known
for moving these gigantic convoys of narcotics
and moving huge amounts of weapons back into Afghanistan.
With the Taliban now earning $300 million a year
from opium, the Pentagon shifts course.
Haji Juma Khan is allegedly put on a kill list.
And the DEA is assigned a new task,
something they don't normally do --
assist in an assassination.
Juma Khan is allegedly targeted
by one of the go-to tactics in the War on Terror
but rarely used in the War on Drugs --
a drone strike.
A DEA agent calls Juma Khan and urges him to meet.
Unaware of the drone tracking him...
Juma Khan is lured out of his compound.
But instead of setting him up for the kill,
the DEA allegedly defies the Pentagon
and puts Juma Khan on a plane bound for Indonesia.
We're set for the first six months of this year.
And then we'll go even further up from there...
The DEA has saved his life.
The local police, working with the DEA, arrest him.
Khan, make it easy on yourself.
Take it easy.
This way. Come on.
Within minutes,
he is put on a plane bound for the United States.
Juma Khan is charged with financing the Taliban
under the new narco-terrorism law
and faces a life sentence.
The U.S. military's dimensional thinking
is always be capture or kill.
The law enforcement
was not to focus on capture and kill,
but investigate and prosecute.
By removing those primary players, as we did,
it slowed the trafficking industry down measurably.
But there's always,
always someone to take their place eventually.
Because unequivocally,
rewards always outweigh the risks in drug trafficking.
While the Taliban's drug traffic is being disrupted,
the U.S.-backed president, Hamid Karzai,
is serving his second term as Afghanistan's president.
The win keeps the family's control and interests safe,
including the president's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai's,
drug distribution network in the south.
Please -- Please make sure it's done today.
Ahmed Wali Karzai
is in his heavily fortified compound
when a trusted security aide enters the home.
Oh.
The president's brother is dead.
And the Taliban immediate take credit for the murder.
After the American occupation of Afghanistan,
working with known drug traffickers,
including Wali Karzai,
was simply a marriage of convenience for the CIA.
It was a means to an end.
When people look at these nuances
and changes in the drug policy,
sometimes we'll try to capture them,
sometimes we'll try to "pick winners"
and -- and maybe just tamp down the violence.
Sometimes we'll become more aggressive,
but really it's like changing the deck chairs
in the Titanic.
Tonight, I can report
to the American people and to the world.
The United States has conducted an operation
that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda.
The issue that people get wrong about the Afghan conflict
is that they think it's all about religion and ideology,
and I think that it's a lot more about drugs and money
and power than anybody realizes.
♪ God bless America
Yeah!
9/11 happened, and the United States government
actually invaded
one of the largest opium producers in the world,
and after more than 15 years of occupying,
controlling, influencing Afghanistan,
the production and monetary value
of opium and heroin from Afghanistan
has actually gone up every single year
that the United States government has been there.
The fundamental problem isn't the productionof drugs.
The fundamental problem is the demandfor drugs.
As the U.S. faces a growing opioid epidemic,
the demand for heroin skyrockets.
And just across the border,
Mexican cartels are diversifying to meet the demand.
The Sinaloa Federation
had become one of the most powerful
and geographically spread out cartels in Mexico.
Mexico is a perfect example of what happens
when you empower people who basically are total
and completely beyond the pale of law-abiding citizens.
That guy's doin' something down there.
Man #2: Let's go in there and see what's goin' on.
-Yeah, he's doing something. -You got coordinates?
North 1-5-0-9-8-3-1-9er.
Agents from Immigration Customs Enforcement,
also known as ICE,
spot a small vessel coming up the coast from Colombia,
bolting for the Mexican shoreline.
No, he's going into the inlet.
There's a whole crowd of people meeting him.
On the boat are members of the Sinaloa Cartel.
They're unloadin' stuff.
Stashed on board -- pure cocaine.
One of the challenges when a large organization
like the Sinaloa Federation expands
is to establish logistics,
to establish a supply chain,
and also local commanders to make sure that they maintain
the integrity of that newfound territory.
-They're unloading fuel barrels. -Yep.
Cartel middlemen unload the product.
All the fuel barrels are off the ship.
Overseeing the operation --
Arturo Beltrán Leyva,
nicknamed "The Boss of Bosses."
He's a top Sinaloa enforcer.
The coke is buried below fish and ice
and loaded onto commercial trucks.
Beltrán Leyva radios Mexican border patrol agents
on the cartel payroll,
alerting them the trucks are on the move,
ensuring safe passage across the border to the United States.
Chapo built the perfect
vertically integrated enterprise
where you control your product
all the way from the ground to the marketplace.
One of the most fascinating things
about the relationship that Mexican cartels have
with American distributors is that
most Americans have absolutely no idea
what is going on right under their noses.
You could be driving on any major highway
and see an 18-wheeler right next to you
loaded with illegal drugs moving across the country.
The endpoint --
the Flores brothers' Chicago operation,
who distributes the product to the street...
where the price will have increased 15 times
to over $35,000 a kilo.
The Flores brothers were wholesalers, in a sense,
that they were getting product directly
from the Sinaloa organization.
And then they were, um, distributing it to dealers.
They had houses rented that they just packed with money.
As profits soar, one of El Chapo's lieutenants,
Arturo Beltrán Leyva,
and his four brothers decide to go out on their own.
The Beltrán Leyvas thought
that they would manage operations better.
They had an issue with all that money coming in
and not getting enough of a piece of the pie,
and that was enough impetus for them to --
to go out on their own.
El Chapo's son has been released from prison.
But soon after, Beltrán Leyva's brother
is suddenly arrested by Mexican police.
And he suspects El Chapo
engineered a deal with the authorities.
Now it's Beltrán Leyva's turn.
He has the dismembered body parts
of El Chapo's militiamen delivered to his enemy.
El Chapo firebombs a Beltrán Leyva safe house.
The pattern of violence continues
as the rivals try to one-up each other.
To show who is the most powerful,
who is the most capable of inciting fear.
Then Beltrán Leyva gets personal.
15 assassins open fire in a parking lot.
One of the victims is El Chapo's 22-year-old son.
Now the civil war is on.
116 people are killed over the next month.
The surge in violence puts Beltrán Leyva on the run.
And the Mexican military reportedly place
a $2 million bounty on his head.
This is an indication
of the level of insanity and violence
that takes place in Mexico as a result of the drug war.
They're not fighting about anything else
but the money that's being made in drugs,
so the drug war creates this level of violence.
Once the killing starts, it's like --
We've seen it in mafia movies --
You kill one of mine, I kill three of yours.
I kill three of yours, you kill six of mine.
And the level of violence
and killing just keeps upping and upping and upping.
The Flores brothers are caught in the middle,
as the two cartels go to war.
They decide their only move is to work with the DEA,
allowing their calls with El Chapo to be wiretapped
in exchange for protection.
Anybody's gonna be terrified
when you're confronted with that level of violence.
You figure, "I'm gonna walk out and I'm gonna get shot.
I'm gonna get killed."
What happened with the Flores brothers
is they had no good options.
Their only option was, as far as they could see,
to work with the DEA
and hope that you're gonna get protected by the government.
An informant tips off the Mexican marines
to Arturo Beltrán Leyva's location.
The marines cover the bloody corpse in pesos
and pose Beltrán Leyva for the press.
As a final show of force,
El Chapo sends a severed head to Beltrán Levya's tomb.
Sinaloa is now poised to take over
and become the most powerful cartel
because they've got the police doing their dirty work for them.
It's not an uncommon strategy used in war --
to use the enemy of your enemy to advance your interests.
We do it in Iraq. We do it in Afghanistan.
We're doing it now in Syria.
El Chapo is now
one of the world's most powerful drug lords
and also one of the world's most wanted men.
38 years after the War on Drugs began,
there is a major push for one of its biggest targets
to become legalized in America.
DEA agents in full combat gear
descend from a helicopter and touch down on a farm.
The weed-like plants are cut and confiscated.
This is marijuana...
also known as weed,
offering a mind-altering, euphoric high.
Primary psychoactive element -- tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC.
Despite the federal government
classifying marijuana as a Schedule I illegal drug,
the cannabis market is now worth an estimated $7 billion.
It was criminalized in the early 20th century.
It was all about the weed with roots in hell
and this huge propaganda that was --
that built up around marijuana.
This harmless-looking cigarette
is cloaked in many innocent disguises.
But light the match, inhale the smoke,
and it becomes an invitation to your own murder.
Through the 1930s, '40s, and '50s,
government propaganda
claimed that marijuana destroyed the human spirit.
It made young women into fools and whores
and turned men into rapists.
They lied to us about this plant.
You smoked it, and you suddenly said,
"Wait a minute, now. This stuff isn't so bad.
I don't have any desire to go out and rape anybody.
I don't even want to get into a fight."
St. - Ending marijuana prohibition
is incredibly beneficial for everybody in society,
except for the entities who have been making money
off of its prohibition for the last 70 years --
law enforcement, private prisons,
pharmaceutical companies.
All of them, their business models are predicated
on marijuana being illegal.
On average, 700,000 Americans are arrested every year
on marijuana charges.
...2, 1!
Happy New Year!
Colorado becomes the first state to legalize
recreational marijuana use.
This veteran of the war in Iraq
will make one of the first legal
marijuana purchases to treat his PTSD.
$59.74
Thank you very, very much.
I got some legal weed!
I'm in line to buy something legal.
Let's do this. That's all I'm saying.
Let's do this.
Now legal in 28 states,
legalization is having major implications
for the Mexican cartels.
There you are.
If you go to Mexico,
then the single biggest threat
that the cartels face at the moment
to their business is legalization.
They now face a very powerful competitor
in the form of legal businesses.
And if you go to a state like Colorado
where the stuff's been legal now for some years,
it's an incredibly sophisticated business.
It's really professional.
The Sinaloa Cartel doesn't do chocolate brownies.
If you can take this gigantic market
out of the hands of criminals
and put it in the hands of law-abiding, taxpaying people,
that's much more attractive to the government.
And ultimately it leads to a market
which is better regulated, safer, and far less criminal.
Unlike the legal operations in the north,
the Sinaloa kingpin, El Chapo, operates in the shadows.
Over the last decade, he's played
an elaborate game of cat-and-mouse,
always staying one step ahead of the authorities.
Intelligence gathered from informants and wiretaps
leads authorities to this seaside condo.
Without a single shot fired...
El Chapo is finally captured.
He's sent to Mexico's most secure prison.
Truth of the matter is that the huge amounts of money
that are generated by the illegal drug traffic world
has corrupted law enforcement and the prison authorities.
Suddenly Chapo's guys come along and say,
"Well, here's 150 grand, 200 grand to look the other way
while we build this tunnel, or you're gonna die."
And, you know, people are going to take the money.
The Sinaloa Cartel digs
a mile-long tunnel directly to El Chapo's cell.
Looked like he's gonna take a shower
and disappear into a tunnel that had a motorcycle in it.
Next thing you know, Chapo disappears and he's gone.
While in hiding, El Chapo makes a bold move,
persuading Mexican soap opera star Kate del Castillo
to introduce him to actor Sean Penn.
The hope -- a collaboration on his life story.
But Penn and del Castillo don't realize they're being watched.
Mexican intelligence is tracking their every move.
After months of meticulous tracking,
the Mexican military zero in on a coastal town in Sinaloa,
El Chapo's home state.
Officials spot a van they believe to belong to the cartel
picking up a large late-night order of tacos.
The hunch -- the tacos are for El Chapo.
With the alleged support of the U.S. Delta Force,
the Mexican special forces carry out Operation Black Swan.
Five cartel gunmen are dead.
But El Chapo escapes through a hidden tunnel
in a closet connected to the city sewer system.
He stole a car and he took off.
When they caught him, he said, "Look, I'm gonna give you money.
I'll give you jobs.
I'll take good care of all of you."
But the Mexican soldiers refuse the bribe
and take Joaquín Guzmán into custody.
With evidence from the Flores brothers' wiretapped calls,
El Chapo is extradited to New York.
El Chapo is now in the most famous jail in the world,
the Metropolitan Correctional Center,
the Criminal Hilton,
to bow down before the almighty power
of the American criminal justice system.
And in that building, you have every single criminal
of every kind of stripe, from terrorists
to rogue CIA agents
to drug lords to mafia bosses.
And in his absence,
the Sinaloa Cartel continues to operate.
The U.S. government, when it makes a seizure
or takes out a notorious, high-profile drug trafficker,
it's never eliminating the problem.
It's just giving a promotion to somebody else.
It's great for the American public appetite for --
for these kind of super villains,
to have guys like El Chapo or Pablo Escobar,
to point their finger at and say, "This is a bad guy."
You lock Chapo up, you lock Escobar up,
you kill 'em, whatever you do,
somebody else is gonna be there to take their place.
Maybe 30 guys are there to take their place.
It doesn't stop anything.
It just gives the public another anti-hero
or bad guy to focus on.
911. What is your emergency?
I need -- I need an ambulance right away.
My son just overdosed on heroin.
-What's your address -- -Please!
He's unconscious. Please hurry!
I think in future,
when people look back at the War on Drugs,
they'll see one of the great
public policy failures of our time.
So much money has been spent and so much violence done,
all for such little gain.
America's public enemy number one in the United states
is drug abuse.
The U.S. government has always had
a hypocritical relationship to drugs.
On the one hand, it uses drug dealers
as part of its foreign policy.
What will you do when someone offers you drugs?
Just say no!
And then domestically,
it has built up an entire system of social control
around the use of these drugs.
The war on drugs, it's a war on poor people.
It's a means of dehumanizing
large segments of the American population
George H.W. Bush: Some think there won't be room for them in jail
We'll make room.
The War on Drugs has achieved none of its ends.
But the one thing it has done
is it increased the power of its institutions
and the laws of the state...
its powers to search Americans' homes,
to do surveillance.
That is the only tangible victory of the War on Drugs
is to have made the state stronger.
You will be put away and put away for good.
Three strikes, and you are out.
The country was given a choice,
and what happened was it doubled down on the War on Drugs.
Move, move.
We have spent trillions of dollars
over the decades, trillions,
with no positive results.
Walk backwards, backwards.
Backwards. Stop.
The only thing it created was mass incarceration.
No individual in the United States
can say, "Thank you, America, for your War on Drugs.
You saved my child."
Nobody really wants to be addicted to drugs.
It's a terrible way of life.
Law enforcement is not the answer.
The only solution is to treat it as a social and health problem.
People who get in trouble with drugs need to be helped.
They have a medical condition.
And I think a lot of things really need to change.
Drug use is not a war you win.
The reality is that no one in power
ever took this War on Drugs seriously.
They used it for political purposes.
It's an ugly truth.
Drugs are menacing our society.
They're killing our children.
George H.W. Bush: I say that legalization
is just another word for surrender,
and surrender is not in our vocabulary.
We have just begun the job,
and we do not intend to stop until we have finished.
When we fight drugs, we fight the War on Terror.
I think it's politically very difficult
for politicians to talk sense about drugs
while they're still in office.
And what we're seeing is a growing number of people
who come out and admit that the war is failing.
I signed a bill that made the problem worse.
We had a lot of people locked up for way too long.
And that was overdone. We were wrong about that.
The President of the United States.
Finding sitting presidents who are still in office
and who still have the power to change things is much harder.
To protect our citizens, I have directed the departments
of Homeland Security and Justice,
along with the Department of State
and the Director of National Intelligence,
to coordinate an aggressive strategy
to dismantle the criminal cartels
that have spread all across our nation.
Bellum se ipsum alet.
And it translates as, "War feeds itself."
Police! Police! Search warrant!
Once you create the enemy, once you build the institutions,
it will keep perpetuating itself forever.