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#178: Cartel USA, pt. 4 (The Tomorrow People™) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-01-07 06:31:54
Imported:
2026-06
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  • 178 cartel usa pt 4.mp3

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Content

"Opioid epidemic" is a phrase carefully crafted to sound like a natural disaster. It isn't. Let me tell you a couple stories.

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Comments

George E

On the Black Panthers... Is there anything to be said about the Panthers that survived 😶‍🌫️

Nic Bodiford

I’m sure it wasn’t easy doing the research for this one. Thank you for everything you do, Michael.

Peter Evans

My mom was prescribed thalidomide when I was a fetus. She never followed through thank God.

Shiv

I’m so excited for you and Bro Judge doing Clockwork together 🥛

Shiv

PSA : if like me you never img searched Otto Skorzeny—let me warn you he’s got the most haunted wiki pic I’ve seen

glenn mohre

Damn man, you sound good!

Oatmeal

Jesus Christ

Jaime Christley

First just want to say, if America is the Fourth Reich, Dick Wolf is our Goebbels. Has anyone fleeced more generations of TV watchers into a default state of cop & prosecutor worship? Second, and this is also going to be news to nobody: The Mitt Romney-style "leveraged buyout" and what then ensues will sound familiar to anyone who has watched a little indie film from the '90s called GOODFELLAS, re: what happens to the Bamboo Lounge when Sonny goes to Paulie for help when Tommy and his friends run up tabs that they'll never pay. Of course this is a classic mafia strategy called a "bustout scheme"; take over a struggling business - as simple as walking in with your goons and saying something along the lines of "this corner all built up and shit. we need it, yo."* Use the business's lines of credit to buy tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of, say, cases of liquor and cigarettes, flatscreen TVs, stereo systems, etc etc, and sell that stuff out of the back door. When the credit dries up, burn the place to the ground, and onto the next poor SOB. (It's a well enough known scheme to any crime writer worth their salt - for ex. it's a key subplot in one of Westlake's Dortmunder novels, WATCH YOUR BACK! Which is very good by the way.) This ties into your "turtles all the way down" remark about the lack of meaningful distinction between a sad little local shakedown artist and what JP Morgan Chase et al do every hour of every day. It's the ultimate logical state of capitalism. * the great Marlo Stanfield, naturally

Wyatt

I know you’re not big on Cormac McCarthy but his new book has a recurring hallucination called “the thalidomide kid” which is how I learned about that shit just recently. I guess it’s circulating in the aether.

Brendan Garcia

Peter Dale Scott pointed out that “organized crime,” is just another way of saying “tolerated crime.”

Shiv

The thing about being Black from the usa (bonus for coming up in a once thriving, crack-impacted Black neighborhood ) is I didn’t need any historic examples to convince me of your opioid theory. Mind you, I didn’t know about Pruitt-Igoe until the TA ep so I’m still digesting that particular horror.

Zach

I’m tentatively optimistic that, in the same way the narrative that the CIA killed JFK is becoming more mainstream, that the “economic Calvinism” of the elites will become more widely accepted. I think I would have had more trouble in believing your thesis on the “opioid epidemic” (for lack of a better term) if not for all the stories that have come out in recent years of nonsense like “effective altruism,” of rich freaks like Epstein and Musk attempting to ensure that more “smart people” (people like them) are reproducing, etc. I’ve noticed more people around me begin to understand that, to those at the top, anyone beneath them is subhuman. Obviously harder to say if any “impact” will result from that realization.

Ian H

As a lifelong Ravens fan I can't help but mention the explosive growth of the "healthcare" sector in the rustbelt cities of the AFC north. Baltimore, Pittsburgh and Cleveland are at respectively 30%, 20%, and 12% of total employment in that sector, with the extraction of profit from the failing bodies of now-surplus former laborers replacing the productive labor they once performed. The starving city eating itself.

ggmacd

I remember a few years back when it was revealed by a former RCMP officer who had been working on this particular file... That the money earned from the profits of the fentanyl trade in Vancouver was being laundered through local casinos and then promptly invested back in Vancouver real estate, buying million dollar properties for cash at prices well beyond asking. This was substantially juicing real-estate speculation in a market where the expectation was that prices would rise 15-20% in a *normal* year. On uncovering this, said RCMP officer was ordered to do nothing about it, with the orders coming pretty directly from the party in control of the provincial government. Worth noting that party, the BC liberals, is so friendly with developers you'd be forgiven if all you see when you look at them together is an ourobouros of ass-eating. And what did they say when called to task on this truly fucking hellish dynamic they played midwife to? Oops! we thought it would be good for the economy! The "housing crisis" in Vancouver is acute -- pretty consistently ranked in like the top few most unaffordable cities worldwide. Its unhoused population is famously large and from credible surveys, about 70% of them claim addiction to one or more substances (opioids/fentanyl being pretty prominent). Combine this with a horrifying legacy of colonialism, which included (as one of the city's founding measures) the use of real estate speculation as the legal lever to segregate and dispossess the indigenous population (plus chinese migrant workers, among others) of their land and dwellings. Today about 40% of unhoused are of indigenous ancestry, while being about 1-2% of the total population. Add to this, I have it on good authority from someone who works at a housing society tells me virtually every "otherwise unhousable" person his building houses is there on a path they were set on more or less due to being (sexually) abused as a child. Anyway, it's been years since it was publicly revealed that all of the city of Vancouver's trademark crises are effectively and purposely vertically-integrated into massively-scaled meat grinder for anyone who happens to be marginalized. I don't think I've ever heard another person tie these things together, though these overlapping crises are individually all constant topics of conversation if you live in the city. Kind of makes a fella feel fucking insane, so I really appreciate you drawing this kind of dynamic out as you see it and putting it so clearly. You're absolutely correct. And maybe, where a city like Vancouver (or San Fran, or Portland) really differs from, say, Cleveland, is how successful it has been at working every single angle to turn the suffering of its 'surplus population' into rocket fuel for its real estate values. PS. the amount of NGOs and charitable organizations in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside (the epicenter of this crisis) basically outnumber the population they're meant to serve... y'know, in case there was any doubt our hearts weren't in the right place.

Dan Leyendecker

Seconding Wyatt’s comment; Michael, I know you think McCarthy is kind of mid, but his latest book feels like some kind of DIJATC companion

Sean

Mom new D/C dropped and it’s a fuckin BANGER

Rimbo Jackson

Every time I hear the name Sullivan Cromwell come up these days…it’s in reference to the FTX collapse. Absolutely no chance crypto is a way to launder money for wealthy bad actors connected to the drug trade and various government entities. Right?

U wot mate

I used to help out with a bunch of odd jobs and yard work for this quirky old neighbour of ours on Vancouver Island. She would tell me stories about her sister who had "saved countless lives fighting evil bastards" or something along those lines, but I never understood the context. Years later my own sister filled in the blanks and told me that our neighbour's sister was Dr. Frances Kelsey, who is a bit of folk hero for having thalidomide banned. In the 1940's she researched potential pharmaceutical effects during pregnancy, specifically with regards to birth defects via the placental barrier (as you mentioned, a bald faced lie that we didn't have this information already). She joined the FDA as one of only 7(!) drug reviewers in the early 60's and withheld Grünenthal's thalidomide application approval despite them making her life a living hell and including using their US government connections to try to have her US work visa overturned and constant harassment and intimidation for years. By all accounts, it sounds like she was a real one.

Brian

Yep! In the 70’s my dad worked a gd cash register in a grocery store and owned a house! My mom didn’t work! (This was Clinton MO if you are familiar.)

Kate Baldwin

MSJ I really love this series. Especially as a former addict. But your closing song (which I love) empire state of mind. When they say towards the end 'how clever look at us we done it again!' Fucks me up. Like the entire song is beautiful and terrible but that line always gives me chills

Phil Harrison

I forgot to take a note of the timestamp for the two books you recommended, too engrossed to pause! If be grateful if anyone could reply with both titles?

warren_

I know you’re telling an exceedingly serious story here but your delivery on the line “And Hitler thought that was *cool*” made me laugh out loud

Colin Helpio

Your Cartel USA series is my favorite podcast series out there. Thank you man, I've really loved these.

Sandy

I'm only a half hour in, so you may touch on this, but something that must be noted, that is consistent with the idea that these drug smuggling networks are a facet of the spider network/the CIA/gladio/The rocket city/etc. is the way these fascists implemented white supremacist policies within these illegal drug smuggling networks. (Implementating policy in illegal networks is impossible! You say. But as Liz from Truanon points out, all markets need regulation. The CIA is well positioned to fulfill this.) MSJ has already pointed out in his Iran Contra series how the CIA flooded black neighborhoods with crack. There was aals shift in the drug markets of native Americans in the 70s. There was a time when you could get the same shit in town where white people lived as on the native American reservation (the rez). Then at one point it switched. You could still get the "fun stuff" in town, LSD, Mushrooms, Weed, cocaine, but on the rez you could only get the "scary shit," meth, crack, and yes, heroin. They may have also been selling the scary shit to white people, but they sold it so much harder to natives and black people, likely other groups. This is consistent with the apparent fascist nature of the drug dealers and smugglers sanctioned by the CIA. I have no doubt this strategy was refined into what would eventually become Iran Contra. I'm not indigenous, this was a story from somebody's grandma. Alone this proves nothing, but it is believable, and could be a good lead to those researching this area.

Sandy

Quick note: MSJ mentions that crack was cheaper than cocaine, but Highway Rick Ross on one of Joe Rogans early podcasts that MSJ himself pointed me towards tells how crack wasn't actually any cheaper, but that after one hit, "you'd walk across town for the next one."

g28

Man. My wife's having real bad morning sickness this time around so they gave her a sample of some drug. I googled that shit so thoroughly after listening to this