Quick Fix 2 | It's Not Gonna Make a Difference

Eric Sterling tells Clayton and Greg about the futility in how the War on Drugs is being waged in South America.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm Greg Gloudy, English and this is a War on
drugs quick fix? Man. How you doing, Clayton, I'm good Man,
I'm good. Okay, So Clayton, we you know, we have
some amazing guests and sometimes you just can't fit everything
into the episode that we're doing. But yeah, so this

(00:22):
is almost like the bonus feature the director's cut um aspect,
and I don't want to give much to it because
this is from the Eric sterling Um interview that we did,
and he tells this amazing story about a trip, you know,
down to South American and Colombia and how politicians kind
of use the war on drugs for political gain and
kind of what some of these almost photo ops kind
of look like and where a lot of this comes from.

(00:44):
Because not only can the War on drugs be profitable financially,
but from a political gain as well. I think that's
pretty obvious that you can go back and say I'm
being tough and war on drugs definitely is a good
campaign for whoever. I mean it it's for a shriff
or whatever. You're gonna roll out that table with the

(01:05):
two German shepherds and they're gonna put on everything that
they found and just you know, and act like they're
doing something. When I went with the Select Committee on
Narcotics on a on a fact finding mission to South
America and we're meeting with the top government officials to

(01:27):
encourage them to do more to fight quote the War
on drugs, and to find out what more left they're doing.
And in Peru, the Chairman and I have flown in
in this proving aircraft into the jungle of the Amazon
Watershed where we're seeing cocoa being grown and coca being
chopped down, but with taxpayer money. And we have seen

(01:49):
all this cope. We're seeing it being chopped down. We
knew how it was supposed to be eradicated, but they
were chopping down with machetes these old, crummy coca bushes
that were a pair their viability, and then spraying the
herbicide on the ground around the route. They were killing
the weeds that were going to interfere with the cultivation

(02:09):
of the coca. They were in effect pruning coca bushes
and improving their viability using US tax dollars in front
of members of Congress, thinking we wouldn't know what's going on.
The congressman who represented Ocean City, New Jersey, turns to
me and he says, now I understand the meaning of
the term pissing into the wind. We here we you

(02:34):
realize when you're flying in a helicopter in Colombia to
sort of see the Colombian military chopping down marijuana plants
with machetes and asked plantation after plantation in the helicopter
US No, no way, this is this is this whole
strategy is not going to succeed. There's no economic sense

(02:55):
to it. You know, there's it's it's a boon doggle.
It's a campaign. You know, how do I get elected?
How do I sound tough? You know, we would send
these message. You know, you'd hear members of Congress give
these speeches on or sending a message to the dope
dealing scum. We're not gonna take it. The message they're
really trying to send is, hey, voters, I'm protecting your children.

(03:16):
I'm doing something that you want to have done. It's
not gonna do It's not gonna make a damn bit
of difference, But I hope you get the message. Yeah,
I'm looking like I'm doing something. I'm sounding like I'm
doing something. I'm Clayton English and I'm Greg Glad and
this has been a war on drugs. Quick Fix, thanks
again for listen