Joe Rogan | How Corruption and Legalized Weed Impacts Mexican Drug Trade w/Ed Calderon

It must for you to have your life on the line over there and see all this chaos and obvious either lack of organization or outright corruption, it must be insanely frustrating. Yeah, I mean, putting people in that were clearly guilty of things, you know, and then seeing them come out. Or the legal system down there that I had to endure, you know, you would have to go and do a face to face with all these people. Right? Go into a federal courthouse, leave your firearms behind, do a face to face with these people inside that you just got that you just got for however many tons of cocaine or pot or whatever. And then go outside and they're outside, you know, now, now I know who you are, you know, there's no anonymity in that in that regard. So you would have to sign things, you know, and then seeing some of the people that were with you working on your side, and seeing them how some of them would fall into corruption charges and then sue the government and then get your jobs back. But you have somebody is compromised within your own unit. Wow. Alright, so they did try a few things to try and clean out police forces. One of them was a plan they called the C3 plan. It was like a like a filter for police officers down there. It's still in it's still in action. But you know, it's questionable if it's effective or not. I saw a lot of people go through it and later on they would turn out to be cartel guys. Basically they would do a background check, FBI background check, polygraph exam, drug testing, all the all of these things to see that you were, you know, clean to work on these police forces. The problem is that the polygraphs turned out to be unconstitutional to fire somebody over them. So a lot of these people got hired back after they would fail a polygraph, basic polygraph exam. So again, it's a lot of attempts to clean it up, you know, and you would be on the level and all these people won't be on the level, but they were still there. So what percentage of people are not on the level if you had a guess? Roughly. I mean, I'd say would depend. I'd say 30% probably. That's a lot. Like on my experience of the people that I worked at 30% weren't on the level. You must cherish the 70. Oh, like family. Like family. And you would know when some of these people weren't on the level because, you know, I have this running joke that I went in with the same car that I drove out of the office with. You know, a shitty truck that I bought when I, you know, bought my own dime. First truck, first car. And I drove out of the office when I quit the job that same day. I drove out of the office in that truck. But a lot of these guys would come in with their, you know, Hummers and H2s and just weird cars. They'll like, wait a minute. This doesn't make sense. Like we are working the same office. Why do you have a three story house? That's so obvious though. I prove it, you know? Yeah, but the obviousness of it. Oh yeah. The blatant. Driving a nice car, living in a big house and everybody else is like, what? Yeah. There's obviously these unwritten rules of, you know, you wouldn't tell on this guy. Of course. But, you know, it was obvious. And when it came time to share information of a certain kind or we're going to go over here and you would have to turn around and look around and see who was listening, you know? Yeah. You wouldn't trust a lot of these people. So how are we going to do our job if we can't trust the people that are working with us? Who was it that recently called for decriminalization? Was it your president that called for a decriminalization of all drugs in America to go along with Mexico? Is that what it was? Yeah. To try to do something about the cartels. We're on the brink of legalizing marijuana in Mexico right now. Like there's been a few landmark cases and, you know, it's Gold Rush type situation right now. There's a lot of these down there that have had experience up here that want to go down there. Right. So the culture is ready for it, I think. Do you think that would help? I don't know. When it comes to legalizing pot up here, it hasn't helped down there as far as lowering things actually made things kind of worse. How's it made things worse? They changed. I don't know. They changed the, they changed what they were producing. So that the reason why there's a heroin epidemic up here and fentanyl epidemic up here. I think has some relationship with how things got legalized up here and how they switched product down there. So lighter colored heroin is coming down from Mexico. And I've seen, I work with law enforcement up here in the US doing classes and kind of, you know, they send me things like, what do you think about this Ed? And I've seen that lighter colored heroin pop up in places as far off as Chicago. So you know because of the color? Yeah, the color or the smell, the consistency, you can kind of tell if it's Asian or Mexican. Is it a different strain? Like it's probably a different strain and it's also the amount of sun it gets in the region where it's been being grown. It's high altitude. So it's lighter color, not as stinky. I don't know. But I think it's a relation, that kind of relates to the legalization issue down there. It didn't affect them in the pockets. They just switched product. It's got to be, it's such a strange relationship because the reason why these drug cartels have so much power is because they're selling drugs to the United States. So it's like you have this connection to this country that has this great big wall that it wants to build. And on one side, everybody's buying up all the illegal drugs. On the other side, everyone's killing everybody to try to make and sell these illegal drugs. Yeah. I mean, and there's a lot of holes underneath that wall. Drones. Yeah. Drone technology. Is that wall going to help anything? Well, the wall's already been up for a few years. Part of it. In places like Tijuana, which is like one of the richest drug routes on the planet. And the drugs are caught the same. It's the same. Yeah. And what about the ocean? Can't they just take a boat? I've seen one large submarine in my time working. Really? A large? Like military size? Like scientific size. Where the fuck does somebody buy a submarine? A line, apparently. Really? Yeah. You can buy a submarine? You can buy a small submarine for a small amount of money. I think the main part of the submarine ownership is maintenance. That was the reason we found it is that it wasn't properly maintained. So it sunk? It actually, no, it actually floated. Couldn't sink. Oh. And it had a bunch of things hanging off behind it. Submarines scare the shit out of me. You can't see where you're going. Well, so yeah, I've seen submarines, drones, like a squadron of drones with a bunch of loads on it flying. How heavy can a drone get and still fly? I've seen full like two kilos on it. Really? Yeah. So just flying the coke over the top. Yeah. And the only reason I found out about those is one of those crashed in a roadside next to the border fence. Were you around when that CIA drug plane crashed in Mexico with tons of cocaine on it? I wasn't there, but I was aware of that situation. What the fuck is that about? I mean, realistically, there's a lot of Americans running around in Mexico. Yeah. That's in. And there's a lot of cowboys, right? Yeah. A lot of people say, listen, we just make this one run. They're like, the government doesn't give a fuck about us. My passion sucks. It could be. It could be. Every now and then, and this isn't a secret. Every now and then you would see a dude out there that's blonde, tall, and has a bunch of tattoos that don't belong down there working on the military side of things in Mexico, or some dude's doing something someplace in your land that you would get a call, oh, they're fine. Just leave them alone. So who knows? Who knows? If it's three out of 10 were corrupt where you were, it might be like one out of 10. I have no idea. CIA guys. I mean, you know, usually we would get to, since I have a pretty good spoken English, I would get, I would get, I would get sent places for training or for liaison work with some people that would go down there. And I would never know what the hell some of these people were from, you know? So who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? 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