Joe Rogan | Mexican Drug Cartels, Are There Any Solutions? w/Ioan Grillo

What is a solution? Is there any solutions to this? Well, I mean, I get, you know, I think a lot of people covering this, you get very weary. You want to see solutions. Yeah. You want to find solutions and you want to come with that optimism of finding solutions and you want to justify why you're doing this, what you're doing this for. Not just to tell the stories, but to look for solutions to this. And it gets weird, but there's three areas I believe that are solutions. First, I do agree with you on the idea of drug policy reform. Again, it's tough uphill battle. I mean, going back to 2012, I wrote editorials about, you know, one of the reasons you should legalize marijuana is because of the marijuana come from Mexico, which goes to cartels, which pays for killers, which pays for corruption. But at the same time, marijuana, a lot of, you know, a lot of is legalized in the United States and the violence actually just got worse in Mexico. So you've also got the issue of heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, fentanyl, and you've got the cartels who've gone to a bunch of other rackets now. They steal crude oil, which is a big deal. They steal billions of dollars worth of crude oil, criminals down there from pipelines. Can tap into a pipeline or something? Yeah, you go to a pipeline. You have, you normally put in two taps, you drill two holes in the pipeline, you drill a hole to put, to take the oil out, you drill a hole to put water in to try and keep the pressure the same. Then if you saw this crazy video recently in a small town in Mexico where a bunch of, there was a tap open, a really bad tap, the oil was just spraying out and a bunch of people were lining up just to pick up the oil from the pipeline and exploded. And it was just like crazy death toll. Yeah, I did see that. From that, but anyway, I do believe in drug policy reform. We have to talk about this. It has to be on the table. I mean, Americans, no one knows really what Americans spend on drugs, but there's this survey, which you can find online. If you just tap in, what do Americans spend on illegal drugs? And it is an estimate of a hundred billion dollars a year. So that amount of money, I mean, that's an estimate. I mean, it could be right. It's hard to know. It's a very round number, but like a hundred billion dollars a year. Now, if you think about that pumping into these cartels year after year, I mean, decades, how much of that, if it's 30 billion of that going down to Mexico in over 10 years, 300 billion over 30 years, close to a trillion dollars, that really creates this monster. But anyway, second area, so I'm not believing drug policy reform. I mean, I don't know how, I mean, rehab, everyone who needs it, because heroin addicts buy a lot of heroin. So everyone you save from that, you can, you know, you can stop a lot of heroin and a lot of that money, which does money goes to these people who are doing this stuff. But a second area, I believe, is social work in the neighborhoods. Like I've talked to, I've done a lot of interviews with, particularly with the assassins, with the killers in cartels in Mexico and also around Latin America. I've been traveling around Jamaica, Brazil, Central America, Colombia, talking to a lot of the killers, especially. And when I sit down with them, I try and get their life story. Like how did they first get into this? Because you're not born doing this stuff. And often, I mean, in some cases, there's different profiles. There's some of them, you know, there's one, one guy, this is Dan Honduras, which is also crazy situation. There's a guy there, I'd actually met him before I'd met him when I was doing some reporting down there back in 2015. And he was driving for us. And he was also carrying a gun to help protect us with the journeys to add a head ad who'd been hit before, been actually shot before. And then I met him again afterwards and got him to tell his story, which is kind of typical of a lot of these guys. And he described how he'd been abandoned as a kid by his parents and had this real hate that he had with the world like, you know, just fuck the world. And he described the first time that he carried out murders. And it was this was actually, I mean, he carried out later on, he documented all these hits he'd done and decapitations he'd done and this kind of crazy stuff. But the first time he carried out a murder was probably the freakiest when he was 14. And they got a family, they went into a house, they got a family and they butchered a family. And he described when he described that, and then described later on, you know, how he became a high killer. And the thing about him, like some of these people, you think they're psychopaths, they just they really don't care. But some of them really do have these conflicts inside their heart. I think he was someone or at least about to that interview. And he had, it's hard to balance that someone who does evil, but also has been a victim as well a victim and a victimizer. And you feel that pain since then he's himself been been murdered. But yeah, he's he was, you know, one, so how you get social work to reach people from a very young age, because often they're recruited into organized crime when they're 12, 13 years old. So he butchered this family when he's 14. Was he stealing money from them? Was he? So the story with that was he said that he was hanging around with these basically street kids. And one of the other kids said, I know where there's some money in a house. We can get some money in a house. So they went in there and killed his family. And it turned out there was no money there. And the reason the other kid had said, go there was because he'd actually been living with his family. And he said they'd been abusive to him. So he wanted to like, have revenge on his family. But what was so really sick about this, too, when he was describing it was they had this family and they would stop them defending themselves. They would like take them one by one, like pin them in a room and take them out, butcher them, how the other ones didn't really know what was going on. And think I mean, the action itself, but how like teenage kids can think about that stuff. And then later on, when he was talking about the decapitations, he was talking about they get contracts with decapitation inside the court, like they say that we want this killing, we want you to decapitate the guy, we want this dog, we want to see video of the guy being decapitated. We want that we want the guy to suffer. And when he hacks the heads off, there sometimes still be a moment when when the life goes out of them. And when the body is still like twitching, like he says, they can still see like, was a bit like nerves and was like a chicken, like a headless chicken. There's a bit as a part when they're still like twitching a bit even after they, you know, they've lost their kind of seven connections there.