Totalcrime
A true crime podcast, written and produced by Chris Summers, veteran crime reporter with more than 30 years of experience. He has been writing producing content for Totalcrime on Substack since March 2024 and is now launching into podcasting. The podcast will be a mixture of Chris narrating true crime stories from the UK and around the world, and occasional interviews with people who are knowledgeable about crime.
Totalcrime
From Cockroaches to YouTube Success
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Life has come full circle as I interview Shaun Attwood, a YouTuber with 1.1 million followers, who I first wrote about in 2004 (see first link), when he was blogging from an Arizona prison about the horrendous conditions he was facing after being incarcerated for selling party drugs like ecstasy. In today's episode he tells me about being plagued by cockroaches, intense heat and gang violence in prison, and how he got the word out and embarrassed Sheriff Joe Arpaio. We also discuss the "war on drugs" and he tells me how he reinvented himself on YouTube.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3735826.stm
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-10985113
Hello, uh welcome back. This is the Total Crime Podcast. I'm Chris Summers, and this is episode twenty-six. Uh and I've got with me, virtually, uh Sean Atwood. How are you doing?
SPEAKER_00Chris, I just want to give you a huge thank you. For over 20 years ago, when you first reported on my story, it started to generate interest and it's never stopped ever since you kicked it off.
SPEAKER_02Ah, right, yeah. This is so we've we've come full circle, really.
SPEAKER_00Uh I was saying that. I was saying that to my partner. I said we've gone full circle with this one.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, I should I should explain to the the small percentage of the world who don't know you. Sean is plenty. Uh on YouTube we've got 1.1 million presently. Yeah. Right. So I I we really don't need much of a uh an introduction. But today we're gonna go into your backstory and and the origin story, as they say in superhero land. Um so uh let me start off by saying is it Witness? Is that where you grew up or you you are from?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Witness Cheshire, chemical manufacturing town. Rugby League town, huge rugby league town. My dad was a daughter-door insurance salesman, and my mum originally was a state-home mum, and then she later went on to become a teacher. Okay, right, yeah.
SPEAKER_02That the Barbara, isn't it? I I Yes. I I remember I don't know if I inter I must have interviewed. Did I interview her or just um I think there's some quotes from them, isn't there, in those articles? Yeah, there is, but I and I I must have maybe given given her a call or something. Probably. But okay, so you what were you like as a young kid, sort of teenager, all that sort of thing?
SPEAKER_00So I was probably one of the last to grow in my year group, and I remember getting beat up by the rugby players stick your head in the mud and in the water and and hold you down. And um, so I had social anxiety as a teenager, but then when the rave scene started and I took ecstasy, I couldn't stop dancing and talking to strangers and making friends all night long. Prior to that, I was scared to dance, too self-conscious, wouldn't go up and chat to girls. So the rave scene kind of transformed uh my social life.
SPEAKER_02So am I right in thinking that you it was in 1991 you moved to Arizona?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I had two aunts out there, and I moved to live with one of my aunts and applied to be a stockbroker.
SPEAKER_02Okay, right. So you were kind of bumming around doing not very much here, and then suddenly you went to America, you became a stockbroker, but you became a raver, and uh as we're gonna find out, you you dabbled in a bit of drugs as well. Yeah, so tell me what your life was like in the Arizona rave scene of the 90s, you know.
SPEAKER_00So it was they were behind musically, so I started to click up with the local DJs and stuff, and had all these tapes, the 808 steak show and Piccadilly radio playing all the rave stuff, so all these DJs were like stealing my tapes, and I was like, anyway, it grew to the point where I had investments into rave clothing music stores, and we were throwing raves up to 10,000 people at a time would attend them. But you know, being a businessman, studying economics, I saw the opportunity to integrate that into ecstasy importation, and I was only in my 20s, no common sense, no emotional maturity. I sacked off my work as a stockbroker and went full-time in the party scene, and it wasn't my brightest idea to break the law where Sheriff Joe Arpayo was running the local jail system. Presumably, you were you were kind of aware unaware of him until you got banged up or unaware of him until I'm in an environment where people's teeth are getting knocked out, heads getting smashed against toilets, there's dead rats in the food, there's cockroaches crawling over at night time. It's uh almost 50 degrees on the UK scale. There's like a swamp cooler that doesn't work, so you're all got all these bleeding and itching skin infections and bed sores. It was a proper house of horrors. I'm not saying jail should be easy, I deserve punishment, but uh the human rights stuff was off the scale in in his it created an extremely dangerous environment. A lot of people got murdered.
SPEAKER_02So we we uh just going back a bit, you so you got did you get sort of caught red-handed with a load of you know, e-tablets or no, I didn't get caught with anything.
SPEAKER_00Oh right. But what I I was naive to the statute of limitations and actually quit a year before they caught me, the importation.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00Statute of Statute of Limitations in Arizona is seven years, so all it takes is someone from the past seven years to tell them I did a deal with him and they've got you.
SPEAKER_02Oh right. So you'd quit you'd quit while you're ahead, uh well, you thought you were ahead.
SPEAKER_00They caught up with you anyway. Yeah. And they had to uh accept my karma cheerfully. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So did you did you copper please straight away reminded?
SPEAKER_00I was fighting my case for 26 months. Originally I was facing 200 years. Oh shit. Right. Yeah, it's terrifying.
SPEAKER_02Were you on your own on the indictment, or did you have sort of co-defendants?
SPEAKER_00No, so it was a state case. It was equivalent to Rico, that had continuous criminal enterprise. I was the hit lead figure in a crime syndicate, and I had over a hundred codefendants.
SPEAKER_02Right. And just um on that environment, because nowadays we're obviously used to hearing reading a lot about Mexican drug cartels and fentanyl and all you know all that sort of stuff. But I mean, where were you sourcing your your supply from?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so we sent smugglers to Holland with testing kits for a website called Dance Safe to make sure it was the pure stuff. Uh, we had we tried various routes, but in the end, to get the bulk back, we had people jump on a plane from Ermacio, you know, Mexico near California, over to Mexico City, then they that would be Air France to Paris, train over to Holland, and then they'd come back on that route. We'd take them down to where I had property in Porto Peñasco, Rocky Point, a proper spring break location for the students, and then we'd smuggle them back over the border into Arizona. That was our main route. So we had to be okay with the people down in Mexico to be able to do that because Mexico's divided into plazas and whatever cartel controls, whatever plaza, you've got to be okay with the locals. So I sent my mates down there, wild man and wild woman, to pave the way for that. And my other mates in Arizona said, Oh, the Mexicans will kill him. And uh, when I went down there, they were running wild men around in in military jeeps, calling him El Oso the Burr because of his fighting style. Right. He's dead now, he's on the wall. Is it he's the guy up uh in one of these pictures behind me? Oh, there he is behind me on the wall. Right, right. Died in his forties from multiple organ failure because he lived such a hard and fast life.
SPEAKER_02So just going on uh I mean, I I remember in that time, the 90s. I mean, one of the cases I covered in early days was um the Rettenden murders in Essex, which um obviously they're three guys who were linked to dealing um ecstasy in the the club in Basildon where famously Leah Betts um she didn't actually die from E, obviously, she died from sort of taking too much water as you know in response to it, but she was sort of the the poster child for beware, watch out for ecstasy and all that sort of stuff, wouldn't she? But I mean Absolutely. Yeah, I mean you you don't believe anyone that you gave you know gave drugs to died or anything.
SPEAKER_00No, we tested them. Uh we would have known right away if someone had died. And the police, you know, they overcharge you, they would have pinned any deaths upon me if they could have if they could have proven anything like that. And we have done a lot on my YouTube channel on the Essex Boys case. We had a lot of different guests on over the years, absolutely fascinating. So I think uh I think the police corruption was heavily involved.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah, well I I don't know whether we'll ever get to the end of that story, but it's uh it's a it's a massive one. Right, go going back to 2004, so that's when I uh first wrote this article. I was working with the BBC at the time, BBC News website, and I can't remember where I heard about you. Must have read an art m I must have read some little piece in The Guardian.
SPEAKER_00It was in The Guardian first.
SPEAKER_02Probably a nib, you know, news in brief, as we say, you know, little piece. But I thought, oh, that sounds interesting. So yeah, what what was happening was that you were well you you were doing a blog or with the help of your dad. So but it's better to uh come out of your mouth. Tell me tell me what was going on.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so my dad has read a book called The Baghdad Blogger, and he had this idea that we should start a blog. So I started to write everything down with a little tiny pencil that sharpened on the door, and I released uh property to my aunt at visitation in Maxim Security through the staff, and she smuggled what I wrote out of the jail, typed them up, emailed them to my parents in witness, and they put them online as a blog, John's Jail Journal, J-O-N-S Jail Journal, and it's all still up, time-stamped to this day, all those all those entries. And that article you wrote, I started to get letters from people all over the world who wrote to me throughout my incarceration and sent me books. And these are all the wonderful things that happened, Chris, after you wrote that story that you probably might not even be aware of.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, I I think it got I remember it got quite a big, you know, a lot of hits. Quite a lot of people read it, there was quite an interesting tale, you know. It's very in the very early days of sort of blogging and the the the internet, you know. Um so yeah, but it was it was fascinating. So yeah, you were you were writing down little um written little notes um and and it was smuggled out um and you and your dad was kind of got the idea from the Baghdad blogger, which is a guy called Salam Pax, I think his name was, who he was writing about sort of life in Baghdad kind of rant during the war and you know the when the Americans first went in and all that sort of stuff, didn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Um so so yeah, one of the one of the things you were writing, you were writing about the sort of prison conditions, weren't you, and which um ended up get that got back to Sheriff Joe Arpeo, who realized you know he was getting sort of criticism, uh, which he you know he was probably wondering, how the hell who's that writing that, you know, but um he was you know suddenly getting some bad press about the conditions in his prisons. Um so yeah, tell me what happened, what happened from that point, you know.
SPEAKER_00Well It was it was the cockroaches that caught the attention of the Guardian because when I got moved over to Maxim Security, it was uh eight at night, was locked down, ten was lights out, and the cockroaches would line up in the cracks in the wall in this whole building, doing this little shuffle with the antennae sticking out, and as soon as the lights went off, they would just flood the room. Oh, we had a choice, we could wrap a sheet around us, but like I said, it's almost 50 degrees, you've got all these bleeding and skit skin infections and bed sores and itching. Or you can let them just crawl on you, uh, which is what I ended up doing. I tried to wrap the sheet around me, but I couldn't sleep, it was unbearably itchy. They don't bite, they start out tickling your feet, your legs. To this day, if anyone tickles my hands, I I flinch because I I woke up so many nights of them on my hands, and I just had to throw them across the room. They get on your face, mouth, nose. But the favourite place of all is going in your ears to eat your earwax. It's like honey to them. And we had a neighbour who was asthmatic, he wakes up one morning out of breath, grabs his inhaler, takes the blast, shoots a live cockroach inside himself. He's trying to throw throw it up and it's stuck inside him. Even in the daytime, there were so many the prisoners were doing cockroach races on the day room tables, gambling on the winner. They owned the building. So that's that's what put the blog on the map. Now, the sheriff, while I was in the jail, it didn't come to his attention. I got moved over to Super Maxim Security Prison, which is after the remand, when you ran that article, and that's when I started to get all of the letters and all the love from people all over the world. So I was out of his jurisdiction, so he couldn't do anything to me by then. And actually, when um when we had the National Geographic bang up abroad episode out Raving Arizona, I sent Sheriff Joe Apau a signed copy of Hard Time saying, um, thank you, thanks to your jail. You know, I've turned my life around. I speak to school kids now, I'm putting them off drugs, and we've got this documentary going out. And he went and advertised the documentary for us, which which which really did expose his jail.
SPEAKER_02Remind me, um, Ruby Wax went over there as well, did a documentary. That was that before you, you know, you we uh did she just sort of or her crew just sort of found the toughest sheriff of it was supposed to be about Mary's sheriff or something, wasn't it?
SPEAKER_00A lot of people went out there after us. I think Joan Harry went out there. Uh he wrote about it in Chasing the Scream, and that comedian went out of there, that that Borak guy, he um what's his name?
SPEAKER_02Uh yeah, Sasha Barron Cohen.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he he tricked Sheriff Joe into saying some salacious uh stuff.
SPEAKER_02Oh right, uh he looked that up on the screen, man.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So then remind me, um he then did something about the was it pink uniforms and everybody in tents and all that sort of stuff.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so our outfit then was the black and white bee stripes, the old 1920s chain gang style, and pink underwear to humiliate the prisoners. So we had pink boxer shorts and pink socks.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay, but not pink uniforms, but just uh pink underwear to delo masculinise you or something.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because you're getting strip searched all the time. So as soon as you go in, the guard looks getting it completely naked in front of the guard, looks in your ears, mouth, armpits, staring at your man parts, raise your man parts, then you've got to turn around, bend over, spread your buttocks wide open and cough. And they're looking right up your backside to see if you smuggle anything in. There's also a foreskin search for drugs, but I won't get into the details of that one.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Um then um so yeah, tell me a bit more about the some of the people you were in with. Were you were they uh they were some pretty uh were they were they they weren't on remand, they were convicted prisoners as well, aren't we?
SPEAKER_00So the first 26 months was remand, and then I did the balance of my sentence in the Arizona Department of Corrections in the prison system. So remand is very transitory, all the new arrestees, it's just absolute mayhem. The guards have got people fighting and they're making bets on who's gonna win. There's just all these four racial gangs. If you're white, the neo-Nazis come up to you right away, the Aryan Brotherhood explain the rules. If someone hits you or calls you a punk or calls you a bitch, you've got to fight them on the spot, or else the whole gang will attack you. You must take showers, or they'll attack you for bad hygiene. Can't go make your friends with the guards, they'll attack you for snitching. Can't sit at the tables with other races, they'll attack you for that, and on and on and on and on it goes. And they've got Hitler all over them, swastikas, lightning bolts, tears. It's it's uh it's a different world in there.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I did a um I did a uh substack. I I think I did a podcast as well about a guy called Tommy Silverstein, who was the um one of the leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood. Um and yeah, and I went into that whole it's yeah it's just weird, isn't it? I I think British prisons are totally different. I as I understand it. I mean there are sort of Muslim gangs and and stuff like that, and you do get the occasional, you know, if London gangs are on the same wing, they might sort of kick off, but there's it there's certainly no other sort of racial segregation in in America. It sounds like most prisons, you know, you if you're white, you just can't hang out with black guys or or anything like that, or Latinos.
SPEAKER_00It's all about the drug business. So so all the gangs, the priority is getting that in. They've got the guards bringing it in, they've corrupted some of the guards. And if a white guy wants to fight a black guy, no one's allowed to jump in, it's got to be one-on-one, otherwise, then there's a race riot, the whole system gets locked down, they can't get the drugs in. So it's all very controlled. And I interviewed Michael Thompson, who was one of the founders of the Arian Brotherhood as well. Could agree the stories that he told me, like at Corker in prison, they were fighting. The guard they had so long with the knives before the guards would shoot them, so they had to grow the muscles thicker so they could fight a little bit longer to absorb the shotgun bullets, so they could try and stab the other guy to death before the other guy murdered them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, it's a it's a different world, man. Um and how did the mild-mannered uh stockbroker survive this? And you I mean, you you obviously learnt all the rule, all the prison rules not to do. Um, but you how did you did you fight people just to sort of make them weary or just act mad or what?
SPEAKER_00So Wild Man, the guy above my shoulder, he was arrested with me. Uh and he was when he died, he was 29 and a half stone and six foot two. So as we're approaching the jail, and we're in the van getting out of the jail, and there's a queue outside, all these men, and the men in the queue are heckling these women look like you know like street walkers and stuff. So, anyway, our women get out of the van first, our co-defendants and partners and stuff. Wildman's watching Wild Woman get out, and Wild woman, Wildman's got red dots in his head telling him to hurt people, and whenever he's gonna do something crazy, he's had that since he was a kid, and whenever he's gonna do something crazy, his face stays completely calm, but one uh just one eyebrow goes up, slanted. So he's watching these fellas yell, I don't know, obscenities to Wild Woman, and I watched the eyebrow go up, like, oh god, he's gonna do something here. So he gets to the top step of the van, he's about to get out. The redneck officers yell at him to get out, and he's it he's got this Viking, crazy Vikings beard, and he's been up for days on crack and meth. He hasn't slept, and he puts his Vikings beard back and he goes, You loved disrespecting our women! I'm gonna be in there in a minute with all of you, and I'll find a many of you, and he just pulls his crazy face, he goes, You think I won't? And he goes, and they all just shit themselves and show up right away. Yeah, it was he was like he was like that, he was like that all the way through it, Chris. All the way through it. The Italian mafia, I've interviewed an Italian mafia guy called Bruno, who was in there with us. He saw my documentary on uh America Got in Touch, and he said, Yeah, you know, wild man, he was just he had a massive heart, but he was very unpredictable. We had nothing but love and respect for him, and he was just like a uh a lone force of nature in in the jail.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, right. That was uh handy people to have in your corner. So uh how long do you actually do? How many years were you in there?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I served uh just under six years, and I got released in December 2007. I was on Connor for a couple of days, and then they put me on a regular flight from LA to Gatwick. If you if you look on my YouTube, there's uh you can see pictures of me. Uh I think I'm at Heathrow Gatwick with my mum and dad. I'm all stubbled out, and my sisters explaining to me what texting is on a phone and stuff.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so a whole uh almost a decade had passed you by and and you know didn't have smartphones, but you you were coming into that age of so what did you do? I mean, it was 2010 when I did this follow-up article, um, and by then you were kind of you were doing this um sort of drug education stuff, and I think you and then you brought the brought the book out by then, the first book, Hard Time. Um but yeah, what what happened to you? What was it like getting back into the groove of living a pretty hundred humdrum live in England?
SPEAKER_00So my first year I was living in my parents' garage, then you know, remade it into a room uh on the dole, and I moved down south, and I lived in my mate's bedroom for 10 years, which wasn't much bigger than my jail cell. Uh, but I was on my computer, you know, diligently writing my books and building up all my socials. Uh the schools' talks ended up, I ended up doing over 100 talks a year uh to the schools, right up until the pandemic, which then slowed it down. But my life kind of reconfigured during the pandemic where YouTube took over and and the book the books as well because people were at home watching videos and reading. So the YouTube and the books um really grew during during the pandemic. Yeah. Yeah. And then so you've written uh 19 books, is it? Well, life story is a trilogy. It's it's uh party time, hard time, and prison time. And then I wrote a series of books about Pablo Escobar and the war on drugs. And then um I've started writing about conspiracies about Epstein, because Epstein, Prince Andrew, etc., they became uh some of the biggest, most viral videos on our channel. Still, still now the Epstein stuff's still running strong.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. Well, it's uh it's been given fresh uh well, a lot of conspiracies have been given fresh sort of uh oxygen, haven't they? The the UFO files, I don't know if you've done anything on them, but obviously UFOs is a big one. Well you UAPs, apparently they're called by the Pentagon. Um yeah, there's there's uh I mean personally I've all I've always believed that you know most conspiracies are are cock ups, you know, that you know I I I believe that you know uh big societies like Britain and America are just capable of massive cock-ups, you know, when so things like 9-11 I I I don't buy all the conspiracies about you know they knew about it and they deliberately or they let it happen or even you know whatever. I just think it was a massive cock-up. And I I think that goes with with a lot of things, but it's it's not I mean I love a conspiracy theory, don't get me wrong. I I love you know what imagine if that was happening. In fact, I should I should tell you about a um a trial I covered years ago about these two guys who were trying to sell uh Federal Reserve bonds, which they had apparently found in a crashed American plane in the Philippines jungle, and it contained um like trillions of dollars of US Federal Reserve bonds. And it you know, it's especially like an IOU note. So you go and they say the American government owe me this you know trillions of dollars, and surprisingly, the Americans didn't want to pay him. So they they anyway, cut a long story short, they ended up getting convicted of fraud because um they kind of proved that the that they'd been printed on sort of uh 1990s or 2000 era sort of paper and print and ink and all that. So it it you know their their idea was was all made up.
SPEAKER_00But the theory, you know, what if they were telling the truth and you know that the the the authorities had deliberately sort of come up with that evidence to to avoid the Americans having the American government had to pay out for what would bankrupt America in Well I mean I mean what was it 20 years ago Alex Jones said there was an island where royalty famous movie stars, prime ministers, politicians went to do these things to kids, and everybody laughed at him, and then it all all came out about Epstein. So yeah, there's there's you know a lot of stuff out there that's floating around that's true as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm it's I've got a bit of a bugbear about the mainstream media, you know. I used to work at the BBC, I used to start out in local papers, and I just think that um journalism is is I'm not trashing journalists because I I am one, but I just think it's um it's so sort of under resourced and and short and uh understaffed that there's so many things that they don't cover. And nowadays they just they just sort of rely on press releases from government departments and and the police and whatever. There's very you know, very few people sort of going to court and actually finding out what's really happening. So I think it's a natural breeding ground, and and because of that, you know, people are just very suspicious of you know like what they're told in the papers and you know on the TV and whatever. And that's that's where it's all coming from. You know, a lot of the you know, we had the after the Southport riots, people just sort of put two and two together and made five and and um but it was largely because they don't trust you know the media, don't they? Or the government. Yeah, oh yeah, also I should uh I should uh thank you for uh putting me in touch with Marvin, Marvin Hitchman. Um you you had him on uh on your show, the um uh we ended he ended up tipping me off about this um his dad's murder, and I I I sort of went down a rabbit hole, um, you know, followed the trial in in great depths, and it was it was fascinating. It was like a really totally you know, if a news editor would say, That's you know, why are you writing about that? It's just not newsworthy, you know. Fish and chip um paper people, they're they're just sort of low lives killing each other, and that's true, but it was fascinating to know what you know what goes on in in London, you know, just drug dealers and and you know drug users sort of killing each other. Um but yeah, his story was really sad, you know. He was born in a prison, grew up, you know, he he's a he's got a good book out, and uh he's a redemptive redemption story as well.
SPEAKER_00Chris, I've got so many people I know with stories. If you're looking for ever looking for stories, just tell me what what type of crime and stuff, and I can hook you up with anyone.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, I bet you've got a good context book. I'll I'll I'll I'll book you up on that. So I just um one last one last question I'm gonna ask you about you know, because obviously what got you in trouble in the first place was um drugs and ecstasy and all that, MDMA. What um what do you make of you know the war on drugs and what what do you think is the best way of tackling it? I mean, you know, because uh um we've got you know a lot of countries have legalized um or different states have legalized cannabis, you know, some countries have sort of um kind of legalized uh harder drugs, aren't they? And and allow people to sort of shoot up in sort of safe spaces. Um, you know, do you what what do you think is the answer? Because obviously you know, if criminals, you know, serious criminal gangs make loads of money and kill people over it, um it's it's a dangerous thing, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00So I've written a series of books deconstructing the war on drugs and mass incarceration, and you know, the most dealt drug in the world is weed. So you've got billions of pounds going to cartels and narco-terrorists, etc. When the government could take control of that, tax it, put money into drugs education for kids instead of incarceration for kids, which we've seen so much of, and have a more sensible approach. Because what happens to a kid who gets busted smoking weed? I mean, if you look at the height of the war on drugs in America, you had almost a million arrests a year for weed possession, that's how they filled the private prisons. One of the highest arrest categories in the history of criminal justice. So a kid who's smoking weed ends up in Sheriff Joe's jail, becomes a neo-Nazi. 90% of them are injecting heroin, so then becomes a heroin addict. Two-thirds of hepatitis C from shirving dirty needles to get something that could potentially kill himself, gets all these swastikas and Hitler tattoos on his face. Gang knows he's not gonna get a job looking like that, jail knows he's not gonna get a job looking like that. They give him $50 on the gate when they're getting released as they say have a nice day. Because they know they're gonna come straight back. They were getting fifty thousand dollars a year of taxpayers' money per person. That was 20 years ago, you know, when I was arrested, God knows what it is now. So the whole war on drugs and mass incarceration is just a huge shakedown on the taxpayers. Yeah, drugs are bad for you, but adults have done drugs for time immemorial. Should the gangsters be running it and making all this money and wreaking havoc, like you see across Mexico? Or should the government take control and get the criminals out of it? That's what I say.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, well, I I guess it's gonna take one country to be very ballsy and say, you know, yeah, we're gonna we're gonna legalize them all and take over the you know the sale of them and make make them, you know, check the safety of it and and you know, make it uh an educational medical issue, you know, people do get addicted rather than uh a sort of um criminal justice thing, you know, where it's all down to incarceration, like you say.
SPEAKER_00Look at all the cops, look at all the cops who've died.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Fight fighting a war on drugs, and yet drugs are more common, stronger, cheaper than ever in the history of the world. Why have all those police sacrificed their lives for nothing?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, it it comes a point where you think you know, it's a bit like the Vietnam War where you know America just eventually threw the towel in because you they were it's a fight and a losing war. Um so maybe, yeah, the war on drugs you might have to just go a totally different way because this constant um you know taking on the big cartels and the big gangs and just you know smashing people, finding drugs, locking people up. It's not it's still they're still coming in, the drugs still coming in. There's the demand is always there, so it's pointless, really.
SPEAKER_00Milton Friedman wrote to George H. W. Bush about the drug laws and the black market in cocaine and predicted the rise of the violence and the cartels, and all Bush cared about was posing with seizures of coke and having Pablo Escobar as the boogeyman. So Escobar could source a kilo of coca paste from Peru or Bolivia for $60 in the 1970s, because of the black market created by drug laws, he could sell a kilo for $60,000. So it doesn't matter who you arrest. They made the drug laws made plants, worthless plants, more valuable than gold. It's been the biggest profit opportunity in the history of the world for organized crime to flood the entire world with drugs.
SPEAKER_01It's crazy.
SPEAKER_02And it's sort of uh damaging lots of places. Um I've been reading recently about lots of Caribbean islands um where they've got really high homicide rates, and it's all linked to drug trafficking. Well, we put the world to rights, and is there we're gonna leave it. And thank you very much, Sean, and it's good to see you 22 years on from when I first wrote about you, um, and many years after we first met up in person. Um thank you very much, and uh may people uh carry on watching your uh your YouTubes. Thanks very much.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Chris.