US Government and Afghan Poppy Production

This is real. Watch this.

May I tell you a story?

I hope you will.

When I was the senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,

2009 to 2011, end of 2011, uh,

I told the then chairman, John Kerry, I wanted to go to Afghanistan to do

a formal Senate study on the heroin poppy

crop, right? Afghanistan at the time was producing

93% of the world's heroin, and so I flew to

Afghanistan, went to Bagram Air Base.

I told them I needed to fly to Kandahar and then to Lashkar

Gah, which is the capital of Helmand province,

and I was doing this study.

Now, as a, as a senior congressional staff member,

I had the rank of

brigadier general. This is the only time in my life I ever pulled

rank on somebody.

And I said... They, they wouldn't take me down there,

and I said, "I'm not asking

you. I'm telling you you are going to fly me to Kandahar, and

then we will fly to Lashkar Gah, and then we'll fly back to Bagram." So

they, they relented. We went to Kandahar, did some meetings.

When we got to Lashkar Gah, as you're landing, for as far

as the eye could see, all you see is heroin poppy.

And so I said, "I wanna go into the poppy fields,

and I wanna find a farmer,

and I wanna talk to him." So I had security, I had a translator, Pashto

translator. We just drive out into the fields,

and sure enough, we stumble

on a poppy farmer. And I asked him a very naive question.

I said, "Instead of poppy, why don't you grow things

that have two growing

seasons, like tomatoes or onions or pomegranates?"

Right.

And he goes like this: "The Americans told me in 2001 that

if I told them where the Arabs were, I could grow all the poppy I wanted." I

said,

"What Americans told you you could grow poppy?" And just as I said the question,

my

military handler pulls me by the arm, and he says, "We're under threat.

We have to go back to the base." I never got an answer.

We got back into the Jeep, and they took me back to the helicopter.

I flew back to Bagram.

Actually?

Actually, like out of a movie. So I come back to Washington, and

I said to, to the chief investigator, I said, "I'm, I'm onto something here.

This is not good." So I wrote it all up just as I collected

it. Well, I had a friend at DEA, the Drug Enforcement, uh, Administration,

and I s- I called him. I said, "Listen, I'm gonna send you a paper, eyes only.

I just want your thoughts on it before I send it to John Kerry." So he calls me

back a couple days later, and he says, "Buddy, you know you're not gonna get this

paper published, right?" I said, "Why not?" He said, "Afghanistan produces

93% of the world's heroin. Almost all of that heroin

goes to Iran and Russia, and we want them to be addicted to

heroin. It weakens their societies." And I never got it published.

Well, fast-forward years later-

That's disgusting

... we've got a fentanyl epidemic in this

country.

That fentanyl is coming from China and Mexico.

They want us to be addicted to fentanyl because it weakens

our society, and that's why we're in the predicament

that we're in.

So you believe that the US government allowed poppy production in

Afghanistan in order to weaken Iran and Russia?

I do.