Hey folks, Derek here to wish a happy holidays to you and yours.

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advantage while you can. And thanks for listening. How much of what we're seeing now is the hangover from the war on terror?

These things are merging the war on drugs and the war on terror into the war on narco terror.

I saw Lindsey Graham the other day talk about a drug caliphate in Latin America,

which is just a sort of rhetorical climax, I guess, of all this crap.

If there is a drug caliphate, by the way, it's the United States, but let's not go too far into that.

But to what degree do you watch what's happening now and sort of think, you know, these are tools that were refined in the war on terror that are now being brought back. I mean, I think that's a lot of those tools had their origins in the early war on drugs. And now they're being brought back in a different way, having been kind of steeled under the war on terror, being brought back to the war on some types of drugs.

Yeah, no, that's an interesting question.

For me, you know, narco and terrorism, as someone who studies drug history,

kind of seems like an oxymoron in some ways because terrorists are politically motivated or ideologically motivated, and narcos

genuinely are not. I mean, they are motivated by their economy, their enterprise, and that sort of thing.

And in my studies of the topic in the Mexico case, the more you kind of practice these prohibitionists

militarized drug policies, you know, the more you kind of practice these prohibitionists, militarized drug policies, you know,

the more ideological and politically motivated these narco-terrorists get. And the United States has

been practicing these aggressive supply control measures in Latin America, you know, since the

70s, if not before then. And so to answer your question, Derek, getting back to this narco-terror, it's just that you're kind of putting two terms together to help kind of mobilize these, you know, these resources, because these are not existential threats to U.S. security. But you can see how rhetorically powerful it is when you kind of put narco and and terrorists together.

And from, yeah, from my studies of the drug trade, I mean, we've made these organizations as

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