A Geek History of Time - Episode 71 - Smuggling in SciFi Part I

Episode Date: September 5, 2020

Wow, you're gonna like this. Oh, no, I'm not because there is no god damn middle. This is not unlike ancient Rome by the way Not so much the family circus Yeah, I did Want to create self-sustaining farms and you got into crystals. I know. Okay. I understand that standing farms and got into crystal sea. I know! Okay. I understand that. But yeah, I'm reading Livy, who is a shitty historian. Because Irrigan is.

Others say that because Laurentia's body was common to all the shepherds around, she was called a she-wolf, which is a Latin term for horror. You were audible, lassies. It was just most of it, where you slamming the table. As the Romanists at the table, well, duh. Yeah. Obviously, Ipso facto. Right. You know, to engage in a real duh.

You have a sword rat. This is a geek history of time. We connect to the real world. My name is Ed Blalock. I'm a world history teacher up here in Northern California and the father of a two and a half year old, the boy. And very recently I have actually tipped my toe back into the waters of Warhammer 40K. I actually bought my first model in Holy cow, close on two years now. Maybe longer.

And it just arrived in the mail yesterday, and 14-year-old me was just a quiver with excitement. So who are you, sir? I'm Damien Harmony. I am a Latin teacher up here in Northern California. I am the father of a 10-year and an eight year old. And I just ordered shampoo. Which, okay. Adults, it's awesome, isn't it? Yeah, this is fatherhood, man. Like, my friends were like, yeah, I bought D&D Unlimited and now I can play all the D&D I want online and it works with this and I'm like I bought pistachios this week

So yeah, but you know it just occurred to me that Last year literally around this time within this week last year I baby sat your little boy for oh good goodness like goodness, like, six, eight hours, something like that. And had just the most fun. I'm sure it felt like that. Yeah, a lot. Well, because I remember the thing ran long. But I had just the most fun with him, and I'd forgotten that I'm good with kids that little too.

Because I just kind of keep growing with my kids, you know. But, yeah, it popped up in the social media. And then when you said just now that he was only two and a half, and I'm like, he was a one and a half year old when I played with him. Uh-huh, yeah. Wow, like I took him upstairs and gated him in and closed all the doors and threw things to him, and he threw things down at me. And that was a good two hours of play right there. Yeah, no, he did all the photos and everything.

He sent me here. I remember I was like, well, okay, at least one part of this afternoon went well. Yeah. Like, well, you know, I was teaching him just in case, I know you guys are Scottish, but just in case, you know, you want to build a two-state solution, I was teaching him how to do it one stone at a time. Oh, there you go. Yeah, there you go.

Like that. That's good. Well, you know, he is half German, so one brick at a time. Oh, there you go. Yeah, there you go. I like that. That's good. Well, you know, he is half German, so one brick at a time. There you go. Yeah, no kidding. You know. Well, and I, you know, I'm Irish, so I'm teaching him how to hurl rocks. So it'll be good.

Well, yeah. Should have had my palestine neighbor come over too. Yeah, perfect. Yeah. So, yeah. You know, what I spent a lot of time with this week was drugs. Really? Well, not imbibing.

I thought you were a straight edge. I, man, I was never straight edge. Like I never subscribe to that because number one, I don't really enjoy punk rock and number two. Okay. And number two, I don't really like ascribing to any particular thing. Like even when we drill down on existentialism and it's clear that that's like a good chunk

of like my philosophy seems to be mirroring. Except that that's that's solidly 68, 70, something percent. And I still like, I'm like no philosophy. That ain't me. You know, and it's a straight edge. Like I've done just as many drugs as as they have but I don't describe to that philosophy like no that's really great that's a really great way of phrasing that I like that justice drugs as you know T totaling abstainers

yes you know yeah I've you know yeah no I've I've written just as many motorcycles as the Amish. It's the same kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, like, oh, I like that. I like that. Well, you know, yeah. So, so in any event, I hear, hearing you say, you know, drugs in that context does kind of make anybody who knows you a quirk and eyebrows. So what exactly are you doing? Well, you know how much I love Star Wars

and how I've never done a Star Wars episode. This is true. I figured I would do a Star Wars episode about drugs. Death sticks? No, no. I don't need to tell you about death sticks. You don't, you can tell me about death sticks. Yes, we can go about the podcast and then enjoy our lives, we can go about the podcast and then enjoy our lives.

We can go about the podcast and then enjoy our life. Wait a minute, not even got the engine on. True. Of the two of us, yeah, I'm the religious fanatic. So wait, no hold on. This is true, this is true. Yeah, so no, I don't really even have a good title other than drug smuggling in sci-fi. So we're gonna talk today about the 1970s

and how that absolutely led to Han Solo. You know, it's funny for a couple of guys who weren't even born for, in my case, half the decade, and in your case, more than half the decade. We spent an awful lot of time talking about that shitty, shitty decade. It's really remarkable. Well, it's, yeah, it's either the 90s or the 70s every time for us. Most times to be.

Yeah. Most, yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah. We occasionally dip a toe in the 50s to, you know, talk about how much watergate, not watergate. Um, uh, uh, the cold war. Watergate was also the 70s. Uh,. Well yeah, the Cold War, but I'm specifically thinking of have you know, decency, surre at the end.

Carthie isn't. Thank you. I spent the day looking after my two year old all day. So I as if I have, you know, toddler caretaker brain. But yeah, you know, we occasionally will spend a little time talking about, you know, the 50s and McCarthy suck, but usually 70s and 90s. Yeah, we've had a few and a few Episodes now where we've both taken on the 80s as well. So Yes, but so yeah, you teach what you know kind of thing. Yeah, well, so The DEA was created in July of 1973. It combined the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs with the Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement

with about 600 other agents from customs, customs, agency services, et cetera, under one umbrella organization. Okay, let me stop you there. Sure. So DEA now operates under DOJ Department of Justice, correct? Drug Enforcement Agency. I think, yeah, I think, yeah, because they report to the Attorney General.

So yes, yes. Okay, yes. So now, their Department of Justice, the first of those groups that you mentioned, the Bureau of Dangerous Narcotics. The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Was that originally a DOJ Bureau or was that part of like FDA?

I actually want to say, and I might be wrong, but I think it was an offshoot of Treasury because prohibition. Okay, that would make sense. might be wrong, but I think it was an offshoot of treasury because prohibition. Okay, that would be a good sense. Okay, so in part, I just, I just, as part of the political context of all this, this, this does show, like at its very outset, this shows a certain amount of growth on the part of power of the Department of Justice. Yes. Oh, absolutely. It was a bureau.

I'm sorry, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs was within the DOJ. And it's basically the, it's kind of like what the OSS was to the CIA. Okay. So, essentially the DEA was the drug version of Homeland Security. You know how they brought a bunch of things under this one umbrella to kind of streamline it. That's essentially what the DEA did. And then it's head.

He reported to the Attorney General. So and just now the DEA has their own Air Force, they have their own special ops forces, and their current budget as of this last year was over $2 billion. Okay. In 2018, they spent $74,000 of that, which is Pidance, but they spent $74,000 to eradicate pot plants in Utah, they found zero. Okay, so, you know, lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. That's true, but it's also Utah.

It's not like there's like huge force that you can hide shit in. And who granted this is true, especially when they have an air force and like they have a history of using You two spy planes and drones and such. Oh, yeah, so You know, I actually In in talking about you know Maybe not militarization of police in this context but talking about the the oh we will the encroachment of you know law enforcement powers over over everything in the world. Or in our world here in the States.

Since 9 11. My father is a civil aviator. He has his own airplane. He flies cross country. Need a lot. Usually within the state of California, but on one particular occasion, he was making a trip. It's kind of a badge one earns as a subvolvator to make a landing and take off an landing in every one of the 48 continental United States.

Okay. Integrated States. Sure. And then there's what's called the four corners where you land at the northern most, southern most, western most, eastern most airports in again, the contiguous 48 states. And I don't remember which of those goals it was he was trying to get his ticket punched for him, but he was on his way flying back cross country in Texas. And as a small aircraft pilot, you know, you don't normally, you don't have to file an official flight plan with anybody, generally speaking.

He wound up, he came down at some small field, kind of in the middle of nowhere. He needed to get gas, landed, and shortly after he landed, multiple black SUVs pulled up. Without ever being told he was arrested, he was effectively detained there for four hours. A threat of them taking away his pilot's license or seizing his airplane. My father, I have to point this out, my father is and always has been, as long as he's been voting, he is a Republican voter. Mm-hmm. Like, and, and, and, you know, the joke about,

if you remember the 60s, you really weren't there. My father really wasn't there for the 60s. My dad was a naval officer. Right. Like, all the people in the world who you'd look at and be like oh yeah oh yeah this guy. Oh yeah we're gonna we're gonna get into why they why they detained him. Oh yeah no I'm sure yeah and I'm looking forward to it because he he still gets heated about it and I still

get heated about it because it's ridiculous, but anyway, continue. Yeah, quite right. So, also in the 1970s, American smugglers started trading US-made weapons in Jamaica for pot. Then Prime Minister Michael Manley's response was to shut down and work nice and cozy with the American DEA to shut it all down. Prior to that, you had plenty of pot coming up from Jamaica, worked nice and cozy with the American DEA to shut it all down. Prior to that, you had plenty of pot coming up from Jamaica, but now that guns are starting to be used, you're seeing a lot more gun violence in Jamaica,

and his response was to shut it all down. This meant letting the DEA set up their own radar station for the first time ever on foreign soil. And they start seizing yachts and sailboats that are filled to the brims with pot. The anti-crime, anti-gun, anti-dote policies of Michael Manley took Jamaica from being a sleepy, perfectly fine island to a third world police state on several levels.

The economy started crashing. And the real sad part is that he was a true labor party type of politician. He had all kinds of populist programs. He validated unions, he lowered the voting age to 18, he established land reforms, some worked some didn't, he instituted subsidies for various farmers, food programs, employment programs, literacy programs, all these things. But with the introduction of guns and his response to it, he ends up kind of back treading a lot of the things that he'd set up. So in many ways, he's echoing what's going on a few years earlier with LBJ, who wanted these vast sweeping economic policies that were absolutely aimed at fulfilling the

promise of the new deal. And instead, he's part of a government that is just shutting down dissent left and right and bombing the hell out of brown people in another country. Okay. So, question. So, I'm kind of looking at chicken and egg here. So American smugglers introduced guns into this whole Jamaican equation.

Yeah, large numbers. Which is yes. Large, okay. Yeah, large volume of American manufactured firearms. Okay, and so that is the tipping point. Yeah. So which is a valid concern to have? Well, yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah, no, obviously, but you know, the problem there is you know, making a deal with the wrong 400 pound gorilla to try to solve the problem. Or just like, hey, you need to control the guys at your borders so they don't bring guns into

my borders, you know, that kind of thing. But that's really hard to do when you're part of an island that used to be, or that is still at that point, I think part of the British commonwealth and very fragile economically in terms of just the, the world bank and its predations and the fact that it's the 1970s. So the economy is just shit anyway. So here's the question when you say that the economy went in the toilet. So in any talk about sailboats full of marijuana being seized. Do we have any figures like we've been in any research? Did you find any figures on just how much of the Jamaican GDP was based on weed? No, actually, that's one of the ones I didn't look into.

I was looking at a whole bunch of other factors and that one slip past me. Okay. Because, you know, you talk about land reform, I have to chuckle. You're talking about land reform in the context of, oh yeah, there's season, all this weed. Yeah. So they didn't use national parks like we do here in the States. Right. Okay. Yeah.

I mean, they had a large dairy industry. I know that. They had a, which was collapsing actually in a lot of ways. A lot of their fruit started getting subsidized, purchased, and basically, you know, essentially they got Guatemala by the United States. Yeah. So it's kind of sad. There are two or three industries that really started kicking back up in the 90s in Jamaica.

One was piecework, there were three. So there's piecework for Tommy Hillfiger and other American companies like that. You had to pay to work there and then what you paid would be, you'd have to work that off and then you'd make money and it was piecework. It was awful. And so a lot of American textile companies would basically have them make their clothes there. And it was terrible piecework. The other two things, one was private security

and coffins. So those industries really got a shot in the arm in the 90s. Wow. Yeah. So, you know, they talk about the health of an ecosystem. One indicator that an ecosystem is unhealthy is that all of the scavengers are doing really well. Yeah.

So, I've used that bond mod to describe the success of the payday loan industry in our own country. In the last, you know, 15, 20 years. I got to say when private security and coffins are the industries that are doing well, I kind of almost think that's worse. Yeah, it is. It is. Like cheapening Christmas. Yeah. So there were American smuggling rings that took advantage of 150 miles worth of bays, remote beaches, secret docking sites, tiny airstrips,

all to fly out, 1,000 pound loads of pot from Jamaica. Okay, in their small planes usually, right? Now, some of these rings were just groups of regular guys who decided that they wanted to put a little capital together, make some quick money, and these guys were, you know, long-term, long-time friends from childhood working out of Long Island in Manhattan, and they're just, you know, they're like, hey, we can make some money off this. This seems like a good deal. Smuggling rings would smuggle in the early 1970s using rented Ford LTDs because those had the biggest trunks on the market.

And they would drive down to Florida, pick up as much pot as possible and drive back up I-95. Eventually they graduated to using the 26-foot long winabegos. Let's see. Basically, those guys who are driving them up in the 1970s would get $5,000 per trip, which is good money. I don't know that it's worth the risk money, but it's good money. I mean, that's one-fifth of a house in Santa Barbara in the

early 1970s. Yeah, that's big money. Yeah. In that time period, that was a lot of cash. Yeah. So, to distribute New York, they'd pick it up in Florida, drive it up the coast. One ring even started buying farms in South Carolina for air drops. Fun fact, my family went in the early 90s to start a farm. And we didn't know where we were going to land. And we drove up to North Carolina to look at farmland up there and the vibe that my parents reported getting was very similar to Mendocino County and they're like, nope, we're not going to be here.

And it's not because my parents are like against pot, they're not, but it was, oh, this is those dangerous suspicious pricks, like what we saw in the casino. So no. So they bought a farm in South Carolina, not my parents, these smugglers. We ended up in Florida's Taint, Bronson. And feel free, Big Timers, look up Bronson, Florida. It's the seat of Levy County. And when I say Florida's Taint, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. But yeah, they bought a farm in South Carolina for air drops. And what they would do is they'd have all these pickup trucks at a certain time of night on that farm's property, point north and shine their headlights.

Therefore the plane flying overhead would see the landing zone. They'd kick the bale of pot, the bales of pot out over the farm and keep on flying. Then those pickup trucks would load up the bales and then drive them to all the different points they want to get to, usually going up north. Miami's construction boom actually owed a lot of its growth to the laundered money that would later come from cocaine smuggling. And disco actually helped make that drug very popular both in Miami and New York as well. And those were the two big markets for cocaine. And we're talking between three to seven billion dollars was laundered and unreported in 1980 alone in Miami.

Holy shit. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, more than the current budget of the DEA. Yeah. Yeah. Like, wow.

You know, which, cause one side is private enterprise and the other side is government. Mm-hmm. I mean, come on. Like, come on. Raised is a raganine. I know. I know.

Of course, private enterprise is always going to make more money. But so, so you, you, there was a switch there. Because because we started out, we started out. We were talking about pot. Yeah. And, and I am going to go back and force a little. Okay, and in the middle there you switched to cocaine and I'm kind of curious about where

Because I mean it would be I assume it would be false to say there's some kind of a dividing line temporally between the two of them. But I do get the sense from just my own kind of perception of thinking about the portrayal of this kind of stuff in the media, that there was this one period of time that was, like, no, no, it's pot is the majority of the stuff that we're that we're chasing after. And then it does turn into and then cocaine is the majority of the stuff we're chasing after. Yeah. Am I am I right there? Yeah, you are. So there's a lot of stuff that happens here in the 1970s is a period of flux. And it's largely during Carter's presidency. So and there's a move to decriminalize it and I'll talk about that in a little bit. But essentially once Carter backs away from decriminalizing pot, a lot of the

not all, but a lot of the pot smugglers are like, well, I'm making plenty of money here, but I could make even more money here. And they start bringing in cocaine. And by the way, so do, so does CIA. So under, well, under several people, bush being one of them. And then you start to see cocaine really skyrocket, profitability wise with the war on drugs. I'm going to mostly focus on the pot because I think that is much more the culture that we're gyrocket, profitability-wise with the war on drugs. I'm going to mostly focus on the pot because I think that is much more the culture that we're talking about when we talk about Han Solo, but I can't ignore the cocaine and the violence that came with it.

And actually, this very next thing. So there's a smuggler who spoke under, I didn't interview the guy, I found the interview, but he stayed anonymous. He's speaking under pseudonym So he started that small making the $5,000 trips. He said quote It was such an elitist feeling very much about being the hipster outlaw and getting over on the system And I want you to remember that very phrase hipster outlaw getting over on the system because it's gonna play a lot later in this podcast. It also didn't hurt that this job that made you $5,000 per trip

also came with the best recreational cocaine possible hookers hotels jewelry everything else like it was a good life. If that's a thing you like, you got to do it, you know. I'll find my own job. Yeah, with hookers. Yeah, you're not gonna, you're not even gonna recognize me. And it's like, well, that's actually true there, Jimmy. It reminds me actually of a pro wrestling promoter who started a renegade outfit. And he basically talked his way into a lot of success for a little while,

but then it all kind of fell flat. He ended up dying in a hotel room and one of the wrestlers said, well, he died doing what he loved. Cocaine and hookers. What? And it was true. How's that for an obituary?

Right. Like, like, that's your eulogy. Yeah, oh, it's great. All right. So, but okay, so back to this guy. Yeah. He said that he and his associates actually did. They stayed away from, they stayed away from cocaine

specifically. They stayed away from it. Because they also felt that if they were caught, the public and the law wouldn't perceive the crimes as something much uglier and serious, and they didn't want to be associated with that. So these guys stayed away from the harder stuff because they didn't like the idea of being seen as the bad guys. It's okay to be seen as a guy who skirts the law, just the good old boys, you know, been in trouble with the losses the day they were born. I mean, you had literally you had the dukes of hazard on TV. Yeah, who were

smugglers. That's that's literally that's literally, that is where NASCAR comes from. Yeah. Exactly. Like, yeah. It's 100% that kind of thing. So, they didn't mind the pot. They didn't think that would mess with their image. They did think, though, that cocaine would.

And they also stayed away from the harder stuff because they didn't... Well, how to put this. They liked making money and stepping outside the law to make money even better, but they still could think of themselves as good guys, right? It's just pot. But not everybody had those same compunctions. And there were plenty of smugglers starting to fly into Cartagena.

And the pot smugglers, despite refusing to involve themselves in cocaine, weren't necessarily immune to the violence with their own organization as time wore on and as money got more important. And there were some who were like about the money. And so they started really getting into like, well, what's gonna make us the most money? And what was interesting is that this guy reported

that they in New York, he would drive around all day long going to nine different banks to launder money. And as a result, because they had so much money and a ton of money, like at one point, they used cocaine specifically to stay awake for three days to count the money they had in a hotel room. And some of them were armed to the teeth with all these really nice guns, but they were totally untrained in how to use these guns. So, like... So, so what could possibly go wrong?

Right. And we're talking $7 million being counted that weekend. Like it's making lots of pot is making plenty of money. Like there are some people are like, I do not need to dive into the cocaine thing. And then there were others who absolutely dove into the cocaine thing. But those guys who were into the pot of it, a lot of them said, quote, these guys were not hard and criminals in any way, shape or form. So they stayed away from the cocaine trade.

So you're already seeing this dividing line between the different types of smugglers, right? Okay. Yeah. line between the different types of smugglers, right? Okay. Yeah. Okay. So, where? So nowadays, like, like, the organizations that we now in 2020, 50 years later, 40 plus

years later, that we're seeing in the news are, I mean, like right now. It's all dominated by cartels at a Mexico. Right and before the Mexican cartels It was Columbia. Yeah, the Medellin. You know the Medellin and So so we're talking about these American smugglers. Mm-hmm When when did that shift in ownership? Happen. Uh, happens after the growers get busted out pretty hard. And it really happens after the first round of Latiflundia growers in Humboldt County get busted out.

And it happens roughly around 85, you really start to see it turning in a very different direction. And because of that, that's actually outside of the purview of what this podcast specifically is about. So in Miami in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a lot of violence, like a lot of violence. A lot. I cannot emphasize. There was a lot of violence, like a lot of violence. A lot, I cannot emphasize how many died in Miami in the 1970s,

it was a lot, and the DEA was completely flat-footed. Like, they did not know how to deal with it. So they went ahead and set up a deal with the Treasury Department to take care of the money launders, as well as Dade County and Manhattan County agencies, or not Manhattan County, Manhattan, Burrow agencies, to try to take the big traffickers down. And with some success, but really not much success, you end up seeing shows like Miami Vice come out on TV, which is specifically highlighting things. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So to give a little bit of,

I don't know if context is the right word, but one of the stories my father relates, because he grew up in Coral Gables in the you know 50s and 60s and at some point in the 1970s or early 80s, he was visiting his folks in Coral Gables which is south of downtown Miami. South of downtown Miami. It's a separate incorporated city, but it's essentially a suburb of Miami. Yeah. And sitting in the living room of the home he grew up in, he heard a string of gunshots from a block away, less than a block away and and and I cannot stress enough. This was a Tony neighborhood yep and and he

He was not quite quick enough on the uptake To because my my grandmother said oh my goodness, I wonder what that was. My grandfather was very quick to say, oh, it was a car backfiring. And my father was not quick enough on the uptake to recognize that my grandfather was lying. And tried it and like argued with him about no I know the sound of a 45 ACP being fired you know I you know I'm in the military right gunfire you know I spent time on a gun range for my job occasionally that's and and you know had to had to get the crazy eye for my grandfather for a second before he realized he needed to shut up Right But yeah, it was it was it was truly

Everywhere and around in around Miami in that time period Like there there was not a neighborhood that was immune to it is kind of kind of the the point I'm trying to Reenforce well in 1980 Miami had 573 murders Sweet Jesus and that was a record the next year 621 Wow, yeah, the Miami to Columbia root was paved with cocaine and blood. Like, it's insane. Wow.

Yeah. Okay. So you can see why the DEA is like, oh, we gotta do something about this. Well, yeah. And so, and and people were finding every which way possible to smuggle drugs in specifically cocaine. Plains, you could store a lot of coke on planes, small planes and big planes. And for a while, it's just small planes,

but then people are like, well, we've been successful. Let's go with bigger planes. And that's what happens, you know? Boats, cargo boats filled with cocaine. Speed boats filled with cocaine. speed boats filled with cocaine, cigarette boats. Yeah. Filled not cigarettes. Right. Submarines. Okay. How early did the submarines thing start? Because I know that's, that's a current

thing that the coast guard is dealing with that. I remember there was, there was a, a fellow who worked in the CIA who was working with Russian agents shortly after the fall of the USSR. And they tried to sell him a sub that they had been using for years. And these were mobsters. So they're like, oh, would you want to buy this sub? And that tells me that subs had been being used for quite some time in the Caribbean.

In fact, they even use human mules on commercial flights. Oh, yeah. It's kind of like at a swap meet, you'll see small booths, and you'll see large booths and you'll see large booths. You'll see smaller tents and bigger tents. And you know, summer smelling, selling it volume and summer selling just enough to like, you know, to get by. And that's what you're seeing with this.

The Tony Montana story in Scarface was 100% a direct reflection of what Oliver Stone directly witnessed in his cocaine explorations in Miami in the 70s. I didn't put it in here. How do you say exploration? Oh yeah, oh he. As opposed to, you know, benches. Yes, but like I didn't put it in here, but there's a story about how he just hung out

with all these guys. And of course cocaine makes people paranoid. And so he, like there was a dude who just like, you know, they're laughing and having fun. And then Oliver Stone mentioned some guy who had killed a few of their friends. And the dude just stopped and stared at him. He's like, I'm gonna go outside. And Oliver Stone instead, I slept with one eye open that night. Like it was, and he, but he took that character and he's like, okay, that ability to go from, you know, happy, happy, happy to Stone Cold Killer on the drop of a dime.

Yeah. And people could become millionaires overnight with the right connections and with the right application of violence. So you have a whole bunch of stuff going on on the East Coast, down south, specifically with cocaine. Moving up north, you've got a lot of stuff going on on the East Coast, down south, specifically with cocaine. Moving up north, you've got a lot of pot smuggling. And right now, I'm going to take us to a commercial break because it's been a few shows since we've had a commercial. So I'll catch you on the other side. All right, I like that. Hello Geek Timers, this is producer George, interrupting this podcast to let you know that

we have space available. This space could be used to promote your product, book, event, group, even wish a special someone happy birthday. If you're interested in using this space, please contact us on Twitter via private message at Geek History Time. So, there is our commercial. Guaranteed not to have you smuggling anything as a human mule. Indeed. Something I'm proud of. I'd say so.

I think that's a lawful thing to avoid. Mm-hmm. I would agree. I would agree. So on the West Coast, so we just finished talking about kind of East Coast stuff. Yeah. The West Coast, you had San Pedro, San Francisco. These are the ports of call essentially

for smuggling drugs and moving up to Washington State. Same basic principle, but you're getting stuff from Thailand, you're getting stuff from pot fields in Hawaii specifically, you're getting Southeast Asian trade, you're getting a lot of, and this is gonna be really awful, you're getting a lot of heroin being packed into coffins of soldiers from Vietnam.

And I'm gonna probably talk about the soldiers from Vietnam for a little bit because, again, Han Solo. Now, it's 1974. There's a Shelflo named Tom, and his name has one of those little squiggly things below the letter C So I read it as forcade But I don't know what that squiggly under a C does for pronunciation might be might be for for sod for sod Tom for sod

Okay, he was a drug smuggler who used his drug smuggling profits to found the magazine high times. Okay. High times was to pot what Playboy was to boobs. Okay. And it's a good analogy. Yeah. And by 1976, high times was on its way to having 4 million in circulation. It was a mainstream, commercially successful counterculture magazine that advertised an illegal substance, and it highlighted stories of smugglers and their efforts to bring

that substance into the United States. And it was all started by the profits that he made by smuggling that illegal substance. Okay, so where was he getting his stuff from? Was it Mexican? Was it Hawaiian? He had he been on a boat or a pilot. What was how did he do this? Well, so he'd become a drug smuggler after serving a few months in the Air Force. He basically learned to fly and then he tricked them into thinking he was mentally incompetent. And so he, I don't know where he was getting it from, but that's where the money came from was the smuggle. So in 1977, High Times was rivaling Rolling Stone and National Lampoon in terms of circulation. Wow.

Here's a fun fact about Tom Forsodd. He was the first documented man in 1970 to use pie-ing as a form of protest. Oh, shit. Documented. First time, first time. And he did it when he hit Otto Larson, who was chairman of the President's Committee

on Obscenity and Porn pornography in the face with a pie. Do we know what kind of pie? Ah, custard. I do know what kind of pie it was custard by eye. Okay. All right. So he was the founder of a magazine. He pieed a man and he was a drug smuggler. Okay, hold on. Okay, so he found out of the magazine in 74. Yes. The magazine was founded with his, with his pot profits. Yep. Pot smuggler profits. Yes. In, in 70, he's the first documented person to to pie a government official in protest yeah

what what was he protesting well it was a commission on obscenity in pornography so he's going hard against censorship okay yeah um... right and i just that was too delicious effect to take out like i was i was just i was tickled by that well Well, you know, kind of like the custard. Exactly. So it was not his last stand either.

So yeah, he's a drug smuggler. Now his story doesn't end well. He gets really paranoid. It does a lot. He never met a drug he didn't like. There's all kinds of really fun details about high times. Like they had a backup receptionist, just in case their normal receptionist was too high to do her job. They would advertise to reporters, you could have like this much pay and all the pot that you could like snort, inject, swallow, smoke, whatever, like just as much as you wanted. They had like, it was like a speak easy kind of an office where people wouldn't even need to see each other They just go into different rooms to try different kinds of pot

They're their magazine had a a centerfold fold out of pot Yeah, all kinds of Now just another fun little tidbit about this and my parents, I put out a call to social media a couple days ago saying, hey, does anybody have this particular issue of high times? Because there's an article in it that I need to grab some quotes from,

because I know where I wanna go with it, but I wanna get the full article just to make sure. Sure enough, my mom hits up her middle school group on Facebook and she says, hey does anybody have that issue? Well the moderator of that group damn near kicks her out of the group because that's inappropriate and my mom's like you do realize that we were like the number one class our class 1974 of high school was the number one class, our class, 1974, of high school was the number one class of like drug overdoses, drug suicides,

and on and on and on. Like we did all the drugs. Like she was part of a group called the flying team, which was a come down squad. Like if somebody was having a bad trip, they would go help the person come down. It was, oh god. And this, by the way, suburban Detroit. This is Dearborn Michigan. So, so she puts out this.

I am. And it's yeah, that's that for this guy. No, no, no, literally just about smack in the middle of the country, where Henry Ford got started. Like, yeah. So, like like so she puts out this call to the people who went to her middle school and they're like and the moderators like well that's really an appropriate. And she's like and I was joking with my mom. I'm like well it might have been an appropriate but it was absolutely the right ask because who else would know. Yeah. But so then my mom went and and subscribed to high times and then sent me the code for a month. So...

Wow. Yeah, thanks, Mom. Your mom goes hard. Yeah, apparently. Your mom does not shy away. No. So yeah, Mommy got me a subscription to High Times and the Atlantic this year. So...

Okay. The Atlantic was for my birthday, but also she got me high times this month. I'm trying to I'm trying to I'm trying to picture the crossover of anybody who's not you know a podcaster, right? Like of like I have my subscription to the Atlantic and I times. Yeah, that's a particular, that's, that's, that's the bottom line. You have a lot of overlap. Yeah, yeah, it's weird. It's weird. So, okay, so back to Tom Forsyth,

it doesn't end well for him. He gets really, really paranoid. He eventually shoots himself in the head and commits suicide. And it's largely because he had a lot of unresolved PTSD from not from being in the military, but because he and his friend Jack Coombs were both on separate planes doing a smuggling run

and Jack's plane exploded right off to the side of Tom's. And so he never got over that. And so he had to blame himself. Yeah, so But in high times there were all kinds of articles about different smugglers exploits how they got away from the cops and stuff like that the underworld of pot use Lauded these heroes who evaded capture and who also went to these far-flung locations that we can't even point to on a map Nepal Bhutan Tibet various jungles in South America, kingdoms in the Middle East, war zones in Southeast Asia, and all in the effort to bring back drugs

smuggled to the United States. So I want you to remember, they went to all the different places in the world, one end to the other to bring drugs. So now to get the use out of my mom's subscription to High Times in the summer issue of 1974, here's a fun quote. They had this thing called, oh god, it wasn't called the blaze, it was something similar though.

And it essentially read kind of like a, you know, like the police report on a local small newspaper. Okay. You know, a man was found buggering a beaver and then, you know, and arrested and then shortly there after, you know, released. I love how you say, you know, local, local news report and that's where your brain goes. Yeah. Okay. You know, right.

But, you know, and then you see like the ellipsis and then it tells you like so and so their window got broken by three boys playing baseball and that it didn't really get the ellipsis. So here's a quote, feds estimate that they got probably 10% of incoming pot and they're probably right dot, dot, dot, monster loads that are busted at are the tip of the iceberg, dot, dot, dot, potso widespread now that enforcement nearly impossible. Da, da, da. National guard was reportedly called in to guard the 25 to 30 tons busted at Christmas time in Florida.

And they reportedly used a Ringling brother's tent to house it. They burned it as quick as possible to avoid a commando heist that was rumored. My mom, her brother, my mom's older brother had friends who got arrested and got their shit seized and this happened around the same time. It's entirely possible that my mom actually knows some of the people who got arrested. This was a huge drug bust, by the way, and it happened around Gainesville. Wow. Yeah.

Okay. How many tons again? 25 to 30 tons. Tons. So that's between 50 and 60, thousand pounds. And that's only 10% of weed. Yeah. Well, that's that's one bust.

Yeah. That's that's that's that's not even that's not right. You're right. You're right. Yeah. That's that's that's that's part of the 10% that they're bringing it. She many Chris. I'm just trying to picture the sheer biomass. Mm hmm. Of of like the amount of acreage. Yeahage of all that growing. Oh yeah. And that's on the East Coast, right? So that's, yeah, that's coming in by plane and by boat.

Here's another quote from the same basic article. With a lot of narks becoming dealers and dealers becoming narks, one begins to ask what they have in common. Goddamn, you know. There you go. Wow. Okay. Yeah, here's another one.

Fed Task Force on stopping smugglers has reportedly moved office to Gainesville. That's the thing. Now I get a kick out of this. $5 fine on grass is now logged in in Ann Arbor. And there's a place and I'm going to spell it and then butcher it. YPSIL, A N T I Yip Silante. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti. Ipsilanti Michigan, okay. Yeah. Dot dot dot, same in Oregon, dot dot dot, lots of new books on dope and a few on dealing.

So just, you know, how things coming across the ticker. And then, uh, so yeah, that's what's going on in high times, a major publication that is commercially successful. So okay. Yeah. All right. So, so, so the DEA was, was established in 74 to try to stamp all this out. Right.

Okay. What percentage of the population as a whole was part of the clientele that these guys were serving? Glad that you asked that. I have those percentages. Oh, from 1972 to 1975, the amount of adults who admitted to using pot went from 11 to 24%. That's a quarter of all adults having practiced. So not quite one in four.

Right. I'm going to round it up one in four, because 24%. Oh, yeah. but it increased by more than double in a five-year period. Yeah which that tells me there's a lot of availability. Okay so when because I mean we know now because they they came out and you know said they quite part out loud after they thought it didn't matter anymore. And we couldn't make it illegal to be blacker against the war.

Oh, you're getting ahead of me. You're getting ahead of me. Yeah. That's coming. That's coming. But I will answer you this as well. Because if one in four people is using stuff or has used it, like, how do you even begin to think you're going to get a handle on trying to enforce making that illegal?

There's a lot of delusion that gets to happen that way. Yeah. Okay. Well, and it gets to the question of, are you actually trying to make it illegal? Or are you trying to set up a system wherein you can disfranchise a large chunk of society? I would argue it's the latter, not the former. Well, yeah. So for kids in 1975, it was... Step ahead. What's that? Yeah. Now, I'd just be your step ahead of me with the logic of the disenfranchisement being the point, but yeah, carry on. So in 1975, just under 40% of kids admitted to using pot by 1980, it was 50%.

And we'll get into why that is a little bit later. So in 1972, well, in the 1970s, high times did more to romanticize drug smuggling than anything else did in the 1970s because again, look at its circulation. And it was explicit about it. Now in 1972, the Republican presidential campaign flat out accused the Democrats of being the party of quote, acid amnesty and abortion. Wow.

Which when I did my episode on the New World Order, I didn't think to reach back and grab that, even though Pat Buchanan was around at that time too. Like I can't even miss that. Well that was, yeah. So also in early 72, Nixon makes a commission on marijuana. It's called the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse. It was popularly called the Shaffer Commission,

because Raymond Schaffer, who was the former governor of Pennsylvania, headed it up. He had been the leader of the moderate wing of Republicans in the 1960s. He also, Nick's and also tapped conservative Senator Harold Hughes from Iowa to be on it. And in March of 72, the Commission presented its report to Congress and the public and titled it marijuana spelled with an H, a signal of misunderstanding. And the report basically said they did do diligence on this. And the report said that you should end marijuana prohibition and adopt other methods of discouraging its use. So okay, we do that with other things. Nixon was pissed and he just ignored it. Now remember, this is 72 March of 72. Like this is a big deal going into an election.

So he's like, I want to be the president of law and order and I want white people scared of everything. And his own guys that he hand picked are like, yeah, dude, it's not a big deal. We were really worried about it for not much reason. In fact, it should be legal. And he's like, that's, and he says, quote, I can see no social or moral justification

for legalizing marijuana. Okay, so he got a report from his own people that he didn't like. Yep. And so he ignored it. Yeah. So I'm gonna go back to a prior president go back to to a prior president when we when we talked about J. Hawks and Bushwackers in Missouri.

Oh, yeah, yeah. And it was the same thing. It was, no, no, these guys are illegitimate. Here's the congressional report that these guys are illegitimate. And you know, this other government needs to be the one that's installed and can't, nope. That was Franklin Pierce, that was indeed Franklin Pierce Good old magic test goals Franklin Pierce Good old squash ball

You brought that up in that episode too. I did it's one of my favorite things about him His hair was really cool, but the fact that he squashed, squashed his nuts to the point of fainting, that's something. I don't know if you've ever done this, like if you have a wooden chair and your balls hit the chair before you do, and then your thigh is on top of your balls, so you get that double impact and that bouncing pain, that shit hurts, but it never made my ass faint. and that bouncing pain, that shit hurts. But it never made my ass faint.

Like, I don't know, once or twice, I've had the room spin on me. So like, I'm not gonna, oh, man. Maybe I'm hitting the wrong ball. Maybe my left ball just hits everything a little sooner. So, they always called me a left long ball harmony, though. So, yeah, well, you know, that wing Damien, you know, so. So Nixon's up for re-election.

He wants to see, seem very tough on drugs and crime. And he just spent the last four years using drugs and crime as code for black folks and scaring white folks about it. And I'm going to get into that a little bit later as well. The report said that while public sentiment tended to view marijuana users as dangerous, the report actually found users to be more timid, more drowsy and more passive, you know, because they're on pot. Because they're stone.

Yeah. And it like, I mean, okay, the worst thing that a pot smoker is gonna do, like, is rummage through your pantry when you're not looking and steal all of your graham crackers. Like, yeah, see, I kind of think of it a different way. I think the worst thing that a pot person, somebody on pot's gonna do is pontificate

on some really dumb fucking point in like pulp fiction and tell me about how that's life, man. And it's like, oh shit, could you just take a few more hits and you shut up? Like, how many more hits will it take for you to fall asleep? Right, do those, do those. Do you have any of that is like, how many do I have to roll for you to get to that point?

So yeah, like, yeah, but they're going to, they're going to do that. They're going to suddenly discover their fingers. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. Why are there just going to be a slightly quieter version of themselves? Well, yeah, that's mostly, and yeah, they're just gonna be a slightly quieter version of themselves. Well, yeah, that's mostly. And yeah, they're gonna eat all your snacks.

They're gonna, you know, just stink the place up because I mean, it does stuff reek. But I have a story about that for you. And yeah, so like, how does anybody see Pot Smokers as a threat? But tell me your story. I want to hear what you're saying. They see Pot Smokers as a threat? But tell me your story. I want to hear what you're talking about. They see Pot Smokers as a threat largely because it was criminalized and excoriated in the 1930s, as, first off, it was given the name marijuana because it was then tied to Mexican immigrants and they're bad. And then it was called reefer and it was tied to black people and they're bad Um, and then they made exploitation films about it

Uh, to get around uh, what was the predecessor to the haze code such as refer madness and so then everybody saw that and thought that that was the truth Um, but Here's the story I've got my mom again. She was in the most drug using uh, class of her entire school. And I'm not going to tell too many tales out of school, literally. But she and her friends would be in the, you know, this is the Midwest, so everybody has a basement. They would be in the basement. And my great-great aunt, who lived with them at the time, came down and she said,

is somebody burning rope? And she couldn't figure out why it smelled like someone was burning rope. And she's talking all these teenagers. Who's been burning rope? And then she went back upstairs, grumbling about people burning rope. And it was, you know, them smoking pot. What I didn't realize until like maybe six years ago, I was thinking about that story.

Rope used to be made of what? Hemp. So that made perfect sense. Oh yeah. I was like, oh, that's why. So the downside to me never doing anything. Yeah, well. Now, what was, it didn't twig for me.

The two were in any way connected until actually in college. It had Dungeons & Dragons game. At the very beginning of our campaign, we were busy, and everybody was creating our characters. And one of the guys in the group who hadn't played before was looking through the player's handbook at the equipment chart. And the equipment chart made a distinction between silk rope and hemp rope. Right. And he just got such a big kick out of hemp rope, hemp and rope, hemp rope, and like wouldn't shut up about it. And it took me two game sessions to figure out why he thought that was funny.

And he made a point of every time we made camp in the game, he would say, all right, I'm gonna go cut off a yard and smoke some of my rope. And to him that joke never got old. Yeah. And to the rest of us, it was like how many hits on that rope do we need to give you for you to just go asleep. So. But yeah, no, I mean, well, shit during World War II, there were movies about hemp for victory. Oh, absolutely. You know, because again again, Robe, Cored, all the stuff that you know, that was a big deal.

Because we didn't have synthetic yet. Yeah. Yeah, George H.W. Bush, his life was saved by the fact that he had a hemp parachute. Yeah. You know, and you know, silk is the other thing, right? So it's, yeah. So I have a question. If you were to make a C and, you know, silk is the other thing, right? So it's yeah. So I have a question.

If you were to make a Cess, Cess, Cess, I only know the Latin, a, a, a punching glove, out of that hemp rope, would it be considered a blunt instrument? You're slipping. I'm the one delivering content here, pal. Yeah. I can't get that. I'm the one delivering content here, pal. Yeah, I can't get that in the box. Yeah, but you've done way better. I have. Yeah. So yeah, no, you would, in fact,

continue than a blunt object. There you go. So the report said that cannabis does not cause a widespread danger to society. It recommended that using social measures other than criminalization would help discourage use which makes sense. It compared the situation of cannabis to that of alcohol, which was something that was totally acceptable to white America. Now, there's a senator, a Democrat from, named Jim Eastland, who opposed the recommendation to decriminalize POT.

And then two years later in 1974, he led a subcommittee and they issued their own report. And their report said, quote, five years of research has provided strong evidence that if corroborated would suggest marijuana in various forms as far more hazardous than originally suspected. Okay.

Now, is this where we first start really hearing the drum getting beaten about a gateway drug? No, that's not going to be until bicentennial summer two years later. But I would like to point out what he said here was technically true because he said five years of research has provided strong evidence that if corroborated. What a genius wheeze of word that is. Well he is from the south. Like I was thinking about it the other day and I'm going to be very regionalist here.

I was walking down the street and I realized this guy, because I did a bit of a deep dive on this prick. This guy... Tell us what you're really doing. No shit. This guy embodies why I think the South is just a cancer and needs to just be completely carved away. Like it has never been good for this country. And don't get me wrong, the trappings of the South are really cool. The culture of the South is fucking awful. Because he is absolutely opposing, decriminalizing something which was suggested based on evidence, makes up his own evidence, lies about it, and then uses just enough weaselwords that it is the thing that then takes over.

This, to me, is not that different than the three-fits-compromise that Southerners came up with, that overrepresented them in the House of Reps, and enabled their power as slaveholders to stay for way longer than nature would have ever let happen. Yeah, so now he, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. So, Eastland was also a horrible racist. Big shock. Yeah, Johnson roasted him once and said that if there was,

and I'm paraphrasing so I don't get to say that so I don't say the End word, but Johnson basically said Eastland could be standing in the middle of the biggest flood of Mississippi and he blame it on Blacks who were helped by communists Except he didn't use such nice words Yeah, well because when when when Lyndon Baines, mother fucking Johnson, yep, is calling you out for being a racist jackass, you really, really need to take a minute to look in the mirror and go, am I the bad guy? Yeah.

Eastland was holy shit. Oh, yeah. Eastland was one of three senators or three legislators. I think they're all three senators who really was kind of the core of the the South's like holding on to racism legislatively. It was him, strong, thermon and Richard Russell. Like yeah, he was the holy treading. Yeah, he was like the lepidus of this group, you know. But here's a list of shit that he said. He suggested that James Cheney

might, uh, Mickey Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were doing a publicity stunt that there was no KKK and Mississippi. And he suggested, oh, they probably went up to Chicago. He was on something called the genetics committee of the Pioneer Fund. The Pioneer Fund was started in 1937 to study and focus on heredity and human difference. It's essentially white supremacy science group. Eugenics. Yeah, pretty well, yeah.

He claimed that black folks and white folks science group. Eugenics. Yeah, pretty well. Yeah. I mean, you know, he claimed that black folks and white folks both wanted segregation in 1957. And that claims otherwise were a fiction from the North. Well, I mean, because because everything is the fault of the North, right. He was part of the white citizens.. He was a white guy for Mississippi. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. For the North.

Which by the way, Mississippi had like one of the highest usage rates of marijuana and also the stiffest penalties. Like that's what I mean about the South being a fucking disease. Like like, yeah. There's evidence, man, go with it, you know. But he was part of the white citizens council, which was 60,000 strong throughout the south. And it was hailed as the new clan that used economic pressure instead of violence. Oh, yay.

Right. What fucking progress. I'm sorry. Light up in the street with all of the other racist fascist assholes. Yeah. Oh my god. His response to the Brown versus Board was, quote, the Southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation

was the correct self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the reconstruction period. Okay. I'm sorry. Yeah. No, I stopped there because I knew you had something to say. I need to pause for a moment, but just the parallelism in his phrasing. Yep. Between him, between that and the cornerstone speech. Yep. Like, I'm not the only one that that that like leaps out at. No, right?

No, okay. And the amount of bullshit lies that are that are contained within that like leaps out at. No, right? No, okay. And the amount of bullshit lies that are contained within that like 30 words, like there's almost as many lies there are words. So to argue that you would have to spend so much energy just to unpack that first half of the quote. Yeah. But then there's more. He said, separation promotes racial harmony.

It permits each race to follow its own pursuits and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination. He's about to get religious. So. Oh, okay. Do you want to respond to this party? No, no.

Mr. President, it is the law of nature. It is the law of God that every race has both the right and the duty to perpetuate itself. No, no. Oh, no. no, no. Well, sorry. Where's the lie in that? Everybody has the right to perpetuate themselves. The lie is in the idea that God ever made a distinction between races like, like, nowhere.

You could argue Tower of Babel. You could argue that the curse of ham. No, where? Tower of Babel, you could argue that the curse of ham. No, okay. Tower of Babel was a separation of people by cultural group because of hubris. Doesn't anywhere say that like you can't learn one another's languages as an intermarry. And cursive ham doesn't say you can't curse of cane, doesn't say, you know, it says you're outcast, you're separate, we're not, we're not gonna deal with you. Doesn't say anything about God creating a separate race. That's a, and besides which I'm gonna I'm gonna

Reiterate this this idea that if you say you are a Christian The part of the Bible you should really be taking more of your your evidence from for any kind of religious anything Is is the book that actually has Christ in it Not the old testament I mean, okay if you want a nitpick as a Catholic. I mean, we don't really need to sit here and listen to you Romanizers though. I mean really It's really easy to shop around your confirmation bias. Yeah, well, yeah. But anybody, the thing is though, whatever your opinion may be of whatever schisms have

happened within Christianity, if you claim the name of Christ, you should be looking at what Christ said. And, you know, the Old Testament is part of that story. I don't know. I mean, I'm a really big fan of Hakim al-Ajuan, but that doesn't mean that I have to be seven feet tall to enjoy basketball. Checkmate atheists Okay, first you're atheist. Yeah Second, yeah, what the fuck does that have to do with anything? Well clearly I use something that was grammatically similar to the thing you used and I proved you wrong So balls in your court. Oh my God, you're not nathie.

You're a fucking Baptist. Well, you can be both. So, you know, before we move on, his whole, like everything about that was just so fucking wrong. Oh, it's not done either. It was. He's not done either. Oh god, damn it.

But like two more sentences from that quote. Okay. But before we move on to whatever other fresh hell he wants to like whistically inflict on us, I just I need to include the statement that slavery completely fucked American Christianity like permanently, like because an entire branch of the tree of religious sects, schisms, whatever that that happened here in this country within Christianity happened because people in the South, white people in the South had to justify owning people. And the moment you do that,

you immediately have to go back to the Old Testament. You have to move away from the things that Jesus exhorts us to do in terms of mercy and compassion and flipping tables in the temple because rich people suck. And you have to go back to the God of the Old Testament and then you wind up having an emphasis on rules and propriety and everything that was part of that, of actual spirituality. And so slavery fucked over American Christianity and that line right there

is an eloquent and and perfectly concise explanation of just exactly how it did. Well, I'm going to blow up all of that though, because I'm going to point out that black people own slaves too. So, yes, so it's clearly not racism. Yeah, clearly, yeah, clearly, can't be. No. So, all right, so here's the rest of his quote. All right. Let's see. All free men have the right to associate exclusively with members of their own race, free

from governmental interference, if they so desire. And remember, this is his rejoinder to Brown versus Board that said, you can't segregate schools full of kids. You have to actually integrate them. Like, you can't make one group of people not go to a school nearby because it's falling unevenly on them. You are by law denying them their constitutional rights. He then also said that the Brown vs. Board destroyed the Constitution. See, you keep using these words. You do not think they mean what you think they mean. Yeah. Like, here's the deal.

We had a war. Your side lost because it was inevitable that you were going to lose because like, you had nothing but a lawn. Well, it was a lost cause. And you didn't even have a lawn. Yeah, well, you know, it really was actually. So it really genuinely was.

You know, but you know, you had you had no material advantages. You had no advantage in numbers. You had nothing. You had a moral advantage, though. You were fighting for heritage. No, they weren't fighting for fucking heritage. No, like you inherit slaves. That's heritage.

Thank you. Checkmate atheists. And again, the only atheist here is you. Well, there's that. Anyway, there's that. So, but like, you know, we had a whole war about this. Your side lost and we literally, We had a whole war about this. Your side lost and we literally wrote the Constitution. Does it require this to be a thing? That's also true. And so you want to try to stand here and say, this destroys the Constitution.

It's required by the Constitution. You ignorant prick. We'll have to agree to disagree. He also supported all white primaries. All white primaries? Yeah, yeah, like only white people voting in a primary election. Right. This is Mississippi. Okay, wait. And as a Democrat, you remember when Johnson actually told black people, you all are going to need to sit this one out when the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party,

the MFDP was like, there are no black delegates in Mississippi for the Democratic Party. And a shit ton of us vote Democratic now because Johnson and Kennedy and also there's more black people than white people in Mississippi and Johnson was like, I'm sorry we're gonna, we're not gonna see you like Fannie Lou Hamer was told you're gonna need to sit back. Like, that was happening, and this guy was a senator in Mississippi, always re-elected, and he supported all white primaries. Here's the thing that he said during the war

against the Nazis. Okay. He said, I have no prejudice in my heart, but the white race is the superior race, and the Negro race, and inferior race, and the races must be kept separate by law. in the Negro race and inferior race, and the races must be kept separate by law.

In 1970, he voted against an occupational safety bill that would establish federal supervision to oversee working conditions. He was one of three senators who voted against it. He was a Democrat who supported Democrats, and as a result, he brought in Democrat votes for Democratic candidates, and in turn, they let his segregationist tendencies slide. He also was a huge fanboy of Herbert Hoover, by the way, and regularly defended him, because, of course, he was. Yeah. And he regularly defended Hoover's efforts

from the Senate floor. And so when it came out that Eastland was receiving monies from Rafael Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Hoover didn't go after Eastland on corruption charges. Because it brought home electoral results. Well, because he was so vibrantly anti-communist who was like, yeah, okay, I like the cut of this guy's jib. Biden said in 2019, Joe Biden said, I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me boy. He always called me son. Remember that? Because Cory Booker responded with,

you don't joke about calling black men boys. Men like James O. Eastland use words like that and the racist policies that accompanied them to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity. So that's one of the people who is on the side against marijuana being legal. And so you see this dynamic happening. There's a lot of mainstream support for decriminalization and the opposition against it is both reactionary and in power. Well, you know, and when you talk about the public's support for it, what's interesting about that

is I remember hearing about, you know, there was widespread, you know, I don't know if belief is the right word, but there was this understanding, there was this possibility that legalization might happen, and the cigarette companies for wreaked out. Yeah, so it wasn't legalization, it was decriminalization. At this time at least. In fact, when Carter became president, there was a market shift toward decriminalization. And I didn't get to go into normal

in all kinds of organizations like that, but he actually put in charge of the National Institute on drug abuse a man in charge of the National Institute on Drug Abuse a man in favor of decriminalization. Carter himself said, penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself, and where they are, they should be changed. He was suggesting civil fines, not jail time, And he still wanted to go after drug dealers, but not the users. And his chief advisor on this was a guy named Dr. Peter Born, who subscribed to a Dutch

approach of harm reduction. And essentially it said, a government cannot make a society drug free. It could only mitigate the harm that those drugs did. And so there's this wonderful story of them, and this episode with, and then we'll pick it back up in Atlanta in 1976. Born, I believe it was Peter Born, he went to a party where they were talking about decriminalizing pot and he had written

a few speeches for Carter saying we need to decriminalize pot. And while at that party he went over, he went up to a different room and did a couple bumps of cocaine, which was normal at that time for powerful people to do because hypocrisy has always been the thing. Well, yeah. So he goes up there and does a couple of bumps of coke. There's a reporter there who hates him because he had supported the use of Paracwat years prior. Paracwat is a herbicide that the

Mexican government was still spraying on pot fields and when inhaled in smoked form caused the user to cough up blood. And the argument was, don't kill fucking people. And the count argument was, well, that's illegal what they're doing. So yeah, which is very similar to when they poisoned alcohol during prohibition. Yeah. The reporter who saw him hated him for this and basically told him, I saw you doing cocaine. I'm going to do a story on you doing cocaine. What's your response?" And he said, honestly, I don't think that this story should be done. I think it'll not get you

what you want and it'll set back what you're advocating for. And by the way, this reporter was in favor of decriminalization. He said, it'll set it back by quite a bit. The guy said, I'm gonna burn this fucker because he's a hypocrite. Here's the problem with ideological purity. Yeah. He burned him and Carter was like, that's a huge fucking black mark on us. I can't decriminalize now. And I have to tell my whole staff, y'all are expected to follow the laws too. And so he does. He tells them that and he shelves the decriminalization efforts. Who is the reporter? I don't remember. It was a guy from the Washington, I want to say Washington Post,

but yeah, it just like wow. So that's what happens in the 1970s, Vee Savi, this swing from, it should be completely illegal absent any information and evidence all the way to, no, we're gonna decriminalize it and then back to, now we're gonna keep going with the status quo because politically we got fucked. I think in many ways this was like the second time that that somebody screwed up just a little bit too much and it hurt everybody

Way more than it needed to because if he hadn't done that we would have had pot decriminalized and there would have been a very different landscape Similar to when Ted Kennedy was the single vote needed to get universal health care, and he said, fuck you to Jimmy Carter and voted against it. And then when we got to Obamacare, he got a brain tumor and he lost, you know, he died and his seat went to a Republican who, you know, voted against the black guy's idea. And so we ended up not getting universal healthcare. So a few times it just turns on a dime, which is something. Anyway, so do you have any books that you wanna recommend?

Not at present. I'm all the reading I'm doing right now is tied directly into getting ready to go back to school. Gotcha, and that's fair. A lot of what I used for this research was started from a book called Can't Find My Way Home by Martin Torgoth. It's a fantastic book. It's a big thick one, but it's a good one. It's basically America and the Great Stone Age, 1945 to 2000, is the subtitle. It's a really good read. He writes very excessively. I strongly recommend people go out and get it.

It's on Kindle, so you don't have to carry it with you. If people want to argue with you about how you clearly don't understand that the Civil War was not about slavery, where can they find you on social media? I will fight them on that and they can find me to do it at eHBlalock on Twitter. They can find me also at MrBlalock on Tech Talk and Mr. Blaylock on What's the other one Instagram? And they can of course find both of us on the Twitter machine at Geek History Time. Yes Where can you be found? I can be found at the Harmony 2H is in the middle on both Twitter and Insta and you can find me

every Tuesday night on Twitch.tv-capital-punds. In September we've got a hell of a line-up coming to you from all over the world. In fact just this last week we had somebody from Washington DC. In September we're going to have a couple different folks from England, somebody from Washington DC in September. We're going to have a couple different folks from England, somebody from New York, and some very well-known comedians. So take a look for that. It was very cool. Yeah. So until the next episode, for a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Bluel. And until next time, keep rolling 20s. Rolling, that's good.