Matthew Cox

By the time 1990 rolled around, there was just one.

Whereas you had two previous ones that were taken down and those were the larger ones.

Well, suddenly the Colombians were able to get the product into the United States, but they didn't have the distribution capacity.

So who ended up inheriting all that product by default?

The Mexican Mexicans.

So the Mexicans are getting half off the top for themselves.

That money is going back to Mexico.

That's their proceeds.

Then they get the product that the Colombians couldn't sell.

They had to distribute that material as well.

But those proceeds had to get back to Colombia.

Now, getting money to Colombia is an entirely different kettle of fish.

You've got a large geographic distance, so it's not just driving the money down to the border.

So not only is there a large geographical distance, you also have to understand that the Colombian banking structure was under a level of scrutiny that people today wouldn't be able to really imagine.

You know, you and I were teenagers in the 80s.

So I don't know how well-abressed you were of these type of activities, but the Colombian government, particularly the Colombian cartels, was under a tremendous level of scrutiny that we don't see today, even with the Mexicans.

The situation today is a criminal problem or a public health problem with the rise of synthetics.

In the early 1980s, the actual pretext, the basis for the war on drugs was

was a geopolitical struggle between us and the Soviet Union.

You know, for when Reagan declared his war on drugs in January of 82, well, there'd already been a communist regime in the Western Hemisphere for two decades in Cuba.