The Cartel That Created a Country | Patrick Winn

Summary

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Camp Gagnon Podcast Summary

Episode: The Cartel That Created a Country | Patrick Winn
Host: Mark Gagnon
Guest: Patrick Winn
Date: December 16, 2025

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Overview

This episode features investigative journalist Patrick Winn, author of Narcotopia, who takes listeners deep into the hidden world of Wa State—a de facto country carved out of Myanmar, sustained not by taxes, but by a sophisticated, militarized drug economy. The discussion covers Wa State’s unique place in modern geopolitics as an unrecognized narco-state, the evolution from opium and heroin to methamphetamine, the tangled relationships with the CIA, DEA, and China, and the daily lives and aspirations of the Wa people.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Intro to Wa State: The Shadow Country

• Wa State: Not just a region, but a self-sustained, sovereign entity inside Myanmar, with its own borders, government, ID system, roads, cell towers, and ministries. “Everything that makes a country a country.” (Patrick Winn, 02:11)
• Economy: Rooted first in opium/heroin, now dominated by methamphetamine production.
• Size & Scale: Area nearly as large as the Netherlands; population around 500,000.
• International Recognition: Officially not acknowledged as independent, but, as Mark puts it, lives as a "country with its own borders and its own military inside of a country you’ve never heard of." (01:28)

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2. From Opium Hills to Narco-State

• Geography: Located in the mountains between India, China, and Thailand—terrain that fostered isolation and diversity.
• Agricultural Roots: Poor soil for staples, but opium poppies thrived in Wa highlands (18:11).
• Trade: Opium initially traded with Chinese merchants; developed into a vital local export.

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3. Colonialism, Isolation, and Resistance

• British Colonial Lies: Wa areas appear on maps as part of Burma (Myanmar), but were "never actually conquered." (16:41)
• Cultural Image: Stereotyped and demonized as ‘evil hillbillies’ and ‘headhunting savages’; British attempts to subjugate them were fiercely resisted.
• Self-Sufficiency: “We are a wild people, and we want to remain this way.” (15:31)

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4. Cold War Power Games: CIA, Anti-Communists, and Heroin

• Chinese Civil War Fallout: Defeated anti-communist Chinese forces flee into Burma, supported by the CIA in hopes of infiltrating Communist China. (22:48–24:42)
• CIA’s Pragmatism: Weapons are supplied to local anti-communists, who morph into major opium traffickers/corporate cartel (25:00–26:08), in a tacit exchange for intelligence and regional influence.
• Transforming the Region: The trade-off cemented the drug trade’s power and supplied remote Wa villages with guns and rice in exchange for opium.

“The CIA had a long-standing relationship with this drug cartel, which it wanted to use to spy on China. And then a drug cartel being a drug cartel in the truest sense of the word. They’re just trying to make money.” – (Patrick Winn, 34:50)

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5. Vietnam War Fallout and the U.S. Drug Crisis

• Supplying U.S. Troops: Heroin refineries in the region targeted GIs in Vietnam, resulting in a wave of heroin addiction among returning soldiers (34:07–37:00).
• Birth of the DEA and U.S. War on Drugs: Public outrage over veterans’ drug use fuels Nixon’s global ‘super police’ approach, giving rise to the DEA and new international enforcement priorities (41:35–43:02).
• Interagency Rivalry: Early conflicts between the DEA (anti-drug) and CIA (geopolitical gamesmanship) begin to play out over strategies and priorities, especially with narcotics groups tied to American intelligence.

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6. Rise of Khun Sa and Evolution of the Drug Trade

• Khun Sa: Charismatic, self-proclaimed freedom fighter and drug lord, replaces earlier CIA-backed Chinese cartels, consolidates control with a nation-building message (46:38–49:12).
• Wei Hsueh-Kang: The episode profiles Wei as "the most important and successful drug trafficker in human history," pioneering global trafficking networks, innovative smuggling methods (mixing heroin into legitimate cargo, 52:43), and brand marketing ("China White").
• DEA’s Frustrations: Despite high-profile busts, heroin (often relabeled and cut down) continues flooding Western markets under new leadership.

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7. The Creation of Modern Wa State

• Post-Cold War Uprising: In 1989, Wa leaders break with both Communists and ex-CIA traffickers, establishing Wa State as a new, independently-minded entity with a singular aim: preserve Wa identity and autonomy, financed by narcotics (56:29–57:17).
• Military Might: By the early 1990s, Wa State fields tens of thousands of well-armed troops, bigger than armed forces in some European countries.

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8. Internal Struggles: The Idealist vs. the Kingpin

• Saul "Superstar" Lou: Christianized founder, seeks American legitimacy, aid, and peaceful transition away from drugs—with the dream of U.S. alliance and development (67:49–76:34).
• Wei Hsueh-Kang: The pragmatic kingpin, argues for doubling down on narcotics as the lifeblood of the state.
• DEA’s “Crazy” Experiment: American agents court Saul, envisioning a “bloodless” win—starving the heroin business with aid and institution-building instead of force.

“They say, ‘We’re going to convince the DEA not to go after us, but be friends with us…’ It’s absolutely a crazy idea, and even crazier still, the agents in the field had to take this idea to DEA headquarters.” – Patrick Winn (76:34)

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9. Sabotage, Betrayal, and The Triumph of the Cartel

• CIA Intervenes: Alarmed at the DEA’s unorthodox plans (and perceiving a threat to U.S. policy in Myanmar), the CIA sabotages the alliance by informing the Burmese junta and undermining Saul (86:20–94:30).

“The CIA sabotaged it … This fascinating avenue the war on drugs could have gone down, just blew up. And from then on out, Wa State went the drug trafficking route.” – Patrick Winn (93:43)

• Wei’s Victory: Saul is discredited, suffers torture and exile, while Wei steers Wa State fully into narco-economy.

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10. The Meth Revolution & Globalization

• Strategic Shift to Meth (96:53): Wa State transitions from labor-intensive opium/heroin to synthetic methamphetamine to evade U.S. surveillance, reduce risk, and maximize profit.
• Meth Ubiquity: Billions of pink, vanilla-scented meth pills are produced; meth becomes an everyday reality for Thai/Burmese working-class people (101:52–103:29).
• Modern Smuggling: Synthetic drugs are easier to move, the new “passive landlord” business model brings in outside syndicates to run production, with Wa State taking a cut (144:49–145:13).

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11. The China Connection

• Client State of China: Wa State enjoys Chinese protection, trade, weapons, telecom infrastructure, and strategic caretaking. (117:10–118:06)
• Mutual Deal: “Produce all the meth you want, just don’t bring it into China.” (119:14–120:59)
• Strategic Importance: The region is crucial for China’s access to rare earth minerals and serves as a reliable attack dog in Myanmar’s internal strife.

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12. Daily Life Inside Wa State

• Authoritarianism and Militarization: Every family supplies a soldier; child soldiers are common; army prestige is dominant (115:45–117:09).
• Limited Welfare: Despite immense drug profits, little trickles down—illiteracy, poor healthcare, and stark wealth disparities persist.
• Criminal Justice: Drug use among natives is harshly punished: “They would just dig a hole and put you in the meth hole.” (146:43)
• Culture and Identity: Despite Mandarin’s growing influence, many Wa fiercely maintain their indigenous culture and language (123:05–124:36).

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13. Geopolitics & The Future

• Myanmar’s Weak Grip: Perpetual internal chaos lets Wa State flourish in semi-official autonomy.
• U.S. Frustration: Attempts to indict or extradite Wa leaders routinely fail—protected by geography and Chinese backing.
• Long-term Prospects: “Wa State is stable … if anything, I think it will get bigger.” China props it up; Myanmar’s future is uncertain, but Wa sovereignty is likely to endure. (139:02)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On the nature of a cartel:

  "A cartel is a corporation. The purpose of a cartel is to make money. I don’t think they have much of a higher agenda beyond that."
  – Patrick Winn (04:31)

• On Wa independence and statecraft:

  "It’s not easy to start your own state. And they did it."
  – Patrick Winn (66:36)

• On CIA short-sightedness:

  "The history of the CIA is: ‘Whoops, didn’t see that coming.’"
  – Patrick Winn (37:41)

• On the DEA’s doomed alliance:

  "Imagine you can get a drug cartel to stop being a drug cartel simply by cooperating with them... You don’t have to shoot anyone in the head."
  – Patrick Winn (78:40)

• On Wei Hsueh-Kang, the kingpin:

  "He is the most successful, impressive drug lord in human history … He’s the Bezos, in a way."
  – Patrick Winn (108:35)

• On everyday meth use:

  "My Thai friends, my Burmese friends—they’re like, ‘Well, yeah, I’ve tried it.’ So it’s—they’ve tried meth."
  – Patrick Winn (103:20)

• On enforcement inside Wa State:

  "If you do meth in Wa State, they will put you in jail ... Instead of building a prison, they would just dig a hole and put you in the meth hole or the heroin hole."
  – Patrick Winn (146:36)

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Key Timestamps

• 00:00–02:55: Setting the stage – What is Wa State?
• 10:45–16:41: British colonization, Wa independence, headhunter legends
• 22:19–27:17: Opium trade, CIA involvement, rise of anti-communist Chinese drug cartels
• 34:07–37:00: Vietnam War & heroin addiction among U.S. troops
• 46:38–54:00: Rise and fall of Khun Sa; Wei Hsueh-Kang steps in
• 56:29–59:47: The founding of Wa State and its military might
• 67:49–76:34: The internal split: Christian idealists vs. narcotics pragmatists
• 86:20–93:43: CIA sabotages DEA–Wa alliance; triumphant narco-state
• 96:53–103:29: Rise of meth; impact on Southeast Asia
• 117:10–120:59: China’s relationship with Wa State; global implications
• 130:03–133:26: Reporting challenges, life under Wa rule
• 139:02: The likely stability and endurance of Wa State

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Conclusion

Patrick Winn paints a complex, nuanced, and startling portrait of Wa State—a stateless nation whose fate, economy, and very existence are rooted in the narcotics trade, maneuvering adroitly between superpowers, and finding opportunity in perpetual conflict and isolation. This episode demystifies its dark reputation and highlights the intersection of drugs, geopolitics, and identity at the margins of global order.

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Further Exploration

• Check out Narcotopia by Patrick Winn for a gripping narrative that follows superstar Saul Lou, secret alliances, and all the intrigue of Wa State.
• Recommended reading for anyone interested in international crime, the evolution of the drug war, and Southeast Asian geopolitics.

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Transcript

[Patrick Nguyen]

Wastate is the world's most powerful narco state, the most powerful drug trafficking organization on planet Earth, and China supports them.

[Mark Gagnon]

This is Patrick Nguyen, and he's gone deep into Myanmar's shadow world, where an entire country exists within a country and the entire economy is based on one thing.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Math.

[Mark Gagnon]

And Myanmar doesn't just have a civil war. It has nestled within the mountains, an entire narco state. For decades, this region has been carved up by warlords, rebel armies, and generals, each funded not by taxes, but by drugs. First opium, and then heroin, and now something far more efficient and far more deadly. And today we talk about forgotten Cold War deals, Chinese alliances, CIA entanglements, and rebel states that outlast governments. And how the modern synthetic drug trade made Myanmar more powerful and more dangerous than ever. This isn't chaos by accident or a story about narcotics. It's about how history, empire, and war created a system that. That no one seems able or willing to shut down. If you want to understand how a country truly becomes ungovernable and why the drug war will never end, well, this is the episode for you. Patrick Nguyen is a brilliant journalist and has all the answers on how the Wa state, deep in the mountains of Myanmar, actually operates. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. Patrick Nguyen, thank you so much for joining me.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Glad to be here.

[Mark Gagnon]

I am very excited to chat with you, and there's a lot to get into. You have a fascinating story to tell. You wrote a book called Narcotopia, which really shows a part of sort of geopolitics and, like, the American war on drugs and drug trafficking in a really, really interesting way. And I want to get into all the details, but in short, the thing that I was kind of taking away when my friends were asking me about this interview is I was like, okay, look, I don't have all the details, but basically there's a country with its own borders and its own military inside of a country that you've never heard of that is bigger than some European nations that basically exists on an entire economy built on heroin and meth.

[Patrick Nguyen]

That's pretty crazy close. Heroin is now passe. It's all about meth these days. Everything else you said is. Is correct. And it's quite astonishing that more people don't recognize this fact. If you look at Google Maps or you look at a globe in a classroom, you could look at the country of Burma or Myanmar. Same country, two different names, and it looks like one, you know, unified country, but that's a lie. There is a country inside that country that is totally sovereign. They have their own documentation, they have their own highways, they have their own cell phone towers, hospitals, ministries of finance and health. And I can go on and on. Everything that makes a country a country. And, yeah, the. The economy is really rooted in. It was heroin and now it's meth.

[Mark Gagnon]

And the CIA and the DEA is.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Involved in this at various points. Yes. Well, the CIA. Well, where do we. Where do we go?

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, we can get into that, but I'm just kind of now just like, sort of setting the stage that there's a country inside a country that has an economy that exists on meth that the CIA is aware of and is in some way involved in it in some capacity, and it's affecting Americans.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, well, I mean, I think anything the CIA does comes back to America, but absolutely, yeah. CIA has played a role in its formation. DEA has played a role in how the state has come together. And really what I tried to unravel is the strange relationship between this narco state and my own country. And it's just surprising that there's a relationship at all. And even more surprising how deep it goes.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. And maybe it in some way sheds light on the cartels in Central and South America and kind of our relationship with that drug war as well.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. Well, let me ask you something. When you think of a cartel in Mexico, like, throw out a few, like, main facts about cartels. Like, what do you imagine?

[Mark Gagnon]

I imagine that they operate on a code of honor which is, like, against, you know, outside of the bounds of the law. Like, they have their own internal sort of law that they kind of operate with. They're often at odds with the government or they're working under bribery with the government. They're typically pretty violent in order to get what they want. And they are more sophisticated than we typically think, and they have access to decent tech in order to get drugs into America.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, I would say all that's true. Looking really at what a cartel is. A cartel is a corporation. The purpose of a cartel is to make money. I don't think they have much of a higher agenda beyond that. And they, they, yes, they can corrupt parts of the government. Let's just go with the Mexican government to get their way. But that's not at all how things work in Southeast Asia, specifically with this country within a country that we're talking about, which is called WA State. It's a narcotics trafficking organization. But really, like, Agenda A is sustaining itself as a state. Okay. Making money isn't the number one objective. They want to sustain themselves as a state, and they want it to be a place that defends the homeland of a very specific ethnic group called the Wa people.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay, now this has all of the makings of a fantastic story. I feel like we've set the stage pretty well. All right, so tell me, who are you, and how did you get involved in this? Where do you live? What is your background?

[Patrick Nguyen]

I've lived well. I'm originally from North Carolina, from a very small town, like a factory town in North Carolina. Worked in newspapers in my home state. And eventually I met somebody at one of the newspapers I was working at who was a photojournalist. She is a Thai citizen, and we fell in love, and she wanted to go back to Bangkok, where she's from, and I followed. We're now married.

[Mark Gagnon]

Nice.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So that happened 17, 18 years ago.

[Mark Gagnon]

And you've been living in Bangkok since 2008? Ish.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, exactly. Summer of 2008. So I'm an investigative journalist. And so when I got to Thailand, I started looking around for the most interesting stories that I could tell and reported on all sorts of things. I've been in, you know, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, publications like that. Not to toot my own horn, but just, you know, I'm not just blogging.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay.

[Patrick Nguyen]

For more than 10 years, kind of my great white whale has been this story. The fact that Americans are so fixated on the drug war, and they really just look at Latin America. So everyone knows Pablo Escobar and El Chapo and all those guys, Right? There's a whole other half of the drug war that's played out in Asia that just gets completely ignored.

[Mark Gagnon]

And.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And the fact that there is. Look, the most powerful drug trafficking organization on planet Earth is not in Mexico. It's in Southeast Asia. And I just really wanted to tell that story because its leaders are indicted by the dea. The DEA would like to throw them in a prison cell in the US Extradite them. It's hard to tell that story.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. And how did you hear about this for the first time if you just.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Read the newspapers in, say, Thailand? This. This. I'll use the word cartel because Americans understand it, but we'll get into why that's an imperfect word. This cartel is talked about, written about, usually as, like, this great boogeyman. And they're seen as this nefarious force that pumps methamphetamine into the region and, you know, screws everything up and gets people hooked on meth, which is bad. It's a much more complicated story than that. But that's what you'll read in the papers. The other thing is when you read about the group that is really at the core of this narco state, the Wa people, they're an indigenous, indigenous group that lives up in the mountains of Burma. And they are seen as nefarious. And it's quite open. Like in the newspaper, they would be described as sort of villainous, low morality type people, kind of like hillbillies. Like, you know, evil hillbillies.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yes.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So I. I mean, I love evil hillbillies, so I was drawn to that.

[Mark Gagnon]

So you heard about it and then you start asking people and you're like, have you heard of this? And everyone's like, yeah, you know those. Yeah, we've heard of that.

[Patrick Nguyen]

They had heard of it in very black and white terms. So the Wa people, if you ask someone in Southeast Asia about the Wa, if they've heard of them, they've heard one thing. Well, they've heard two things. The first is that they used to be headhunters. So they had a culture of cutting off people's heads and putting them on sticks way up in the mountains of Burma to scare the crap out of any intruders.

[Mark Gagnon]

Is this like 200 years ago? A thousand years ago?

[Patrick Nguyen]

No, it was happening as recently as the 60s.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. Yeah.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And then eons before that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, Christos, I think some visual aids here is going to be very helpful. Is it possible just to one, I think, get everyone on board with what exactly Myanmar is, where it exists in the region, why there's disparity between Myanmar and Burma. So what can you tell me about Myanmar?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Myanmar is a country that's wedged between India and China. It's very chaotic. Some of the greatest, most intelligent, creative, most awesome people I've ever met are from this country. I think the chaotic situation breeds pretty amazing people. But it's one of these countries where the British Empire went in and drew borders around all these different groups that never agreed to all be in the same country.

[Mark Gagnon]

No, the British. Come on.

[Patrick Nguyen]

I don't mean to blow your mind, but yes.

[Mark Gagnon]

Come on, dude.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So it's just set up to be contentious and chaotic. There are dozens of different ethnic groups. And really, when you get into the mountains, like mountains in general, the geography of mountains breeds diversity because you've got one group on this mountain and they speak a certain language and you go three peaks over and it's a different language. Whereas when you get into, like, low flat areas, you know, everyone can co. Mingle and they're trading and they get.

[Mark Gagnon]

A common language and there's much more homogeny.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yes, yes. So, yeah, Myanmar was a British colony. It went independent after World War II, and back then it was called Burma. And around 1988, a military junta, which has controlled the country for much of its existence, said Burma. That's the old British colonial name. We're going to change the name to Myanmar.

[Mark Gagnon]

And a military junta is basically like the. When a coup happens from the military and then they form like a military government. More or less.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. North Korea would be a huna. It's a military state.

[Mark Gagnon]

Got it.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And so this is where it is. As we can see, it borders Thailand, which is where you live. And so if there's going to be issues in Myanmar, it's going to get to the Thai press and people are going to be aware of this.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

So Myanmar in recent history, as of like a few years ago, has also has gone through another military coup, basically. Like, I don't even know if it's a different one. Is the current state of Myanmar and the conflict happening there, is it super relevant to the story?

[Patrick Nguyen]

No, not necessarily. Because as we will hear the Wa people, Wa state exists like high up on the mountain, above the clouds, looking down and everything else. Like, you guys fight it out. The conflict I think you're referring to is there's like a raging revolutionary war happening in the country. For the soul of the country, will it remain in the hands of a dictatorship or will it be liberated? Freer place. And it's so complicated. Dozens of groups are fighting it out, but the biggest, most formidable group consistently are the Wa, and they're up in the mountains next to China. Their country, I would call it, is almost as big as the Netherlands. So this is not, you know, some backwoods, you know, they've got one valley or something like that. I mean, it's, it's a huge piece of real estate.

[Mark Gagnon]

And now the Wa people are an ethnic group that live in the specific region. Now, when the British occupied, were the Wa people kind of just separate? Like, did they not really interact? They kind of just stayed on their, you know, mountaintop and like, didn't cohabitate or like, how exactly did that work from British colonization?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, they were totally isolated and wanted it, wanted to keep it that way. So when I was doing my research, just, just to set the stage, like in writing this book, I, I poured through everything from CIA documents. I talked to so many DEA agents, anti narcotics police in Thailand, Burma, people in the US State Department. So this was like a Five year process of. Of. Of trying to get my bearings. Part of that was looking at historical documents, and you could see where British colonizers, let's call them, are trying to go up into the Wa mountains and. And add them to the colonial project. And at one point, like, a Wa village writes them a letter and says, don't come here. We eat squirrels raw.

[Mark Gagnon]

Bam.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And usually that would, like, make people think, oh, maybe I won't visit. By the way, I don't think they actually eat squirrels raw. I think that they were just saying that to be like, don't come up here.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, yeah. You know, I don't know if that's gonna work against the British. I mean, we've seen what their food looks like. You know what I mean? Their food is so bad. They were like, oh, that kind of sounds kind of nice.

[Patrick Nguyen]

There's some big beans on that raw squirrel.

[Mark Gagnon]

Squirrel sounds kind of good.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Toad in the hole. Isn't that raw squirrel?

[Mark Gagnon]

Actually, I don't know.

[Patrick Nguyen]

They kept coming. Some would be colonizers, lost their skulls in the process and ended up, you know, in the. In front of Wa villages. They would have these skull displays, and a small village might have two or three, and then a bigger one might have 12. And you could get up to the dozens. And the Wa lived in these fortresses, actually. Really cool. If you could imagine a giant, like, giant wooden walls surrounding a village, and there's to. To get into the Wa village, you have to go through, like, an obstacle course. So to actually get in, you might have to go through this, like, trench that's covered in thorny vines. Like, they would plant these thorny vines, like natural barbed wire. There were trap doors where you could fall on spikes. They would take poison they would get from local amphibians and, like, you know, moisturize the spikes so that if you did fall in, now you're impaled and poisoned. Whoa. This is what happens if you don't. If you see the skulls and you keep going.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. Which for most people, the skulls is enough.

[Patrick Nguyen]

That would be enough for me.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So they lived in these. These giant fortified villages. And then once you get inside the village, everything is chill, I suppose.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

But very, very fortified. And so, yeah, the British kept coming and kept coming. And finally, like, when. When Burma went independent, they got some, like, Wa chieftains to sit down, and they were like, don't you want, like, hospitals? Don't you want schools? Don't you want to be a part of this? And they said, no, we are a wild people. And we want to remain this way.

[Mark Gagnon]

So let's get an image of these folks, because I feel like it might be helpful to kind of visualize it. Could we just get just a picture of just the Wa people? Because I think, for me, at least, I'm picturing almost like an indigenous group of warriors, kind of like with spears or something.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well, back in the day. Yeah. And they didn't wear any clothes either, so they would just have a scrap of cloth over their genital area, and women would not necessarily have tops on. There's very little water up in these mountains, so there wasn't much bathing. So the British said all these awful things about them that they're like ogres and things like that, and it's like, all right, well, you can call them whatever you want, but can you dominate them? And the answer was no.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And so what the British did is they just added the Wa area to Burma on their maps. But this was a lie. They hadn't actually conquered it. They couldn't exercise power over the Wa, and so they just added it. And that's why the Wa people are in Burma now.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. And they basically resisted British colonization. They fortified. And I'm sure the British, to some certain extent, were like, hey, we're overextended here in general, and there's not much up there, so we basically conquered them. And let's just loop them in with these borders.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. Who would know?

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Right.

[Mark Gagnon]

Well, here we are.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Right, right. Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

So the Wa do this throughout the 1900s. They're living ethnically as their own people with their own customs and culture. They resist the British. And then once Burma is sort of established as its own independent state, they continue to do that and really never cohabitate with the other ethnic groups within broader Burma, AKA Myanmar.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. It's never really been fully conquered, and it's never really been a part of Burma. We have to remember, on the other side of those mountains that the Wa occupy is China. And that will play, like, a really big role in the story as well. So the Wa wanted to remain separate from the Burmese lowlanders and the Chinese lowlanders as well. They just really wanted to be left alone.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. So how do they progress in terms of infrastructure? And then how do drugs come into play?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well, the funny thing about the Wa territory, it's just slopes and slopes and slopes. I mean, there's hardly a patch of flatland to farm on, and the soil is not very. It's not good soil. It's like this gritty, sandy, alkaline Soil. So you plant rice there, you plant corn there, and it sprouts, but not very much. One thing that grows really great in that soil is the opium poppy. And at some point a couple centuries ago, they figured this out, and they started growing opium. And it was just the most kickass opium in the world, probably. And they realized they had this thing that the lowlanders wanted. Interestingly, the Wa people, even back then, weren't dope heads. Like, they didn't get high on their own supply. So these different fortified villages would grow opium. And then, you know, normally, outsiders wouldn't be welcome, but they did start letting some traders come in, mostly from China, to buy their opium. And it was really primo stuff. And now they're getting tools. They're getting the occasional gun, weapon. They can buy rice from the lowlanders, and that's how they start interacting with the world.

[Mark Gagnon]

And when does that start, like, this opium trade? I guess in the very early stages.

[Patrick Nguyen]

A long time ago. But let's roughly think about, like, 1800s, and this is continuing to happen up through, say, like, World War II. There's still super isolated at this point. The Cold War hasn't started yet.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. Now, does opium have another purpose, obviously, outside of, you know, making heroin or drugs? Like, was there. You know, obviously we put, like, you know, poppy seeds on bagels and stuff. Like, was there another use for this?

[Patrick Nguyen]

You know, these opium poppies, medicine? So in general, I mean, I have to speak in generalities, but from, like, the anthropological writings and me talking to a lot of Wa people, they'd say, yeah, if you get really sick or something, you would, you know, smoke opium. You can actually eat opium. So I think people don't really know what to imagine when they think of opium, because you can't really buy it on the street anymore. Picture this, like, red, scarlet, red or white flower. And under the flower, there's, like, a pod. And it's really hard. It's about the size of an egg. And you can get a knife and, like, scrape the pod and wait, and this goopy brown stuff kind of, you know, oozes to the surface.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, wow. Yeah, these are pretty, actually.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. And you scrape. Yeah, there you go on the left.

[Mark Gagnon]

Those pods right there.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, those big pods right there on the left. Christos.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, that one.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yep. Okay. And you can actually see somebody has scraped it. See that goop? Yes. It's like a tawny brown molasses goop. Mm. You scrape that stuff out, and then you wait long enough, it actually turns milky white. Did you watch Game of Thrones.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Milk of the poppy.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, right, right, right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

That's an illusion to that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So it turns like a leaf on the nose illusion. Not really an illusion, it's just what it is. And then you can scrape that stuff into like a clay pot and put a lid on it, and it actually becomes more potent with time. So like wine, it almost ferments in a way. I think it dries out.

[Mark Gagnon]

Interesting.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So the water weight, whatever. I'm not an opium trafficker, but this is what I've been told.

[Mark Gagnon]

It becomes more distilled in some way.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yes. And it's highly transportable. So imagine the wake up one day and they're like, you know what we really want to interface with the outside world. We'll grow tomatoes or whatever. Well, that wouldn't work because the closest city is a zillion miles away. And just by the time you transported tomatoes or whatever, they'd be rotten.

[Mark Gagnon]

But if you're transporting this stuff, the longer it takes to get there, the more fire it is.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And so they're realizing this from, you know, a couple hundred years ago and they're starting to trade at a small scale. Like, hey, we got this good stuff. People are using it for medicine. Maybe some people are getting high, maybe it's used for food in some capacity. And then how does it evolve from that into like an actual broad scale drug trade?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Sure. Well, this is where the CIA comes in. Yeah. Eyes light up.

[Mark Gagnon]

So, and again, a year on this, like, timelines are really helpful for me to kind of like understand what's happening. Right. We have like, you know, 1800s trading with the Chinese and they're developing their own thing. They start to get some money, they build some infrastructure, they get some weapons. And then, you know, the British come in, they resist them, they're still trading this opium. And then after World War II, I imagine the CIA, you know, has more interest.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yes. Okay, so forgive the tangent, but we'll get back to where we are now. Probably the most momentous thing that's happened in semi modern Asian history has been the Chinese Civil war. So this is the war for what China would become today between the communist and, let's just call them anti communist, Chairman Mao, all that stuff. So in the late 1940s, the that war is being won by the communists and they kick the crap out of the anti communist Chinese and most of them flee to Taiwan. That's the root of the Taiwan China beef. Now, however, China's a big country and on the far other end, there's kind of like. It's kind of like cowboy country. And it's dry, it's poor, and all the anti communist Chinese there be landowners, opium farmers. Communists do not like opium. The opium wars, all that stuff. No, no, no, it's bad. So landowners, opium farmers, merchants, and all of their, you know, assorted hangers on, they're trying to fight the communists because they don't want to live in a communist country. And finally, they get pushed with all their horses and all their weapons and everything into Burma around sort of where the WA live. At first, they're kind of wasting away in the jungles of Burma. They're far from home. They're pissed off because the communists have won and they don't know what to do. The CIA connects with them and says, hey, what if we send you some weapons, medicine, rice, buy airdrops and caravans running up through Thailand and get you back up to fighting strength and you guys go back into China and fight those damn Communists? Fight the Communists.

[Mark Gagnon]

Nice.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And how do you think that worked out?

[Mark Gagnon]

Well, not great if I imagine didn't work out.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Okay. I mean, the CIA, this is after World War II. We're in like early 50s, and these guys with literally, like, they've got CIA weapons that have dropped in wooden crates with parachutes from them, dropped from airplanes littered around the jungles of Burma. They collect them, they go back into China and they try to fight and they just, you know, they get mowed down, shot to bits. They come back to Burma and the CIA is still egging them on. Like you're, you know, the anti communist Chinese force. This is great, right? And they say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we are. But they shift gears. They look around and they realize, wow, a lot of opium around here, and it grows really well here. And we can't dominate the WA for reasons that we've covered. They're pretty tough. But we can dominate sort of people around them and other ethnic groups that are growing opium. And they set up essentially a drug cartel trafficking opium. So think about who has been pushed out by the communists. It's merchants, it's opium traders, and people who know how to do business. And so while maintaining the guise of an anti communist force, they really become a major drug cartel. And the CIA doesn't say, oh, no, no, no, let's not be friends anymore. The relationship continues.

[Mark Gagnon]

Mm. So this is the CIA not working with the WA directly. It's with the, you know, former Chinese sort of defectors that have occupied nearby territory.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yep. And now I'll bring us back to where we started. We started this tangent, this, you know, exiled Chinese anti communist drug cartel. They really start farming poppies on an industrial scale. So they press gang all of these indigenous groups into farming opium. They're trafficking it around the region. They really covet us of what the WA have. And so again, they can't dominate them, but they start buying their opium. The WA are not just going to give it to them. This CIA propped up drug trafficking organization has to give them something. And what they give them are high end weapons. So now you would see formerly WA headhunters would have assault rifles, you know, steel assault rifles stamped usa And a steady supply of ammo too, because the next time they come up to buy the opium from the wa, they can buy bullets, they can buy all sorts of things.

[Mark Gagnon]

So this is the CIA giving weapons and ammunition to the people around the WA that then those people are trading with the WA.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, it's like a B2B relationship. The Waaagh supply primo opium to the cartel and the CIA props up the cartel so that it can. Well, you know, what the CIA really wanted was they saw the world as like a big game of risk and they wanted their people anti communist, occupying as many points on the globe as possible. And this cartel did a really good job of occupying this part of the globe. These wild and woolly mountains of Burma.

[Mark Gagnon]

Mm.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And so it was their job to make sure it didn't fall to communism. Additionally, drug traffickers, they're really good at creeping across borders. And so what the CIA would do with this cartel group, they would give them big backpacks with like antennas and send them out sort of close to the Chinese border to spy, to relay information. Remember, these guys are Chinese, they speak Chinese, they're good at spying on communist Chinese and they start transmitting information back to the CIA. So it's very useful for the CIA to have a window into this back door of China through this cartel. One more thing. At one point the CIA figures out the WA are there and I found this old CIA document that says, man, these wa, they're great warriors. You know, I think what they really want is to be ruled by white men.

[Mark Gagnon]

Kind of doubt it. If we know anything about this whole British colonization story, they've resisted the white dudes for a while.

[Patrick Nguyen]

They've resisted everybody. Yeah, so they've never seen white guys. So this was fanciful and it didn't work out that way. Eventually the CIA was able to make some inroads with some like, kind of local WA warlords to do some missions for them.

[Mark Gagnon]

So do you think the CIA at this point see the WA as, hey, maybe we can get in good with them and just turn them onto our side so that they don't fall to the communist Chinese?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Precisely. If you are worried about communist China and this is at this point the largest communist country on earth racing towards getting a nuclear weapon and the CIA had very, very poor visibility into what was happening. Wouldn't it be cool if there was this group of like headhunter guys with a warrior ethos right on the back door of China that could slip in and spy on them, make mischief, cause.

[Mark Gagnon]

Problems and just distract them, cause a multi front war, whatever it may be.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Absolutely.

[Mark Gagnon]

So they see them as a useful ends to or a useful means rather to, you know, just sort of aggressing the Chinese.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, but ultimately the. They found some like badass WA dudes to carry out some missions. But ultimately those WA warlords were doing it for gold and weapons and it was purely for their own benefit. I mean they never, they weren't doing it for freedom and democracy and so yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

So is the CIA at this point dropping US operatives into Burma and around WA territory to go and you know, mingle with the locals?

[Patrick Nguyen]

No, it was a very difficult place for like, you know, a guy that looks like me to just wander into. I can imagine what they did do is they relied on Taiwanese people. So Taiwan at the time was their intelligence service was sort of like a little brother or a junior operative to the CIA. And they would go in and they would set up listening stations along the border and they would, you know, listen to military radio transmissions eking out from communist Chinese military bases. And really they ran it through, you know, these like yahoo Taiwanese guys who would go in there and liaise alongside the drug cartel who also liaised with, with the wa.

[Mark Gagnon]

What's up guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because I have a story to tell you. Fun fact, after you have a child, your testosterone naturally goes down. It's a way for you to like become like more empathetic and more in touch and like protect your kid and stuff. And I didn't really believe that. But then I had a baby like a year ago and I started to feel it around like 3 o' clock would roll around and I would get more tired. I wasn't really sleeping that great because we just had a baby and I was like drinking more coffee and I started getting anxious and I was like, this is not working. I was like, should I just do trt. Like I know a lot of guys and they hit like 30, 40, they're just ripping TRT. So I was looking into it, I was like, ah, it affects your fertility. I might want to have some more kids. So I was like, all right, there must be a way I can do this that's more natural and just like support my testosterone. So I hit my buddy David who does the ads, and I was like, is there anyone that's out there doing any of this kind of stuff? And he was like, oh, you should check out Mars Men. Mars Men. Right here is a natural testosterone booster. This is going to just basically support your testosterone using a bunch of supplements and natural ingredients that are going to make your testosterone be what it's supposed to be. Okay, don't even think about TRT because again, it can be overkill. You're going to be injecting your body and it can also shut down. Your body's like natural production of testosterone but using this stuff. Tongat, Ali, shilajit, vitamin D, zinc, boron, all the natural stuff that is going to be supporting your healthy T levels and helping your stamina and giving you more energy throughout the day. And honestly, it's great. I've only been trying it for a couple weeks now and I want to do a before and after testosterone test and see how much more my testosterone boosted. 91% of guys reported feeling higher energy. And the reviews on this are absolutely amazing. It's made in the USA, third party tested and there is a 90 day money back guarantee. So there's literally no risk. You can try it for, you know, three months and if it's not for you, they will get you your money back. And for a limited time, the listeners of this program, this is a crazy deal, by the way, most brands don't do this. You're going to get 60% off for life and three free gifts. When you use the code camp@ Mengotomars.com that is Men M E N gotomars, M A R s and use the code camp at checkout. And after your purchase, they're going to ask you where you heard about them. Please say that you heard about them from Camp Gagnon, that we sent you there. It really helps us out. Mars Men is great. It is a natural support for your testosterone. Look, you can buy all of these, you know, supplements separately or you can just go to Mars Men and get it all in one case. Now let's get back to the show. And now the drug cartel is distributing this opium throughout all of Southeast Asia, yeah.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And pretty soon they start distributing heroin, they start processing it into heroin, and before long, we have the Vietnam War. And they played a role in that as well.

[Mark Gagnon]

In what way? Is that the next step in our story or are we jumping?

[Patrick Nguyen]

I think it's a key part of the story because it's gonna lead to the war on drugs. I found CIA documents that they were looking at this cartel and how they were building these new drug refineries in their territory. And the CIA was looking at, what are these new drug refineries for? And it said, oh, they're specifically to produce heroin for this new emerging market in South Vietnam. And that was Vietnam War was raging, and that market was U.S. troops.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wait, what? Well, they're putting heroin into U.S. troops?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well, it's not like the CIA sat down one day and said, we would love to put heroin into the arms of U.S. troops. What it did do is it had a long standing relationship with this drug cartel, which it wanted to use to spy on China. And then a drug cartel being a drug cartel in the truest sense of the word. Like, they're just trying to make money. They're trafficking drugs to whoever's buying. And it just so happened that, you know, by the 60s, the US was transplanting hundreds of thousands of young American men into the neighborhood, right, to Vietnam to fight the Vietnam War. Now, if you look at who can buy heroin at that time, a rice farming peasant doesn't have any money, can't sustain a drug habit. It's not happening. A US GI gets a stipend from the US Army. I think it was like 80 bucks a month. There's probably a Vietnam vet screaming right now. No, it was less than that. But it was a decent amount of money. And really pure heroin could be bought for like two bucks. So this was a really juicy market for any heroin trafficking group in the region. All of these, you know, American guys, like I said, in the neighborhood.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. And how much of a role does that play in the actual conflict? Like, are a lot of soldiers getting access to heroin? Are they a lot of them doing heroin? Do we know about that?

[Patrick Nguyen]

A lot were. I think there's sort of an argument about how many. I mean, at one point I saw an old article that said one in six had used it at one point. I'm skeptical of. I'm skeptical of a lot of drug figures because these things are really hard to measure.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Anyone who wanted it could get it right. And it was such a big deal that USGIS that started Going home from Vietnam, were going back home to like Ohio, California, Florida, wherever.

[Mark Gagnon]

Hooked on heroin.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Hooked on heroin with track marks.

[Mark Gagnon]

Whoa. So they're actually shooting it up?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Oh, they were shooting it up in, in Vietnam, for sure, yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

If you get really, really pure heroin, you can snort it, but still, the best way to get high is to.

[Mark Gagnon]

To shoot it up is intravenous.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Mark Gagnon]

Interesting.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So now moms and dads and sisters and brothers of the, of the vets are like, what the hell happened over there?

[Mark Gagnon]

Is the CIA aware that this cartel that they were kind of propping up is now selling drugs to their own armed forces?

[Patrick Nguyen]

I would argue that this, this document that I looked at is stone cold proof of that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Did they try to stop it or were they just like, whoops, didn't see that coming?

[Patrick Nguyen]

I think, I mean, the history of the CIA is whoops, didn't see that coming. Yeah, it's an organization that's extremely powerful and a lot of very bright people work for them, but is really bad at predicting the outcome of its interventions.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So this was again, when somebody tells you like, bro, the CIA runs the drug trade, and that's really dumb and hyperbole. It's usually something like this where, look, we thought this was a good idea to fight communism. And look, we had a fighting force that paid for itself. We didn't have to spend a single US taxpayer dollar they were funding themselves. But then something funny happens and they start selling to U.S. troops. And, you know, this cartel was just releasing heroin on the market. It was going through several steps before it reached the arms of GIs.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So it's like the cartel was out dealing it or anything, but they were.

[Mark Gagnon]

Finding their local guys and then their local guys would find another local guy and they would get into the hands of usgis as well as many other people throughout the region.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Absolutely. Yeah. With USGIS being the primary buyers at that point. Because they had money.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. Wow. I wonder if that played a role in Vietnam. Like, I wonder as far as, like a fighting force, is that why we lost it? Like, I don't know. I recognize that there's been drugs. I mean, you've heard of the book Blitzed, obviously.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Where, you know, drugs been used in warfare for years. I mean, Nazi Germany. In this specific example you have, you know, I think, I think they called it Panzer Chocolat Tank Chocolate. And they would give these like tank operators, like these 17 year old kids, they would just give them meth and they would just do meth while they're Driving their tanks, stayed up all night. I'm pretty sure this is a random detour, but like, when the Nazis had invaded France through the Belgian forest, they had to do this insane trek through this piece of territory that they didn't think they could get through. And part of the reason some people speculate that they were able to go for such long hours, like they drove these tanks quite literally non stop for like 18 hours, is that they were just on meth and so they were able to, you know, power through. So drugs have been used in warfare for a long time. But in this case, I wonder if it's the inverse where you have these guys that are there, they're deployed on this thing. They don't even understand why they're in Vietnam. They've never heard of these people. They're depressed. They're seeing their friends get blown up and fallen into these booby traps and they're like, they're drafted. Yeah.

[Patrick Nguyen]

They don't want to be there.

[Mark Gagnon]

You know what, maybe a little bit of heroin would be good. And then I wonder if that affects the fighting force. If you have your force all on heroin, does it have the inverse effect?

[Patrick Nguyen]

It doesn't help.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Patrick Nguyen]

I mean, meth, actually, I can understand the case for using meth in warfare. Fighter pilots take stimulants as well to stay up. I mean, this is just strategically, I think wise. Heroin, Heroin does not enhance your fighting ability whatsoever. Morphine, which is on the road to making heroin, can treat you if you've had your leg blown off, but.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. I don't think that's why they were using it.

[Patrick Nguyen]

That's not why they were using it. They were traumatized. I mean, as the son of a draft dodger, you know, my, my, my father was trying to avoid that hell that his friends were telling him about. And it was just a. It was a nasty experience and they were looking for an escape.

[Mark Gagnon]

So now what happens to this cartel and the wa after Vietnam?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Ah, okay. So eventually the cartel sort of fizzles out. You know, there's, there's two. If we had to come up with two big eras for the CIA, the Cold War was really a wacky time. And that's where you hear about your MK Ultra and you're really like, throw it against the wall and see if it works type of stuff. I think we can firmly put it into that category. We're in that era, not kind of like, you know, the post Cold War era when things are a little bit different. Okay, so then, you know, this is the time when you prop up a drug cartel and see what happens. See what happens?

[Mark Gagnon]

See what happens.

[Patrick Nguyen]

What really happens actually is there is a moral panic back here in the US at what the hell happened in Vietnam? Why is my brother on drugs? Or why is he such a wastoid? And then Nixon is in power and he starts the war on drugs. So when everyone thinks about the war on drugs, I think they think about, like, probably Pablo is the first person they think of.

[Mark Gagnon]

Sure.

[Patrick Nguyen]

But really the origins was this backlash to what happened in Vietnam.

[Mark Gagnon]

Cause you have all these guys coming back, they're hooked on heroin, and that's really what starts the panic.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yes. And so Nixon, the US President, comes up with this idea which is really quite novel. It's a globetrotting super police that will go after the root of where drugs are produced and stop them from coming to the us. Pretty wild idea, actually. Really was without precedent. And so the DEA is formed and they start going after the root cause, and they say, These guys are in bed with the CIA. And so you start to see this clash between the DEA and the CIA where the DEA really wants to do something about this cartel and the CIA continues to protect them.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, when you say this cartel, you mean specifically in South Asia. Yes.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And the story of DEA versus CIA, them getting into feuds is a worldwide story. But specifically I'm referring to this because.

[Mark Gagnon]

You have the DEA saying, hey, we identified a group in, you know, near the mountains, near China, in Myanmar, that they're selling drugs to all these people. They got all of our soldiers in Vietnam hooked on drugs. And the CIA is like, actually, we're using them, so back off. And the DEA is like, no, the President told us to go get them. And now the CIA and the DEA are in this conflict.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Conflict, yes. So the DEA is actually a precursor to the dea, but federal drug agents, they go to Thailand and they sort of summon the leaders of this cartel. Remember, these are just now aging anti communist Chinese guys. And they work out an agreement and say, look, we're going to get everybody out of this spick and span. No one needs to be embarrassed. Just give us all of your opium and we'll pay you for it. It's a million US dollars. And they say, okay. So they give all the opium up, and in a grand spectacle, all the opium is piled high and doused in jet fuel and torched.

[Mark Gagnon]

Is there an image of this?

[Patrick Nguyen]

I never found an image of this, but there's plenty of descriptions of it because they invited the press to watch.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. And this is the dea.

[Patrick Nguyen]

This is, it's actually just before the dea, they had another agency called the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, if I'm not mistaken.

[Mark Gagnon]

But this is a part of Nixon's war on drugs.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, they're about to become the dea. It's kind of a technicality. Let's just call them the dea. And it's a big spectacle. And okay, we all washed our hands. No one needs to be embarrassed. And look, we got these guys to burn all their drugs. And then the next season when they are meant to go out and collect the next crop of opium poppies and opium to turn into heroin, the mules go out to collect and this cartel continues business as usual. And these anti narcotics feds are like, what the hell? And that's really the beginning of the DEA CIA beef. And I mean, we can get into why the DEA and the CIA continue to beef, but it's sort of a baked in struggle that I don't think can be resolved.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now even in this era, we have this war on drugs from Nixon, the CIA is still in some ways trying to utilize this cartel.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, at some point the cartel becomes kind of old and decrepit and lame. And so it kind of outlives its usefulness. And it takes sort of a graceful. I mean, the story doesn't end with a bang. It just ends with kind of like a. And they become kind of lame. Basically, the quality of their intelligence is not good. They start getting bullied around by other drug cartels who are not aligned with the CIA and they just kind of fizzle. You can go and look at all these old CIA documents that are sort of lamenting like, man, these guys are real has beens. Like, grandpa's not. Well, this guy that was really the man in 1962 is pretty, pretty lame. In 1978. 1980, Jordan on the wizards.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh man, what happened?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Worse than that. Yeah, yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

So now it seems like everyone gets what they want, right? At this point, this cartel kind of fizzles. The CIA is like, well, we tried, but now these people are gone. And the DEA is like, hey, we got rid of this, you know, drug threat in, you know, Myanmar.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well, the problem is that the cartel, aforementioned cartel, just gets bullied out by a new guy. And his name is Khun Sa. He's sort of the Pablo Escobar of Southeast Asia. He actually started out as sort of an acolyte of one of the cartel leaders. He is himself ethnic Chinese. And he comes along and says, you guys are a bunch of has beens. I can do this better. Screw it. I'm gonna start my own country. And he starts trafficking drugs and starts pulling in a lot more people because he says, join me. I'll start my own country. And we'll be freedom fighters and we'll fight for the oppressed peoples of the mountains of Myanmar. And that was a much better message than, you know, the CIA. Totally, totally. And so he just sort of comes in and turfs them out and dominates their area. And now we're in the. Well into the 1980s and.

[Mark Gagnon]

What was his name?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Khun Sa.

[Mark Gagnon]

Khun Sa.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Pretty hilarious guy. I mean, he. I've actually gotten quite close with some of his former people. His former top aide. I'm on good speaking terms with his cousin. He was a big loudmouth. Basically, he saw himself as like a George Washington type figure. And he would threaten the US openly. He would always say, oh, I know the CIA's dirty laundry. I'm going to spill it. But he kept coming back to like, look, I'm a businessman. You paid these other cartel guys money if they handed over their opium. You could do the same with me, although my rate's gonna be a little higher.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. So he's trying to broker deals with whomever, even the CIA, just whoever wants to do business.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Dea, CIA. He's like, look, you know, this is a joke. Come on in and let's make a deal. I mean, at one point, the State Department called him the worst enemy the world has. So he was a big, big figure. He was a big, big target. And at this point, as often happens, the CIA and the DEA are aligned. They saw him the same way. They both did not like him, and so they were now working together.

[Mark Gagnon]

All because of heroin.

[Patrick Nguyen]

How do you mean?

[Mark Gagnon]

Like, all because he's trafficking heroin into these other countries. Is that the only reason? Or is it because he's now leading, like, a political task force and he's trying to form a government? And, like, what exactly? Why does the CIA care about a drug warlord in a disparate country?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Ah, okay. So I think it's important to look at what the agenda of the DEA is and what the CIA is. We'll do the DEA first. It's really simple. Drugs are bad. Stop drugs, get rid of drugs.

[Mark Gagnon]

That makes sense.

[Patrick Nguyen]

A lot of the hair at this point, a lot of the heroin from this region is coming to the US So that luscious, creamy heroin that the guys were doing in Vietnam, they know how great it is. The best in the world. And it's not easy To, I mean, it's very easy to market it to the US you just have to figure out the supply lines.

[Mark Gagnon]

And now do you know how that works? So this guy comes around in the 80s, or not the 80s, but he's kind of peaking in the 80s, is able to get all this heroin and bring it from, you know, these mountains in Myanmar through, you know, Thailand, I'm sure. And then they're getting on boats and coming to the U.S. yeah.

[Patrick Nguyen]

He has a sort of a trafficker brainchild under him. So his, his, his right hand man is a guy named Wei. We will come back to him because I believe he is the most successful and the greatest drug trafficker in the history of the world. And he does not get his due. And here on Camp Gagnon finally, finally get his due. So he's going to come up later because he is Wa. He's half Wa.

[Mark Gagnon]

And this guy is obviously, he's ethnically Chinese. He's a Han Chinese person. That is not Wa.

[Patrick Nguyen]

He's interesting. He's ethnically Chinese. He's also ethnically Shan. So in the mountains of Myanmar, there's a group called the Shan. They're kind of like the mountain cousins of Thai people. So what he said is, Shan people and all oppressed ethnic people rally under me and I will save you. And yes, we're gonna sell drugs to the stupid Americans and make a bunch of money, but use it to enrich our lives.

[Mark Gagnon]

Was he successful in developing this country?

[Patrick Nguyen]

He got pretty far. He got pretty far. But he's kind of like the swaggering face of the operation. His little brainchild is way. And this is a younger guy he'd plucked from the headhunter country in was state. Wei had been someone who was in one of these U.S. intelligence listening stations along the border when he was a teenager. He would actually be the one listening to Chinese military transmissions. And he could read and write, and so he would type it out, and that filtered into the US intelligence system. So he had been a part of the US spying apparatus. Just a tiny little cog in the machine. So he was a really smart guy. Khun Sa saw him, scouted him, saw that he was really bright, brought him into his operation. And this guy Wei, you know, he's like five, six, definitely has ocd, like compulsively washes his hands all of the time. Someone who knew him told me he would brush his teeth six times a day, hated germs, which is a really interesting quality for a guy.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, he was like a drug trafficker.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, Was not into gold, was not into women really. He just was singularly focused on trafficking drugs. And he was really, really, really good at. He's like the Zuckerberg, you know, of, of drug trafficking. So he's the one that, to answer your question, I know we're doing a lot of tangents here.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, this is good.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Figures out how to or really orchestrates the trafficking to the United States. And what he did is he just put it on cargo ships, cargo planes, mixed it in with everyday items being trafficked. I'm not trafficked, but being shipped, exported. It's the word I want out of Myanmar, out of Thailand. Thailand. Myanmar. That part of Myanmar is locked up in the mountains. Thailand has ports. It's a U.S. ally. You put anything on a boat, it'll make it to port of la. This is how drugs are trafficked these days. So he's an early adopter of the mix it in with normal goods way of smuggling instead of having a pirate ship go across the river, of course.

[Mark Gagnon]

And you have these cargo ships, I mean, if you've ever seen an image of one, there's like thousands of these giant units that are just full of stuff and they're all, all these ships are coming with all sorts of different, you know, mixed in goods from the region. And if you have one of these containers that, you know, you put some, you know, linens or books, and the other half of it is, you know, heroin, you might be able to sneak it in. And then if you're able to sneak it in, there's a lot of money.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And if you lose 10, 15% of it, you don't really care. Right, so Wei is really the brainchild of this. And yes, he gets pretty far along. Okay, why does the DEA hate him? He traffics a lot of drugs.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And it's going to the U.S. why does the CIA not like him? Well, he's not one of theirs and he doesn't play ball. And as far as I could tell, he's not providing them with any intelligence. And the CIA in general frowns on wily drug traffickers starting their own countries. It likes to maintain things the way they are, unless it's going to really benefit the United States.

[Mark Gagnon]

And this is in the late 80s.

[Patrick Nguyen]

We're well into the 80s. Mid 80s. Late 80s, yeah. Now just say the early 90s if you want to. Let's just say this, we're in the grunge era at this point.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. Hell yeah. Nirvana's going crazy. The kids are pissed off.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yes.

[Mark Gagnon]

And I guess at this point, the CIA is no longer, you know, doing this sort of soft power battle against the communists that they were in like, you know, post World War II. That it seems like their goals has, have shifted a little bit.

[Patrick Nguyen]

They're definitely shifting at this point. Yeah, this kind of wild and kooky, let's send headhunters into China to make mischief that, that ideas like that are not really happening so much anymore.

[Mark Gagnon]

So now up until this point, we, you know, have this cartel of Chinese people that the CIA have worked with and they're trafficking drugs into the U.S. but what exactly have the WA people been doing? It seems like they've been trading and getting some weapons and some guns, but they're still just fortified on their own little island. Just chilling, right?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well, in the late 80s, a lot of interesting things start happening. The Berlin Wall goes down. Eastern Europe Communism starts to fall. There in general, we get a worldwide feeling that communism, like old school, Mao style communism, Soviet style communism is not the jam. The wa. While they're up in their mountain refuge, while all this other stuff has been going on, they do get infiltrated by communists who are under the sway of China. And it doesn't last very long because at some point the WA are like, this sucks. WA people in general, all the WA people I've known are very independent minded. And the idea of just getting them all to think the same way, I mean, look, I'm, I'm from Appalachian descent. I know how mountain people think. Like you're. Communism is not, is not going to fly.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, especially communism. Like, I feel like to get these people to like support a basketball team would be tough, you know what I mean? And trying to convince them like, hey, give up private ownership. They're going to be like, what are you talking about?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. So they have been infiltrated by communists, but it doesn't last very long. And they have an uprising too. We all hear about the Berlin Wall. We hear about, you know, like Prague going anti communists. Right. But this actually happens with the WA as well. And they say, okay, you know, we got dicked around by US Intelligence, we got screwed around with the communists enough. We're going to start our own state called WA state. That happens in April of 1989. So they're starting their own state and they look around and they're trying to figure out how they're going to fund themselves. And they say, well, gosh, we sure do have a lot of opium.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. And they've seen the success of these other cartels that are making crazy money that are giving them guns throughout the 70s and 80s. So they're like, yeah, let's just do that.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yes. And so they say, okay, well, we'll be. We'll start trafficking narcotics. We're going to produce our own heroin in house now, and we're going to become a sort of a narcostate. They wouldn't have called it that. But again, the point is, we are WA people. We want to defend ourselves. We want. We want our own weapons. We want our own borders. We don't want anyone to mess with us. And the pathway to that is by producing and selling narcotics. And as they come online as, again, a cartel. Not my favorite word. But for Americans, they understand it better. They're looking at the competition. And they see Mr. Khun Sa down here. As Khun Sa is being beaten up on by the CIA and the dea, he's becoming weaker and weaker. In fact, at one point, I was told by a former CIA officer they had plans to shoot Kun Sa to assassinate him. Then it was on the desk of President George H.W. bush. Then Clinton came into power, and Clinton said, so he almost got a bullet. If President Clinton hadn't won.

[Mark Gagnon]

Whoa.

[Patrick Nguyen]

I'm just trying to show you how much the CIA hated this guy. Yeah, and the DEA hated him too. So they start grinding him down and grinding him down and grinding him down, mostly by going after his traffickers. And eventually Khun Sa is in a very weakened state and the WA come down and finish him off. So now they're the big bad boys controlling the mountains of Burma. They take over all of his territory.

[Mark Gagnon]

Did they kill him?

[Patrick Nguyen]

No, they didn't kill him. He escaped. He went to the Burmese military and said, save me.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. And because he was afraid of the W.A.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, they. They would have.

[Mark Gagnon]

And the CIA and everyone else would try and take him out.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yes, exactly. So the DEA said, we won. We beat him. Not exactly. He ran off and the WA took over his territory. And now we're pretty much into the status quo. Today was State being the major drug trafficking organization, the major operator? I mentioned this OCD super duper drug trafficker guy. Way he defects to the WA state and he becomes their drug trafficker in chief. And then things really take off.

[Mark Gagnon]

What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because you know what time it is. It's time to level up. And Bluechew just dropped something wild. Okay. Bluechew's been rocking with us from the beginning, so of course we have to rock. Pun intended. With them all Right. And what they've just done is chang the game. All right, this is next level gold medal energy. This Blue Chew Gold. If you never heard of it, this is the newest innovation from the number one chewable Ed brand. All right? This isn't the little blue pill that your grandpa used. This is the four in one beast that is setting the gold standard for performance. We're talking two ingredients to keep the good times rolling, okay? Mixed with apomorphine and oxytocin that are going to turn up the arousal and the connections in your brain, as well as the ingredients to keep the blood flow to keep everything pumping. Okay? Bluechew gold dissolves into your tongue and works in as little as 15 minutes. And that means you're going to be rocking quicker and staying in the game longer. Let me just say, that's how we put this tent up every single episode. We give Christos a bluechew. And you know what? We have this tent rocking all year round. Okay? That's what it takes. Now, I recommend this in a, you know, a married Christian relationship, but you know what? You guys can do whatever you want. Bluechew is the ultimate service to get you these chewables to your door in a discreet way to keep the bedroom on fire. We have a special deal for the listeners of this program. You're going to get 10% off your first month of Blue Chew Gold if you use the code Gagnon G A G N O N. That's promo code Gagnon G A G N O N. You can visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. And thank you so much to Bluechew for keeping the lights on and making this show possible. Now let's get back to it. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I got to tell you a story. Imagine you're sitting in your house. It's cold outside. It's a little snowy. And you're like, man, I just want a panini. So you go and you order it, you know, from a. From Doordash or something like that. And it never gets to you. You're looking at the app, you're like, dude, it's been four hours. Where's my panini? You're calling. No one answers. Well, this is a true story that happened. There was a woman, a client that was working as a doordash driver, and she slipped and fell on an icy walkway outside of a Panera Bread and Fort Wayne, Indiana. She breaks her elbow, which leads to surgery and hardware Having to get inserted into her arm, she can't work. And originally, you know, she sues Panera and Panera's like, okay, we'll give you like 125,000. But then the good people over at Morgan and Morgan fought for her and got her the million dollar verdict that she deserved. Yes. If you never heard of them, Morgan. Morgan is America's largest injury law firm. Yes. And they are that way for a reason. They've been fighting for the people for over 35 years. Now, I'll be honest. If I ordered, you know, a panini and the woman gets paid a million bucks because she slipped, I mean, it's a tragic thing to happen, of course, but I deserve a little bit of that. I, I should get a cut at least, right? As I'm the one to order the panini. If I never ordered that panini, she never would have slipped, never got a million bucks, which obviously she deserved. You know what I mean? But maybe next time she gets a million and million point one. I can get a cool a hundred thousand out of that. Regardless. All I'm saying is if you're ever injured and you are looking to get the money that you deserved, the compensation that is entitled to from your injuries, Morgan and Morgan could be the way to go. Hiring the wrong law firm can be disastrous. I mean, you can be locked up and litigate, it's a nightmare. But hiring the right law firm could substantially increase your settlement. And with Morgan and Morgan, it's easy to get started. Their fee is $0 unless they win. That's right. Their fee is free. Unless they win your case, you don't pay zero, you pay zero cents unless they win your case. You can visit forthepeople.com gagnon g a g n o n that is f o r the people.com gag or dial pound law. That's pound 529 from your cell phone. That's for the people.com gagnon or click the link in the description below. And thank you so much to the good folks over at Morgan and Morgan for sponsoring this program and making this show possible with this paid advertisement. Let's get back to the show. Now, are these borders here generally what we can accept as wall country now?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, it's a really. If you think of it as a country, it's really weird because see these two blobs? They don't touch. So you. Most countries are sort of contiguous, but down south here, close to Thailand, that's Khun Sa's old territory. I see they wipe him out. You want, if you're a drug trafficking organization, you want that real estate, you want to produce drugs in that area. Because you're close to the Thai border, you're going to send it through Thailand and that's your portal to the outside world. You can send them anywhere around the world that you want. Up north here is the original og where the Wa people are really from up in the mountains and you can see it's right next to China and that's really the original homeland.

[Mark Gagnon]

Got it. Now this seems like, like, it seems like a challenging position to be in, right? Like, if you're the Wa people and they're just like, okay, what do we have that we can sell in order to form our own, you know, ethnostate of Wa people that are independent. And again, I understand their position. Like, you know, the, you know, Portuguese make cork and, you know, Ethiopians might sell coffee and they're like, yeah, we sell poppies. That's what we do. We sell heroin. It's just one of the products that we export and we're going to build our entire economy on this product. But trying to declare independence from, you know, the Burmese or the Myanmarians is going to be difficult. And then more importantly, trying to create a new country on the border with Daddy. China is going to cause a ton of problems.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So what they do is they go down to the Burmese military and they say, we're not going to declare our own country. We're not going to run to the UN and say, please put our flag on your wall. None of that. We won't beat that drum. However, let's be very clear. You're not coming uninvited. Your laws don't apply here. You tell us to jump, we don't do it. Okay? You can do that to the other indigenous groups that you bully and they'll say, how high? Not us. We're doing our own thing. Stay in your lane. And the Burmese military junta said, okay, wow. To China, they say, that Maoist thing that you guys had going on wasn't working for us and it's not going to work for us. At this point. China is becoming more of a market economy like we know it today. They're experimenting with free market reforms. The Wa say, yeah, we'll get in on that. We would like to be peaceful brothers and partners with you. And so again, everyone thinks of the WA at this time as savage, headhunting hillbillies who don't know anything. I would argue that their pretty savvy, sophisticated. It's not easy to start your own state.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And they did it.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah. And what is the calculation from the government in Myanmar? Are they thinking like, oh, these guys are too small to start a war with? Are they saying they're too fierce? Are they saying the territory is unimportant? Like, too fierce, really?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Oh, they would. They're not happy about this because like.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like, say, like Appalachia. Right. Let's say there's a mountain town that's like, hey, we're actually independent. Yeah. The US Government would be like, no, you're not. Right. They would come in and they would swoop in and take the land back.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. The U.S. government, the U.S. military is much more competent than that of. Than that of Myanmar. Myanmar. Like I said, it's in constant state of chaos. They're fighting this group over here, this group over here. They've got people in the cities being like, give me democracy. Like, no, we don't want to. So when the WA say, we're not going to cause you guys any trouble, but you're not going to cause us any trouble either.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Then they say, okay, do you want peace or war? Exactly.

[Mark Gagnon]

They said, well, we had enough stuff going on, so you guys can have it.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Precisely.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

That's the case until today.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Okay, so how do they go from this sort of like, rogue ethnic group of people with some guns to actually developing an economy and hospitals and basically, like, developing.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. So starting in the early 90s, a sort of war for the soul of the WA breaks out, and it's really personified in two people. We have Wei, our drug Trafficker in Chief, Mr. OCD. He is pushing for a narco economy. He's like, look, let's follow the protocol here. We produce drugs, we produce really good drugs. We traffic drugs. We make money. We buy weapons. No one messes with us. We want to be feared the DEA will come after us? Fine. That's what they do. We're going to be so well fortified that they're not going to achieve their goals. So that's his sort of dark vision for WAS State. On the other hand, we have someone who is the protagonist of my book and a huge figure in the history of Was State, a founding father who says, no, we're going to do this a different way. We're going to form a relationship with the United States, which is a noble Christian nation that wants to uphold the meek, and we're going to invite Americans in, and they're going to build us roads and schools and highways and all this Great stuff. And they're going to civilize us and we'll slowly wind down the drug trafficking and replace the drug money with good old American aid. If this sounds like a weird thing for someone, a weird agenda to push, it's because this guy whose name was Saul, Saul Lewis, full name as in the biblical Saul, he was Christianized. His family was by American missionaries long, long ago. And not many WA have been Christianized, but he was. So he was sort of an odd duck in that respect. He believed that he was sent by God to deliver his people from the darkness and to civilize them. And so he's trying to take his country in this direction and Wei is trying to take it in the other direction. Sitting on top of them are the leaders of WA State who have to decide which way to go.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, the local politics of WA State at this time, was it sort of like, you know, a patriarchal tribal leadership or they had like a chief? Was it like a complicated political system? Was it like a bunch of. Did they have a religion? Like, what can you tell me about the culture of this people?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, again, you talk to the average, average WA person pretty fiercely independent, so. But however they had been, you know, gelled into this polity where they're now in a state and everybody starts to develop a real sense of WA pride. The government is essentially a one party state. So even though they didn't like hardcore communism, they did like the idea of like having a single party to run everything. Authoritarian. Yeah, but I mean, you could talk crap about the leaders. It's not like they had an all seeing eye into everybody's bedroom or anything. Wasn't like North Korea or anything. Just kind of a poorly run one party state. Poorly run compared to, say, I don't know, Denmark, but sure, but, but a functioning government nonetheless.

[Mark Gagnon]

And how many people roughly this time?

[Patrick Nguyen]

About a half a million WA people.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. So it's a, it's a big country. And I have to put air quotes around country because even if you were to ask the leadership at the time, are you guys a country? They're like, nah. Next, Nothing to see here. They don't want to play the game of going on the world stage and saying, rah, rah, rah, we're a country, they realize that attracts more attention than they wanted.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So they say they're not a country, but they act exactly like a country.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, half a million people, I'm sure they have some type of road infrastructure, they have markets. Do they have like an organized religion? Like obviously there's like a few people that are Christian missionaries. But, like, do they have like a folk religion?

[Patrick Nguyen]

They do have a folk religion. I would say that most Wa people sort of follow sort of like a spirit based religion, but it's not super orthodox, and it really varies from mountain to mountain.

[Mark Gagnon]

Is it like almost like a Native American style religion, like the mountains are God or something like that?

[Patrick Nguyen]

I think that's probably a decent analog if you're looking for a way to imagine it. I mean, they have their own origin story about how there was a hole in the ground. And the first people to come out of the hole were Wa people. And then they sort of developed civilization and humanity. And then all these other people started coming out of the hole. And it was like Chinese people and Burmese people and Europeans and Indians and everybody you can think of. And then they all went their own separate ways. But the Wa really are the first man, the first pure man. And all these other people are lesser lowlanders.

[Mark Gagnon]

So now they're coming together basically, okay, who's gonna take our country? Who's gonna lead it?

[Patrick Nguyen]

What type of economy is it going to have?

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And so the leadership looks over to Mr. Drug Trafficker Wei, and says, well, we know this is gonna work. And they look over to Saul, Saul, Lou, and they say, okay, you've got a point. Yes. If we become a big, bad, dirty cartel like this Khun Sa guy, we saw what happened to him. It didn't end well. So we will tolerate your idea for now, but you really better deliver. And Saul says, okay. And he goes down and he makes contact with the DEA at the US Embassy in the capital of Myanmar, which at the time was a city called Yangon, and starts talking to the dea. And at first he's not telling them about his grand ambition. He's saying, hey, would you like some documents from inside of Wa State? And of course they're thrilled. Like, yeah, from one of the scariest drug cartels. Yeah, we would like to. So he would give them, like, profit and loss sheets. He would say, oh, there's opium grown on this mountain, but not on this mountain. And so he was giving them, like, this golden material. And the DEA was really, really excited about this. So much so that they had a code name for him. So they called him Superstar. When I met Salu and he told me some of this stuff, and I met him as an old man later in life and he told me this stuff, he told me that he was a former top three leader in Wa State and that he had been A DEA asset. And of course, I had to check that out. And I said, all right, you got to give me a name. He's like, I'll just go ask the dea. I'm like, that's not how this works.

[Mark Gagnon]

You can ask the DEA stuff. I'm not. I'm not in a cartel.

[Patrick Nguyen]

He said, all right, well, my. My handler was a guy named Bruce, last name something. So I. With that information, I found Bruce, but he had passed away. And so then I looked for Bruce's partner. And to make a very long story short of me, just, like, scrounging around to find old DEA guys that had worked with this dude, I found someone named Angelo Saladino. He's a DEA former DEA agent. And I described this guy to him, and he goes, ah, superstar. I said, huh? Superstar. That's what we called him. He's like, he's still alive? And I said, yeah, got his notes. I was just in his living room. And so he was highly, highly valued by the DEA because of the information he was giving them.

[Mark Gagnon]

So how does that work, though? Because the DEA is trying to control or fully stop this narco waa state, but he's trying to establish goodwill with the US Government by giving some information. Meanwhile, way is over here being like, hey, let's just be a cartel and make crazy money and live fast, die young type vibes. So what exactly is Saul's angle here if he's just giving up all this information?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, this is why the story of this aspect of the drug war happening in Southeast Asia is so mind blowing, because it just breaks all of the paradigms that you think about happening in Latin America. Saul and I know this from personal experience because I spent a lot of time with him. He is like a figure from the Old Testament. Like, he is so compelling and good at convincing people to do stuff. I mean, he came from a Southern Baptist background. That's who Christianized him. And, man, he could really preach it. And so he also had a giant ego. Again, he thought he was sent by God to do this. So he's like, I'm going to convince the DEA not to go after us, not to lock us up, but to be friends with us. I'm going to convince the DEA to join forces with a drug cartel. It's absolutely a crazy idea, and even crazier still. And I know this because I talked to all the agents that handled him. They said, okay. So the idea was, all right, the dea, through the un, would try to deliver these things to WA people that they needed. Good Education, good roads, good hospitals. It was a really poor area. I mean, they'd really never had anything. And under this agreement, the WA would slowly wind down and slowly wind down as the money aid money comes in. And the agents in the field had to take this idea to DEA headquarters. And I talked to the DEA head of global operations at the time and I'm like, did you think that this was a crazy idea? They did at first, and then they kind of came around to the logic of it. Imagine you can get a drug cartel to stop being a drug cartel simply by cooperating with them. I can see you don't have to shoot anyone in the head.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, the DA's position is like, we want these guys to stop trafficking drugs, but if we cut them out, they'll become more poor, more desperate, and traffic more drugs. If we help them and civilize them, then they will traffic less drugs. Literacy goes up, less drugs, democracy less drugs. And then they're just a fully formed state on the border with China.

[Patrick Nguyen]

That's pro American.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's pro American.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So you put a giant hole in the drug trade. People might not understand this now, but at the time, more than half of the heroin being sold in like Seattle, Louisiana, all over the US was coming from Myanmar, coming from Burma. And, you know, we're full throated drug war era too. We're in the early 90s. This is, like I said, grunge era. Like rock stars are dropping dead from heroin.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like this heroin chic is the look heroin Chicago.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Some of those models with the heroin chic probably doing law heroin.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, China White.

[Patrick Nguyen]

China White.

[Mark Gagnon]

Is this from this time?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yes. Mr. Wei's prime product was in fact China White. It should have been called Wa White.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

The reason it's called China White is because in the pipeline that takes heroin from the mountains of Burma to the us, it goes through Chinese drug traffickers. So in Asia, the lingua franca of the drug trade is Chinese because, you know, look, the Wa couldn't do it themselves. There's. There's a Chinatown in every major city on earth. There's not a Wa town. So you really, you pass it off to Chinese drug traffickers who can get it all the way to the US and actually they had packaging so that the next trafficker down the line would know it was really good stuff. Wei was somebody who was very innovative in that. He and others, but mainly him would stamp logos on the heroin, like on the packaging. One of them was two red lions, kind of like mounting the earth. It was Called Double UO Globe was the brand of heroin. So by the time it gets to la, San Francisco, no one's ever heard of a Wa person, but they might see Chinese letters on the packaging. And it would be initially distributed by Chinese ethnic Chinese gangs or syndicates in the US and so they're like, well, I guess it's from China.

[Mark Gagnon]

And did Wei have the contacts with the American recipients of this, or was that done through a disconnected network?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Disconnected network, primarily. No. I mean, that would be too far down the food chain for him.

[Mark Gagnon]

Got it.

[Patrick Nguyen]

He would be focused on production.

[Mark Gagnon]

So he does the production. He's got a guy that's like, I can get this to America. I need my cut. He gives it to another guy. He takes his cut, gives it to another guy that knows a guy in Seattle, in Chinatown over there or whatever. He gets his cut, and then it gets distributed to local dealers. And they all get their cuts.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yes. White. The white part of China White. There's different types of heroin. Maybe you've heard of, like, tar. So that's the worst kind. It's like a rat turd. You have to put it on a spoon and heat it and turns into liquid and put it in your arm, and it sucks. There's another type of heroin that is not fully pure that's kind of brown, and it's kind of like a gritty brown texture, just not as good. You would have to shoot that up as well. China White is purified up into the 90th. Like 95, 96, 97%. You could do a line of it. So that's really good for marketing in the US because who wants to stick a needle in their arm? If you can snort it, all the better. And so China White is hitting the east coast of the US in the early 90s in a really big way. And so now these people, West Coast.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, and these people are snorting the heroin, or maybe it's getting cut and turned into black tar heroin. That then people are shooting up, down at lower levels. But it's all originating from the same China White that is all originating in WA state.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. And as Mr. Superstar's DEA handler was explaining to me, he's like, yeah, it sounds like a crazy idea. Let's commingle with a drug cartel. He's like, but think about it. Wa heroin is so pure that by the time it gets to the US you at least cut it into four pieces and make it another kilo, if that makes sense. So you got the one kilo of pure white chop that into four pieces and you can make four new kilos of pretty good heroin that you can sell on the street. He's like, so if the stuff is that pure, we had to think outside the box to stop it from coming to the US and well, remember when the British tried to go in and conquer the waaagh and tame them? That didn't work. Nobody has ever tamed these people. You can't make them do what you want. And so you had to work with them.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now the DEA is aware of it. They're not necessarily facilitating it, but they're helping the local people while aware that they're trafficking these drugs. Did they ever try to just intercept all of these drug shipments or was it too far down the line at that point that they couldn't trace it?

[Patrick Nguyen]

If you wanted to intercept, that would be through many different stages before it actually reached the U.S. no, at this point, the DEA is just gathering intelligence with Superstar providing inside information on how was state works and how they traffic drugs. I mean, he's giving them like the keys to the kingdom. And slowly Superstar Saul is, you know, feeding them this idea of let's actually deeply cooperate. So at this point, that idea now has buy in at the highest levels of the DEA and they're ready to move forward and actually hand over a big pot of money to the WA for aid. And this is in 93.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. Now the WA must be pretty stoked about this because now they've kind of got both things. They have the drug money coming in from Wei, but then they also have aid coming in from Saul.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Wei would not be so stoked.

[Mark Gagnon]

Why?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well, this is the death of his, his, his business.

[Mark Gagnon]

And he sees this.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Oh, yeah, this is the war I'm talking about within, within the WA leadership. Do we go the route of Superstar? Do we really let this happen? Do we really, like, kill the golden goose? Because, you know, we know this drug stuff is very profitable. So Wei is seeing his, his empire with a big crosshairs on it.

[Mark Gagnon]

And so they hate each other.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Oh, absolutely. Hate each other, yes. Wei being, you know, kind of a spectrum y. You know, he's not somebody that you could sit down and have a debate with. I mean, he's kind of a quiet, cold guy. Sallu, on the other hand, being like this powerful force. I mean, I'm telling you, if he was, if he was here right now, he could convince you to like cluck like a chicken. I mean, he's just, he's got, he's.

[Mark Gagnon]

Got the, he's got it so do they try to take each other out? I don't see Saul trying to take out Way because again, he's trying to bring them out and he thinks that he's gonna eventually win because he has the back in the us But Way must be like, I have to take matters in my own hands and get rid of Saul.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well, what actually happens is the CIA intervenes again. They love the. Love that intervening thing.

[Mark Gagnon]

What happens?

[Patrick Nguyen]

The CIA doesn't think the DEA has any right to pull off stunts like this. What are you going to. You're going to rewrite the map? You're going to have the US ally with a narco state? This is. The DEA is getting way too big for its britches. Like this is. This is not what the CIA can do that, by the way, but the DEA is not allowed to do things like this. Furthermore, they're supposed to stop drugs and.

[Mark Gagnon]

They'Re not doing it.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yes, the CIA was watching this play out and trying to talk the local DEA guys out of it the whole time along the way. According to the DEA agents I talked to, they're also like tapping their phones at their residences in Burma. You're not allowed to do that. The CIA can spy on foreigners. The CIA can't spy on U.S. citizens. It's not supposed to. I think later the argument was no, but they weren't in the US at the time. But no, that's not a loophole. You're not supposed to spy on us. But they're doing that to see what's going on with this whole superstar DEA crazy let's ally with a drug cartel project. The CIA is against this for a couple reasons. One, dea too big for your britches. Stay in your lane. You're getting crazy. Two, I think generally it was just decided from the local CIA station chief that the WA weren't to be trusted and they just thought it was kind of a stupid idea and they didn't think it would work. Fair enough. Additionally, it would have screwed up one of the CIA's major agendas. So at this point, Burma is a military dictatorship that is trampling on this cry for democracy. There's big rallies and uprisings for democracy. And the CIA has put all their weight behind the pro democratic forces to sweep the military junta into the dustbin of history and establish Burma as a big, beautiful, pro US democracy. So the DEA comes along and wants to pull up this kooky ally with a drug cartel thing. The reason that doesn't work for the CIA is because Burma has to. The Burmese military Junta has to buy into this. So they have to sort of go along with this. And they do start going along with this because it actually can get the US off their back. They can say, okay, sure, we're the big bad military junta, but we're going to help you win this huge victory in the war on drugs. And then they look like the good guys, right? So if they let the DEA do their thing, then when people start hearing that, they'll see headlines, oh, Burma backs greatest US Drug war victory ever. And the CIA doesn't like that. And so they decide that they are gonna step in and put an end to it.

[Mark Gagnon]

And how long does this DEA operation go before the CIA steps in?

[Patrick Nguyen]

That's a really good question.

[Mark Gagnon]

Five years, 10 years?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Oh, no, no, no. It's within a year or so. It's a short span of time. Cause it gradually builds. I mean, at first I'm sure the CIA looked at it and like, this is so stupid. This is not going to happen. And then the DEA headquarters gets buy in and they're like, oh my God, they're really going to try this. And then they're like, okay, we have to squash this.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, how much money has the wa. State made? Up until this point, I don't even think they know. Like, are they printing, like, part of the reason why Escobar is so notorious is because just the mass amounts of money that he acquired.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well then today was state has 30,000 troops with sophisticated military equipment. At the time, they had fewer than that, but they did have in the tens of thousands of troops. And each of these troops needs to be fed. They need ammo, they need uniforms. You need diesel to put in the trucks to get them to move around between the checkpoints. So they're bringing in a lot of money. But running a state, when you really have an economy only based on drugs, a lot of that drug money is getting soaked up into just running the state. So yeah, of course there's a couple guys on the high end living pretty decently, but it's going right into defense.

[Mark Gagnon]

And the average person is not necessarily being uplifted out of poverty.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Not at all. I mean, even mid tier, high tier, we're not talking about like pet hippos running around the backyard like Escobar. I mean, I've seen their homes. They're pretty bare bones.

[Mark Gagnon]

Got it. Okay, so now the CIA steps in and what do they do?

[Patrick Nguyen]

They screwed over our boy superstar in a major way. There was one day where the DEA was supposed to fly in on a Black helicopter with UN representatives and land on a WA mountaintop. And it was going to be the great unveiling of this relationship. And Super Star got all the waaagh leadership, minus Wei, chose not to attend, to come to this mountaintop. And they put up, like, these big arches, and they made it look very festive. Gathered a lot of villages and WA big shots. And it's all going to be this grand.

[Mark Gagnon]

This is biblical. This is deliverance ultimate.

[Patrick Nguyen]

This is it. This is the big day. This is every. Everything that he's. He's worked for. And Superstar, it's like, okay, they're gonna. I forget what time it is. Let's say noon. They're gonna show up at noon. And I was like, okay. And he waits and he waits, and he waits, and he waits and he waits, and he's waiting for that speck in the distance with that black helicopter to come. And it never comes. And what the CIA did is they went behind his back and they blackmailed him to the Burmese military junta, who would have been piloting the helicopters. I mean, it's their country, after all. And they convinced them that this was a bad idea and that Superstar was a major threat to them and that he'd been talking shit behind their back, which he had. And they had pilfered documents where Superstar, you know, had been talking askance about Burma's military junta. And they pulled the plug on it, and the DEA couldn't do it by themselves. Again, the DEA cooperates with the local law enforcement. So in Colombia, when you arrest a drug trafficker, it's the Colombians that arrest the guy. And the DEA is just there supplying intelligence or backup or whatever, but they don't really slap the cuffs on people. They're not really supposed to do that. Same thing in Burma. And so the DEA has this tight relationship with law enforcement, with the military junta there. And so they're doing everything with the military junta, so they can't execute this grand plan without their buy in. So the CIA sabotaged it. And this really fascinating potential avenue that the war on drugs could have gone down, where you take down a cartel without firing a single bullet, just blew up. And from then on out, WA State went the drug trafficking route. Allying with the US Turned out to be a farce. And Superstar's prestige among his own people plummeted, and it all fell apart.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. So now Superstar just lives amongst the people, kind of as like a, you know, like a guy that couldn't do it.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Mm. It gets worse than that. Now Wei has The upper hand. And Wei and Team Wei are able to really put the screws to him. And at points he has to go into hiding and he's put into house arrest. And he becomes almost like a pauper living, you know, wearing rags, just a pariah among his people because he really embarrassed them. This is a proud people. And he got everybody on the mountain ready for the day of deliverance and nothing happened. And it made them all look like jackasses.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

So now it's just a full on narco state. No more trying to make it work with America and away is in charge.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yes. And you know, at this point, as a former CIA station chief explained to me, Way is a big target of the CIA. They have an anti narcotics division within the CIA. The CIA is just interested in whoever has power. So if somebody is very powerful as a drug lord, they want to know about it. I mean, the CIA wants to know what grain production in Kazakhstan is because that will tell you, like, help you understand which way the country's going. So they really care about the drug trade too. And they have their own anti narcotics division in part to compete with the dea. But whey is a big target and among the dea, they kind of go back to classic dea. They treat the WA like a big drug cartel. And the guys that were advocating for an allyship with the US are put out to pasture, basically.

[Mark Gagnon]

So what happens next?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well, was State gets bigger and better than ever and the DEA is trying to come up with ways to stop it now. And the CIA is cooperative, so they're on. They're on the same page. The WA with WAZE guidance do something that I think is tactically brilliant. They do realize that continuing to traffic heroin to the United States is a bad idea. Okay. It is going to cause more problems for them. So they come out and say, we're mowing down all of the poppy fields.

[Mark Gagnon]

Whoa, that's a problem.

[Patrick Nguyen]

What a change of heart. But they replace them with meth labs. Way is a visionary. He sees that the future of drugs is synthetic. And the WA are among the first in the world. I think even earlier than the Mexican cartels to go all synthetic. Growing poppies and producing heroin is very labor intensive. And you have to have an army of peasant laborers to grow the opium poppy and get the goop out and process it into heroin. Furthermore, the CIA with its satellites and the DEA with its people, they can spy on you from above. So the CIA can look down with satellite imagery and try to figure out exactly how much opium you're growing that year and how much heroin you can produce. They got eyes all over you. Meth is not like that. Meth is produced inside, indoors, with chemicals, and they can't really pay attention to you or they can't really spy on you from above. Additionally, you don't need an army of people to produce it. You just need a handful of chemists. As long as you get your hands on the chemicals, then you can make loads and loads and loads of meth. Additionally, they realize now we're Getting into the late 90s, early 2000s, Southeast Asia, the economy is really picking up. This isn't the Vietnam war era anymore where people are just, you know, in rice paddies. We're talking about a big economy and people are starting to move away from the farms, move to cities.

[Mark Gagnon]

Bangkok is a proper city right nearby, 100%.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Oh, growing very, very fast. Skyscrapers are going up. People don't want to like nod out on heroin. They want meth.

[Mark Gagnon]

Do you think Wei is noticing that profits are drying up from heroin?

[Patrick Nguyen]

I think that it was a multi factor decision to move away from heroin to get the US off its back. Off his back and to shift towards meth, which is primarily going to be sold to other Asians. That's the key part of it. And so if you look down the line, why would the dea, really, the CIA, pour all of its effort into destroying you, especially when you're ensconced in a heavily militarized mountain state, when your meth actually isn't going to California, it's going into taxi drivers, construction workers, people stitching sneakers for export to the U.S. fishermen, and they decide to orient towards Asia, don't need to ship heroin across the Pacific anymore.

[Mark Gagnon]

So it's a bunch of things that are all kind of converging, like, look, we can get America offered back. We can do this more cheaply in smaller land mass. It's more productive. It's going to the people in Southeast Asia. It seems like there's a bunch of reasons. And Wei sees all this and goes.

[Patrick Nguyen]

All right, meth time, meth time. Oh man, it's still meth time. It's incredible how much meth continues to be made. One of the other innovations at the time is so they produce crystal meth, which is like, you know, you've seen Breaking Bad. That's not blue, by the way, it's crystal. So that is for the discerning meth user. I don't know what the prices were when they started cranking this stuff out. Initially, 20, 25 years ago now, a gram of crystal meth would go for maybe 80 bucks or something. It's kind of a lot of money for people in Southeast Asia, so you're not going to move as much of that as you would like. So they come up with this new product. It's a pink pill. It's about the size of a baby aspirin, and it's got 20% meth, and the rest is padded out with, like, caffeine powder. And it sells for a couple bucks. You can swallow it, you can put it on a strip of tin foil and put a lighter under it and free base it. If you want to get more high, I guess you could inject it, but you probably wouldn't. And this stuff just starts selling like crazy. It even. I don't know whose idea this was. They start putting vanilla scent in it. So it's a little like, Barbie pink pill that smells like vanilla. And honestly, Mark, like, I still haven't figured out why they did this, other than maybe it's just cool. I've been in rooms with narcotics officers where they've just seized like a big bundle of stuff and someone pulls out a knife and cuts it open and it's like, geez, smells like a candy store in here.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. I mean, vanilla's expensive too.

[Patrick Nguyen]

I guess so. Wow. So I would think you wouldn't want to make your narcotics smell like anything.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. The whole beauty of meth is that you can traffic it without anyone detecting it. Doesn't smell like anything. Right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

This stuff smells like now and later, so I don't know what. Anyway, they continue to make it, and that is really the modern story of wastate. So much meth is produced on their territory that, I mean, it's insane. Billions of pills. I mean, I tried to run the numbers. I think more meth pills are produced than Big Macs are sold around the world.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

It's extremely popular.

[Mark Gagnon]

And this has basically been just how the economy's been run since the early 2000s till now.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Until now. Yeah. I mean, they're not the only ones making it. Others have started making it too, but they're really at the center of it. And they really occupy the prime real estate where all these meth labs are and just enormous volumes of this stuff. It's kind of weird. Like, so my friends in Thailand, it's like, I would imagine 90% of your peers in your social group, if you asked, have you ever smoked weed? They'd be like, yeah, and maybe only a few times. I didn't like it, but they've tried it. And I would say like my Thai friends, my Burmese friends, they've like, well, yeah, I've tried it. So it's. They've tried meth.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. In these little, you know, vanilla pills.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. You would have tried it at some.

[Mark Gagnon]

Point because it's so ubiquitous.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, well, I mean, I know I grew up on like meth. Not even once. All these scare ads, right?

[Mark Gagnon]

And like, it's a. It's a. This is like a crackheads drug. And it's like, you know, guy strung out on the street and like, oh, you did meth? That's crazy. I guess that's not the case in Thailand where it's so ubiquitous. It's kind of looks nice. You're getting it relatively cheap. And so people will be like, hey, you want to have a fun night? Let's stay up all night and party and let's do one of these little pills and you'll feel great.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Not even that. We have to stitch sneakers in the factory. And I can pull a double shift and I can make more money for my family if I'm on a little bit of speed. I'm not encouraging people to do meth. Yes, it can absolutely ruin your life. And there are plenty of stories in Southeast Asia of people ruining their lives on meth. I think it's probably the same percentage of people who. You have people who can casually drink and people who will be fall down drunks. I mean, I know a lot of people who are good moms and dads who have tried meth before in this form. So it's extremely prominent and popular and cheap.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now if you had to estimate as far as like the modern day, what percentage of the global meth trade or in this part of the world, how much of it is coming from WA State.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Okay.

[Mark Gagnon]

Which I know the drug estimates are nearly impossible, but just to try to put. Just to grasp it as best as we can.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. I'm always skeptical of estimates of how big the drug economy is. The United nations has an office called the UN Office of Drugs and Crime, and they try to come up with this number. The Asian meth economy, which was state really sits at the center of it. They estimate that this Asian meth economy is 30 to 60 billion dollars. Now, just to show you how imprecise that is, you know, you could drive a truck through the difference between 30 and 60 billion dollars.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Let's go with their low estimate, 30 billion. That's still more than the GDP of a lot of small countries. And if it's 30 billion. I mean, that's incredible. That's a lot of money.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, what is the GDP of Myanmar? Can we look that up? Like, I'm curious if, like, the Wa State is making more money.

[Patrick Nguyen]

I think I know, but I'm afraid to be wrong. Well, somewhere between 50 and 70 billion dollars.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, look at. They had a little spike. You're right on the top end. 74 billion. So, I mean, it seems like this tiny little mountain range in the middle of Myanmar is on the low end, producing as much GDP as the entire country.

[Patrick Nguyen]

If that's. If those estimates are correct. I mean, I don't know what the GDP of Wa State is.

[Mark Gagnon]

Probably no one does to an extent.

[Patrick Nguyen]

I'm not sure that they know exactly what that is. GDP is hard to calculate. And they're not just running wild with economists over there.

[Mark Gagnon]

They must be making crazy money, though.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Some people are making crazy money. And I've talked to some DEA agents that have really gone after this way guy, and one of them told me that he's swimming in it, that he's like, you know, his treasury is like a treasury, like it's a giant safe with a bunch of cash in it. I imagine he's more sophisticated than that and that he probably has some. Probably owns a lot of things through shell companies and things like that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Have you ever met him?

[Patrick Nguyen]

No. In fact, there's only two photographs of him in the public sphere.

[Mark Gagnon]

Can we get one of these?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, pull him up. His name is Wei. W, E, I. The last name is H, S, E, U, H, K, A, N, G. Several different spellings, but that should pull him up.

[Mark Gagnon]

How would you generally pronounce that?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Wei Sukang.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wei Su Kang.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Wei is a Chinese last name. So, you know, you'll meet probably a guy named Wei up the block here.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, there's actually a great Chinese restaurant not far away called Wei's.

[Patrick Nguyen]

There you go.

[Mark Gagnon]

All right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

But there's a lot of ways in the world. I see Sikang is a Chinese name, too. He goes by several different names, but Wei is the most prominent one.

[Mark Gagnon]

And he lives in Wa State.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, that photo is pretty old. He's must be in his late 70s now. Extremely photo shy. So if you take a picture of the sky, you're in trouble. He does not want his photo out there. He does not come out and make big speeches. He wants to exist behind the scenes.

[Mark Gagnon]

So he's not one of these sort of ostentatious, flamboyant drug lords that have tigers and priceless art and women.

[Patrick Nguyen]

What did I say? I think that he is the most successful, impressive drug lord in human history.

[Mark Gagnon]

He's the Bezos in a way. He's not. I mean, Bezos now is a little bit more flashy, but. But Bezos built the entirety of Amazon just kind of as like a quiet billionaire, just slowly accruing wealth and logistics.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Wei learned from the example of Pablo and from Khun Sa, his former boss. You don't need to go out there and run your mouth. Actually existing in the shadows, it makes it harder for the DEA to make you a target. And I should explain how the DEA approaches this. The DEA has what they call kingpins. And the theory goes that if you take out a kingpin, this is somebody who's so essential to the drug economy that you take them out and the whole thing, not the whole thing or a big part of it kind of topples. I think the theory is wrong because, well, they've tried it over and over, and it's not worked. But they would consider him a kingpin.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And what you have to do first is you have to build up his Persona in the public sphere. So if I tell you, you know, the DEA just arrested Jimmy Bananas, you're gonna be like, who the hell's that? But If I've spent 10 years telling you Jimmy Bananas is the biggest, baddest, scariest drug trafficker ever. He eats babies, blah, blah, blah, then when I take down Jimmy Bananas, Congress is hype about it, the press is all over it, you get some honors.

[Mark Gagnon]

You get a book tour. Life is good.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Oh, man. You get a bigger budget. Yeah, let's give more money to the dea. They took down Jimmy Bananas, so you can't turn way into a figure of big interest. And he gives you so little. I'm telling you, Mark, this guy was so hard to research. It was so hard to get people who knew him to openly talk to me about him. If there's one person I could interview on Earth, it would be him. But I never will. He's not stupid. He wouldn't talk to me.

[Mark Gagnon]

So what do we know about him?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well, he doesn't like the finer things in life. He just wants to rack up money, I think. I think money is sort of like points in a game. And he wants to get the high score, so he racks up a lot of money. But he's also strategic in that he does shower it onto the people that keep him safe. So he's not a tough guy, per se. I mean, you know, like, in my book, I said he dresses like an accountant. I mean, he looks pretty modest in person from what I'm told. But he also has. He always has to be in the shadow or behind a big badass. And so the real leaders of Wa State who are public facing, who hold military parades, who trot out all of their military hardware and the ferocity of their troops. Yeah, he's useful to them. He'll make sure that they're fed and they're happy.

[Mark Gagnon]

But is he the leader of Wasta? Does he.

[Patrick Nguyen]

He's the. I think he's in semi retirement now, but he's sort of the chief financial officer, I would say has been his role mostly through its history.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. And so who's the actual leader of Wa State?

[Patrick Nguyen]

That's a guy named Bao. B A O Bao in his youth was a headhunter, or at least he claims to have severed a head back in the day as one does. So you. There he is. He's the leader. He's getting up in years, so he won't be around much longer. But I know a lot more about him and I've talked to a lot more people that have served under him and think pretty highly of him. You can call him a savage headhunting guy if you want. He certainly emerged from that world. But he was able to help piece together a sovereign nation with many people trying to stop him. And he's still on top of it. The DEA calls him a drug lord. I think that's a misnomer. For one thing, he's just kind of running the state day to day, and he's not overseeing logistics of sending heroin from points A to B. But he's really widely respected among the wa. They really, they love him. Wow.

[Mark Gagnon]

And now he works with Wei because Wei is like obviously this historical elder that got all the money into Wa State, but he's the figurehead and handles all of the day to day. So they work together.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. I mean, it's funny, after the DEA really did a hard press on way and they tried to nab him in the 2000s, was state came out and Bao came out and said, oh, we don't know where he is. He disappeared anyway.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wonderwall. Yeah.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So they would claim, oh, we have no idea where he is.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

I mean, nobody believes that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Do these people ever travel? Like, do they go to Vegas? Do they go to, you know, party?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Like, no. So I mean, this is having the CIA up your ass means that it is hard to travel. The CIA and the State Department, who they really work in concert and we can get into that if you want to have made sure that there is something called the Kingpin act, which was passed by Congress. This is an act that says if you have any sort of dealing whatsoever with anyone in Was State, not just Big Daddy here, but down to like a truck driver in uniform or a grunt soldier, you can go to prison. So if I were to open a coffee shop with a Wa soldier, and I am good friends with a former Wah soldier and person who formerly served under him, I could go to prison for that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So the idea is you cannot pollute the global financial system, specifically the US Financial system, with dirty Wa drug money. And any Wa money in the eyes of the US Is dirty drug money.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. Because their entire economy, basically, as far as export goes, is built on this meth money.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. So, no, he can't go to Vegas. Don't worry. The capital of Was State has some pretty hardcore party zones.

[Mark Gagnon]

Have you ever been to Was State?

[Patrick Nguyen]

I have been to a part of Was State. I haven't gone as deep as I would like. In fact, very few people have gone there. I'm talking about, like, journalists or public figures. If you want to compare it to North Korea, it's like, I don't know, a hundred times harder to go to Was State. North Korea has a tourist visa, right?

[Mark Gagnon]

Wa State?

[Patrick Nguyen]

No.

[Mark Gagnon]

What is the day to day life for the average Wa citizen?

[Patrick Nguyen]

It's not that great. There's a lot of illiteracy. Most are farming a small plot of land. If you want to climb the ladder a little bit, you can join the United Wa State army. It's basically like a militarized state. Every family has to cough up one son anyway, so everyone has to serve. Every family has to spit out, like, one soldier. But I see a lot of women joining too, because three square meals a day. And the funny thing is, I mean, they're so feared, they don't actually have to fight very much. Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Have they had any skirmishes in the last, like, 25 years?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, they have. I mean, they took over Khun Sa's territory and expanded their terrain, and then they get in little scraps here and there. It is an expansionist power. I think that they would like to expand their territory, and they have tried, but very few other groups want to pick a fight with them. I mean, I think it wouldn't go well. Thailand is a US ally with F16s and tanks and all that stuff, and they share a border with Wa State. And at times, some Thai leader will kind of thump his chest and we got to go after the wa and then they ultimately decide, maybe not.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And China's kind of cool with them right now. Why doesn't China just come in and be like, all right, bye.

[Patrick Nguyen]

This is a big ball of yarn. So WAS State is the world's most powerful narco state, the most powerful drug trafficking organization on planet Earth, and China supports them. So you can find photos online where senior diplomats appointed by Xi Jinping are sitting next to the leader of WA State who's wanted by the dea. So I'm not even in conspiracy land here. China supports WA State with weapons, with healthcare. If you get on 5G network in was state, it goes to the Chinese telecom system, which means Facebook, Twitter, all that's banned. Not that they give a shit about that stuff anyway.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

WA State is essentially a client state of China. And that seems so controversial. It seems like such a hot allegation. Right? It's pretty out in the open. And China, I think if you ask them directly, a Chinese diplomat, they'd say, oh, we don't believe that the WA produce drugs. From all of my reporting, and again, I talked to people who were very senior within the WA hierarchy and a lot of anti narcotics agents too. The deal is this. China looks to WA State and says, you can produce drugs, but none of them, not a single kilo is going to flow back into China. That's the deal. And that deal is respected. So if you could imagine, imagine the US could go to the Sinaloa cartel and say, produce all the drugs you want. But those babies are going south, they're not going north. We'd have a lot fewer drugs in this country.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right, and is that the only terms of the deal? Like, does China benefit by proxy from meth going into Southeast Asia? Is there any?

[Patrick Nguyen]

I don't think so, no. They, you know, we talked earlier about the CIA having its own proxy group that's self funded through drugs. Saves spending tax money on that. China has wa State again, 30,000 troops, I should add. That's more troops or about as many troops as like the country of Sweden has. So that's a big deal. They have them as a reliant attack dog inside of Myanmar, who pretty much does what they want. And there's self financing. All those drugs have to go somewhere and that's why they all dump into mainland Southeast Asia. And they do go as far as Australia.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, wow. Like you could get one of these blue or pink vanilla pills in Australia.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Australian's got a little bit more money. They would spring for the crystal meth.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. Does any of it make it to the United States?

[Patrick Nguyen]

The DEA has said that it does. I challenge you to find a Wah Pink. If you find one, Mark, let me know. I challenge you to find one. I'm sure it's come through the mail here and there. If you're smoking meth in the US it's probably coming up from Mexico.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

They'll walk and support themselves by selling to other Asians.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. So what Saul was trying to do with the United States, the WA people basically did with China in a way. You know, they get some funding from China, they get some protection from China. They're able to kind of, you know, operate without, you know, Chinese interference. And all they have to do is just not push drugs into China.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. Except for the Chinese interference part. So when. So the China. China has something called the Ministry of State Security. It's kind of the FBI and CIA rolled into one organization. And they are very close with the WA leadership. And when they tell them to do something, the WA have to do it. Sometimes they'll grumble, but they will do it. Because when you're a friendless narco state, you know, you're going to do what the superpower next door tells you to do. So, I mean, I'll give you an example. Someone I'm very close to who was high up in the WA state government, was chatting with someone on the senior WA leadership just over, like, voice chat. And he was asking for something really simple. He was interested in setting up a charitable organization in WA state, and it was going to have a Christian backing. And I could hear the WA leader coming back to him and being like, ah, we have to think about what China would say. They might not like that. So maybe not.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So the ccp, the Chinese Communist Party, kind of lives in the WA leadership's head, running interference before they ever make a move.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. And they have much more leverage just because they're directly next door.

[Patrick Nguyen]

They have so much leverage. I mean, they can really tell them what to do. And the wa, by and large, are not happy about this, but that's the situation that they're in.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. I mean, this is wild. Can we get some pictures of the WA state in general? I would just love to see, like, what someone's house looks like. Do they have cities?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, they do. They do. The main city, the capital, is called Pansang. P A N G, S A ngh. I think I spelled that right. It's pretty nice. They have gridded streets, electricity. There's A bowling alley.

[Mark Gagnon]

This is. This is it.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, if you look at a certain angle, you could almost. You'd think you're in like a third tier Chinese city. And from certain angles you would think you're in Hong Kong.

[Mark Gagnon]

And so the people speak Mandarin.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, they do these days. That's kind of the. Oh, man. There are some really valiant Wa people trying to uphold their own culture and language and make sure that everybody can speak Wa and they do at home. But when you go to do anything, conduct business, the Chinese comes out and they can. They can all speak really good Chinese.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now is this the Chinese government forcing them to do that or is it just by, you know, the means of how they trade and just life that they kind of adopted Mandarin and started becoming more Chinese? Ish.

[Patrick Nguyen]

It's an organic thing. But the Chinese government, like, if you go to Wa Middle School, go to Wa Elementary School, you're learning in the Wa language, you get to Wah Middle School, you're learning in Chinese. And China would support that. You know, the US has its own client states as well. And I'm sure the leaders of those countries have to think before they do anything. Is this gonna piss off the White House? We know that's true. Right, so it's kind of like that. But yeah, they really do wanna hold onto their own culture. I mean, that's the whole point of was state. I mean, that justifies the narcotics to a degree. They don't want anyone's boot on their neck.

[Mark Gagnon]

What's up, people? We're gonna take a break really quick because I have amazing news. I'm coming on the road. That's right. My very first headlining tour. Where I'm coming, going to every city that will possibly allow me to go there. Hoboken, New Jersey. I'm going to Salt Lake City. I'm going to Washington D.C. and Charlotte, North Carolina in February. Those tickets will be announced soon. And of course, I'm doing my monthly show at Mary Lou in New York City on December 16th. The best comics in the city will be coming out and I'll be working out some new material. It is a grand old time. You can get all the tickets at Mark Yagnon Live and I'll see you guys there. Let's get back to the show. What's up, people? We're going to take a break because we got new merch. That's right. It is the holiday season and the good folks over at Camp R and D have been cooking up in the lab. We got the Christmas sweaters with the aliens. We got the Christmas sweaters with the conspiracy vibes you already know. I mean, this one might be my favorite one. A Christmas tree full of aliens, full Christmas sweater energy. And then, of course, if you just want something simple, you know, you bust out the camp logo tea with the little Christmas lights on it. Come on, bro, get cute for Christmas, okay? It is a holiday season, all right? We're celebrating the birth of the savior, okay? And what better way to do it than to cop a couple threads for the person in your life that you know that loves a campsite that loves hanging with us every single week. And right now, we're running a promo through the holidays. That's right. Use the promo code. Christmas camp for 15% off. I just made that up on the spot. But I think we can do it, right? I'll call some people. Christmas camp for 20 for 15% off. Sure, 16% off. Whatever you say, Mark. Should we give them more? One more. 17% off, people, we don't. I think this is gonna work. I'm not positive we're gonna see if we can do it, but I'll. Yeah. Check it out, guys. We got all the camp stuff going until the end of the year. Check it out. Thank you guys so much for supporting the show. I love you all. God bless and merry Christmas. And so how do they get all the materials to build? And how do they get all the chemicals to make meth? Like, where does all that come from?

[Patrick Nguyen]

China. China. China. The weapons. China. Like, they. They have some pretty badass weapons. There's a shoulder fired missile that they have that can take down a fighter jet. They did not make that in house.

[Mark Gagnon]

Of course.

[Patrick Nguyen]

That is something the People's Liberation army of China uses. And they got their hands on it. I wonder how.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. And now Myanmar lets this happen.

[Patrick Nguyen]

What are they gonna do? Yeah, send a fighter jet in and see what happens.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And then as soon as they went after the WA and said, you're in our country, you should act like it, China's gonna come to Myanmar's army and say, back off, our little bro.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right now, does the WA state do anything else for China other than not put drugs in there? I mean, they obviously work as, like, a proxy, but, like, what else does China get out of this expansion?

[Patrick Nguyen]

They get a lot. Myanmar is, you know, torn to pieces. And the military government doesn't control the entire country. Especially when you get into the mountains, it shatters into different indigenous armed groups. And there's a lot of trade that goes through there. Myanmar Also has a lot of resources. Copper, gems, rare earths. That's a new booming one. And there's rare earths in was state. So I don't know how many people understand how important these are. I mean, this is key, key, key to US China relations. So if you want to make an electric vehicle, if you want to make even the new US fighter jet, you need these metals called rare earths. China mostly gets them from rogue areas of Myanmar, and increasingly they're getting them from Hua states. So I think it's highly plausible that metal scraped from the ground in was state would end up like in the nose cone of a new US fighter jet. Although they would say it's from China. And I don't know how well the US government is tracking this, but you know, you've got a rogue narco state, the US wants to lock up its leaders, and on the other hand, you probably relying on them for the metals you need to supply some of our more advanced weapons. So it's pretty tangled.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. Is the closest proxy to this, like North Korea? Like, is there anything else like this on Earth?

[Patrick Nguyen]

No. Especially having a narco state that is this independent? No, I don't think there's any good analog. I'm racking my brain and I can't come up with anything. Wow. Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

So where did you go in Wastegate?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Ah, so I tried many times to get an invite to the capitol. At one point, I did get invited by was State to come visit their capitol when they were holding a celebration every five years. They trot out their military equipment. And although I don't like the North Korea comparison, it is kind of a North Korea style, you know, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh, let's show all of our badass weapons and scare the crap out of everybody type of parade. So they gave me permission to go. But the only way I could get access to Wa State was through Myanmar. And the Myanmar government told me directly, no, we're not going to let you go.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So I tried many other ways to go. Covid happened that wasn't helpful. They adopted the China style COVID policy of a total lockdown. So that wasn't helpful. Happened right during the middle of my reporting on this book, Narcotopia. Finally, finally, finally I found some guides. I'm trying to think how many details I want to give here. All right, let me keep it simple. I found some people native to the mountains that separate Thailand and Wa State. And they were willing to bring me across to a part of Wa State that is currently being conquered. So the Wa, like I said, they're an expansionist power, and they're always kind of pushing their border a little bit if they can. They had pushed out some members of another indigenous group and basically had it to the point where this group was surrounded by Wa fortifications up in the hills, and they could come down the mountain and tell them what to do. They weren't downright, like, in their village every day, but they were in the process of dominating them. So it was a part of Wa State, and I was able to get smuggled in and talk to the people there about how badly they were faring. The reason I was able to do that is because if I were to go to a place where Wa soldiers were just walking around, they would have seen me and I would have been in really bad trouble. Yeah, really bad trouble.

[Mark Gagnon]

What would they have done?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Minimum, I'm getting detained.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, if you got invited to the capitol, like, why?

[Patrick Nguyen]

That would have been fine. That would have been fine because I was invited by the government proper.

[Mark Gagnon]

But you're sneaking in, basically.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, I mean, I've gone in without permission. They take that really seriously.

[Mark Gagnon]

So no one immigrates, no one goes there.

[Patrick Nguyen]

There's kind of a racial system. Someone who is a Chinese speaker or who is Southeast Asian probably can get in with an invite and they would wave you through. If you had a number of someone, like in the capital, like a businessman saying, oh, yeah, he's coming in to help me with my business. Let him in. And there are people that would bring you in and you could probably get away with that. There's pretty much a total block on Caucasians coming in because CIA, dea.

[Mark Gagnon]

I see.

[Patrick Nguyen]

When I have communicated with the Wa government and met officials in their offices outside of Wa State because they have, like, an embassy in Burma, I think I'm suspected of being intelligence. I don't think they know for sure, but it's smart of them to just assume they're weary. Yeah. I mean, they should be. They should be. It got around to the Wa government that I was buddy buddy with Superstar, the famed DEA asset.

[Mark Gagnon]

That didn't help.

[Patrick Nguyen]

I don't think that helped.

[Mark Gagnon]

I see.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So, yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

So where does Superstar live now?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Superstar died while I was writing this book from COVID Oh, wow. Covid got him.

[Mark Gagnon]

And where was he living in at that point?

[Patrick Nguyen]

He was living in a city in Myanmar about 50 miles outside of Wa State. Ultimately, he was such a pariah to the pro drug trafficking wing of Wa State that he needed to Leave. He was tortured severely and died in exile. Yeah. And so he's still a hero to many Wa who. Not only Christians, but non Christian Wa who think that Wa people get pushed around by China and should quit trafficking drugs and become more of a normal state.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, So I met him there, spent a lot of time in his home, and he was in his mid-70s when. When we became close and.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Walk into his dusty old house, and he had a gigantic picture of white Jesus on the wall, who, sorry to say, quite a resemblance to Mark Gagnon.

[Mark Gagnon]

Hell, yeah.

[Patrick Nguyen]

And I think his openness to me came from the fact that he had this idealized vision of America. I mean, he never dropped it. He still thought, despite all the CIA shenanigans, that America was this great country that would uplift the meek. I mean, he bought into the whole.

[Mark Gagnon]

Package that we sell, and he died a Christian.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Oh, the Christian.

[Mark Gagnon]

Staunch Christian.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Oh, my goodness.

[Mark Gagnon]

Because Myanmar is not a predominantly Christian nation.

[Patrick Nguyen]

No, they have Christians there, but no, it's not predominantly Christian. And Wa people especially. There's not many Christians. But he kind of talked in a raspy voice like this, and he didn't really laugh much. And when he, like locked eyes, it's like dark, dark eyes.

[Mark Gagnon]

Been through some shit.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well, I saw the scars on his body from the torture. So, yeah, he had been through some shit, but he was just like. As one dea, one of his DEA handlers told me, like, just tough as nails.

[Mark Gagnon]

Can people leave Wa State?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, they can go to China and they can work. They can find jobs in China. They can go across that border. Wa people, I mean, they have their own ID cards, they have their own license plates. They have their own everything.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right.

[Patrick Nguyen]

But Wa people can also get a Myanmar passport. They can go wherever they want. And the children of the Wa leadership, you know, they go to boarding school in Singapore and probably don't tell people their Wa.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. Do they have Western media? Do they understand what's happening in the world.

[Patrick Nguyen]

These days? Their window to the world is. Do you know what douyin is?

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, yeah, yeah. It's like Chinese TikTok.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Chinese TikTok. So, like, if. If you Google this, like, BBC's like, Wah. The most secretive people and place in the world. Well, actually, you can go on douyin all day and see, like, you know, Wa soldiers in uniform, like, doing the TikTok dances and goofing off and kind of acting like normal kids.

[Mark Gagnon]

Are the Wa people happy?

[Patrick Nguyen]

That's way too general of a question. They deserve more. That's What? I'll say they deserve more. I would like to see more of those drug profits go into a welfare state. I think I would like that for most countries, for more profits, not to get locked into the pockets of the highest earners and to, you know, build more hospitals and schools and stuff like that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Are people dying of disease and poverty every day?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't want to be sick there. If you get cancer, you're done. Unless you have some money, you can get your ass to China and go to the hospital there. And Chinese would let you in. You could do that. But yeah, there's no real middle class. Like you're either a dirt poor farmer or you join the military, either by force. Interestingly, they have a lot of child soldiers. So one of my good buddies, his job at one point was teaching like nine year olds who had been brought into the WA army, training them and then just teaching them to read and things like that. And there's all these videos where you can see them on parade and it's like really young kids holding guns. They don't really have a taboo about that. They don't think it's wrong.

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. What is the future of Wa State? What happens to these people?

[Patrick Nguyen]

I think the future of Wa state as a state is pretty bright. And what I mean is the state is not going anywhere. You asked me the future of Washington, of Myanmar or Burma as a state, I have no idea.

[Mark Gagnon]

No one knows.

[Patrick Nguyen]

It could have different leadership next year. In five years, it's in a raging war. Was state is stable. It's propped up by China. China's, you know, its fortunes are rising. If anything, I think it will get bigger. I don't know what I hope. I mean, obviously I want people to read my book and find this all very interesting. I don't have a particular agenda and I consider myself really grateful that so many Wa people opened up their lives to me and told me their stories. And I'm not an ambassador or spokesman for them. I really just focused on my government's relationship with these people and how weird and zany it's been.

[Mark Gagnon]

Do you speak Mandarin?

[Patrick Nguyen]

No, I just speak Thai.

[Mark Gagnon]

So how are you able to communicate with a Wa person that doesn't speak English?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Some speak English and other than that, through translation.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Someone out there should pick up where I've left off and do a book that really gets into what it's like to be wa today in 2025. That person will not look like me and they will need to speak minimum. They'll need to speak Mandarin.

[Mark Gagnon]

What are the odds I could run into a Wa person in America?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Virtually zero.

[Mark Gagnon]

Is there one you think?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, I'm sure it's some rich kid who is the son of one of the leaders. And he wouldn't tell you he was Wa. He would say, oh, I'm from Myanmar.

[Mark Gagnon]

Really? Has anyone reached out to you and been like, dude, read your book. I'm Wa and I live in Charlottesville or something?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Everything except the I live in Charlottesville part. The book has been translated into multiple languages, so we've got it really popped in Italy. I think they just like mafia organized crime stuff.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So the book sold really well in Italy. There's Spanish, Japanese is coming out soon. Russian is coming out soon.

[Mark Gagnon]

Mandarin.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yes. Well, a Taiwanese publisher picked it up and they translated it into, you know, like written Chinese in mainland China. And in Taiwan is different. So in Taiwan, they use the old school, older form of writing. It's very mutually intelligible, but they use a simplified form of Chinese in mainland mainland China. That said, some copies have made their way to Wa people and I've gotten a few emails in English, so they must be somewhat cosmopolitan or using Google Translate saying, I really liked your book. I mean, that meant more to me than like, you know, Rolling Stone saying it was a good book or Amazon said it was one of the best books of 2024. Pretty cool. But that email from like a Wa dude totally made my day.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, that is crazy. Is it possible that. That this could happen? That basically the Wa people work out a relationship with China and they say, hey, we're going to declare independence. We will ultimately be a Manchurian kind of puppet state for you guys, but you guys are going to protect us. We're going to declare independence from Myanmar and we'll do more or less what you guys want, but we're going to be our own self governing state, similar to North Korea.

[Patrick Nguyen]

What China would say is, no, you're not going to do that. And the reason is China plays a complex game in Myanmar where it tries to prop up all sides. So it sells weapons to the military junta. It gives weapons to people fighting the.

[Mark Gagnon]

Military junta, but they need chaos and disorder.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well, if you want, I think they would like some form of stability, but they don't know who's going to win. So when the dust settles, whoever wins, they want to make sure that they have a relationship with them, especially armed groups along trade routes or near resources. In Myanmar, they will prop them up and the military junta in Myanmar will be like what are you doing? And China will say, this is the game that they're playing. So if the WA said, hey, we are going, they are an independent sovereign country, as I see it. But if they were to trumpet that to the world and declare it and send their leader to the UN General Assembly, China would say, you don't need to do all that.

[Mark Gagnon]

They'd probably also have to clean up the meth act.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well, if you look at the party line of the WA leaders, they say that they don't produce any meth at all. Yeah, actually the system that they have now is quite sophisticated. Once upon a time they were producing their own meth pills in house. Now what they'll do is, is use what I call a landlord model or as a person from WAS State explained to me they want to be rent masters. What that means is they've got primo real estate on the drug trafficking corridors of Southeast Asia. So you bring in Chinese organized crime syndicates and you say, this would be a nice place to build a meth lab. It's right next to this stream. Because you actually need a lot of water to make meth. You guys make a meth lab and we're going to take a cut of your proceeds, 10, 15, 20%. We will also introduce you to this criminal gang who is allowed to come through our territory. They'll pick up your meth and they'll deliver it to somebody else down the pipeline. We will be taking a cut of their payment as well. And let's just sit back. Passive income, I see. That's how they do it.

[Mark Gagnon]

And they're becoming, I mean, more legitimate in that way that their hands are kind of clean. I mean, they're facilitating it, but they're not making it like they used to.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, it's just, I don't think it's for image. I think it's just for it's financial sophistication. Would you like to get your hands dirty in a meth lab or would you like to take a cut of the guy getting his hands dirty?

[Mark Gagnon]

Right. And then if the meth gets lost or seized somewhere, it's like it's on you, you already paid.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Totally, totally not their problem. One thing they will do. So the chemicals that make meth come from generally the same place as the chemicals that make fentanyl. And I just want to emphasize fentanyl. You cannot buy fentanyl in Asia. Southeast Asia maybe in a hospital you don't see people nodding out on fent in Bangkok. Not happening. It's all meth Meth. Meth. China has a giant pharmaceutical chemical complex that produces all sorts of chemicals that make a lot of the medicines that we take. Certain chemicals are siphoned off and they go to Mexico to make fentanyl. Other chemicals, not the same chemicals, but other chemicals from that general industry are siphoned off to go to WA State to make methamphetamine. And so the WA may facilitate or put you in touch with somebody who has access to those chemicals and that can bring them into their, into their area. So they're, you know, they will help you liaise and kind of do like a turnkey meth lab business and then they just collect a cut.

[Mark Gagnon]

How did they not get their own citizens hooked on heroin or meth?

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well, if you do method in was state, they will put you in jail.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow.

[Patrick Nguyen]

So it is illegal.

[Mark Gagnon]

That is hilarious.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah. Now I don't think they have this anymore, but not that long ago, instead of building a prison, they would just dig a hole and they would put you in the meth hole or the heroin hole. And the hole in the ground has to be so deep that like you could put three guys in the hole, but not four, because if you do four, you could like stand on each other's shoulders and like maybe reach the top of the hole. You would just see sort of like a portal in the ground. And you look down. It's this like gourd shaped pit where guys are in there. No daylight, tie some food to a rope, drop it down to them once a day. And that's what would happen to you if you used drugs.

[Mark Gagnon]

That is crazy. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And you don't think they do that now?

[Patrick Nguyen]

I don't know. Actually, probably they still do in really remote parts, but in the WA towns and cities. No, from my understanding, they have a proper prison, which is still no pony ride.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. I mean, this is crazy. I mean, I feel like my brain is spinning. This is like so much from a place that I've never heard of to now understanding, like a sophisticated, sophisticated government and political structure and military regime that operates at the behest of China in order to traffic meth around the world. It's a lot.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Well, people who are firmly entrenched in the narrative that they see in Narcos, the show Narcos, which I really like, that narrative is really well trod and well known. And so when you bring this to people who are used to the Latin American style of drug war and how it works. Yeah, you just have to start from square one. It works. Totally differently. But the power and the scale of the narcotics, I think, is superior to that in Latin America.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, crazy. And you wrote about all of this and more, I imagine, in Narcotopia.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Yeah, Narcotopia is. Man. Mark. I had a pile of notes, like, high as my head, and I just had to leave so much on the cutting room floor because what I wanted to do is tell a narrative story and see this country through the eyes of one of its top leaders, who is also a DEA asset superstar. And he's sort of. He's our man that we follow to tell the story of WA State. So it reads like a narrative. The other option would just be hitting you over the head with crazy facts. But by the time you get halfway through the book, you're like, I'm sorry, I'm lost. Yeah, you need to follow a man's story in the. That's what I did.

[Mark Gagnon]

Absolutely. Well, people can go check out the book. It's available in all the bookstores, I imagine. Kindle, everything like that. Italian, evidently.

[Patrick Nguyen]

If you want to read it in Italian. Yeah. Let me know if the translation's good, because I have no idea what it says.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wow. Well, this has been fascinating. Thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it. Is there anything that we didn't cover on Was State that I should look into?

[Patrick Nguyen]

No, I think that's a great primer to the wonderful world of Wastate.

[Mark Gagnon]

Thank you so much, brother.

[Patrick Nguyen]

Thanks, Mark.