Original subtitles

How far back does possible CIA involvement with

drug smuggling go?

I don't know, but if you go back and you look at

the evidence, we were supplying cocaine into the US

to finance the Contras.

And on the return trips, we were bringing weapons.

My friends that were CIA pilots were flying the cocaine

into US military bases.

So is this a systemic corruption?

Yes, sir.

Let's face it.

There are so many government conspiracies, it can be hard to

tell what's real and what's not.

My name is Andrew Bustamante, and I am a former

covert CIA intelligence officer.

And I'm going to pressure test the most sensational,

ripped-from-the-headlines conspiracy theories out there

to help you separate fact from fiction.

Chaos is unfolding in Mexico after the killing of

the country's most powerful cartel leader.

The Mexican army killed the leader

of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

You're looking at him here.

February 2026.

The Mexican army takes out El Mencho, and within hours,

violence erupts across the region,

from Puerto Vallarta to Mexico City.

The death of the drug lord

set off several hours of roadblocks.

This was a Mexican military operation, support from CIA,

and it seemed like a pretty massive success, taking out

a cartel leader who was trafficking fentanyl and other

dangerous drugs into the United States.

So why doesn't this moment feel more triumphant?

You can see the incredible deadly power this cartel has

just south of the US border.

How did they get so rich and powerful?

The Jalisco New Generation Cartel has declared that

they're going to be attacking Americans next.

Agents with the US Customs and Border Protection

are on heightened alert,

after new alleged threats from the cartel.

Yes, a major cartel boss is dead.

But the bigger question is, what does that change?

Why are drugs still pouring across our borders?

And why does it feel like no matter how many raids

or arrests happen, the system never really changes?

America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.

We're just gonna kill people

that are bringing drugs into our country.

The fact that the war on drugs seems to have little effect on

this tide of narcotics has long fueled conspiracy theories

that the government doesn't really want to win the war.

But even more troubling is the idea that my own agency,

the CIA, has been accused of working alongside

drug traffickers to move their product into

my own country.

That makes this the most personal investigation

for me yet.

In this episode, I'm going to follow the evidence

from covert wars overseas to the streets here at home.

I'm going to track down a former DEA officer who says

that he saw the corruption up close.

We were fighting ourselves. We were the enemy.

I'll investigate how covert operations from Vietnam to

Afghanistan may have shaped the current drug war.

And to probe the idea that the drug war has become a means

to control here in the US, I link up with a privacy

activist who exposes a tracking system originally built to hunt

drug traffickers that he believes is monitoring

everyday Americans.

It's a very powerful tool and a very dangerous tool.

All to answer a question that might explain everything--

if the war on drugs is real, then why are cartels wealthier

and more powerful than ever before?

Because if the answer to that question isn't what we think,

maybe there never really was a war at all.

When you investigate a conspiracy, the hardest part

is separating three things.

What's documented, what shows up as a pattern,

and what do people believe but still can't prove?

That's what I'm trying to do here.

I'm on my way to meet with a longtime colleague from

the DEA named Cele.

Cele made his career combating drug trade, and I feel like if

I'm going to understand cartels and how they operate,

I need to understand how drugs cross international borders.

If drugs are the enemy and billions of dollars are

spent on enforcement, why do narcotics still make it across

the border every single day?

Cele, how did you get involved in this war on drugs?

Well, first and foremost, I come from a very...

patriotic family, military and law enforcement family.

What got me really into the war on drugs was

what I experienced in Vietnam.

I saw one of my friends shooting up heroin and ODing

after a firefight, and that was when I decided that I wanted to

be a drug agent.

After Vietnam, Cele Castillo

didn't walk away from the fight.

He just found a new battlefield.

He joined the Drug Enforcement Administration in the 1970s,

chasing heroin dealers on the mean streets of New York.

But by the early 1980s, cocaine was exploding

onto the global stage,

and the DEA sent him into the belly of the beast,

Central America,

ground zero for the cocaine pipelines feeding

the United States.

So I asked Cele to show me something most people

never see, the cat and mouse game

between smugglers and law enforcement.

Now, this isn't real cocaine.

What is this mixture that you have here?

It's flour, little bit of sugar.

My understanding is you also added something to it to make

it smell like cocaine?

Yeah, you break it down in the lab,

and then it's processed with ether,

and you make it into 100% pure cocaine.

So what the dogs smell isn't necessarily the cocaine itself.

It's the ether, yes.

If drugs are still getting through,

is it because we can't detect them?

Or is something else going wrong?

To find out, I'm going to test if we can get a substance that

looks and smells like cocaine past one of the most common

lines of defense, a trained drug detection dog.

So what we're doing is taking the powder and masking it.

How do we actually do that?

The kilo itself is already compressed and taped.

And then we sprinkle coffee grounds mostly on top,

drop the coffee grounds on there.

Cele shows me how traffickers conceal drugs,

masking the scent with coffee grounds and tape.

You go forward and then you go sideways and--

- In a pattern. - Yeah.

And hiding them inside massive shipments of everyday goods.

It's not just about beating detection,

it's about overwhelming the system and relying on

the fact that no one has time to check everything.

Now, I have a friend who actually trains

drug detection dogs. - Mm-hmm.

If I take this and I test it against a trained dog...

- He's gonna miss it. - But if we take them both?

- Yeah, he'll hit on this one. - So if you'll hide that one...

- Yeah. - I'll bury this,

and I'll bury it under onions and grapefruit.

OK.

You ready to go smuggle some drugs?

Sure, let's go do that.

So here's what we're doing.

We'll load Celerino's vehicle with the produce

and the containers of mock cocaine.

One box of produce contains the wrapped drugs.

Another box contains the unwrapped one.

My SUV will be the control vehicle, meaning there will be

no drugs in the car.

I'll go in first,

while Celerino hangs back for our cue to come in.

Jordan, thank you so much for coming out.

Absolutely. Good to see you again, Andy.

Jordan Henderson is a professional dog handler

who trains sniffer dogs for

law enforcement agencies all over the country.

He has no idea which vehicle the drugs are in.

If his dogs can sniff them out, we can safely eliminate

border detection as the problem.

This is Atlas. She's five years old.

She's a Belgian Malinois.

What language are you speaking to her?

My dogs are trained in Swahili.

It does aid us to say things that the average person

doesn't know. - Oh, cool.

She's trained dual purpose-- protection-apprehension work,

detection, and tracking. - Wow.

Same with her daughter, Agojie, up here.

So this is her daughter.

She's about 10 months now,

and she already certified in odor detection.

Can you tell me a little bit about how the dogs work?

Yeah. So from the time that these dogs are born,

their eyes aren't open.

So everything they do is through their nose, right?

So they're trying to find mom through her scent.

They're trying to find milk.

So we get the odor that the dog is gonna be detecting,

and we put it on her stomach.

So since the dogs are three days old, they're already

associating that smell with the thing that they want most

in life, which is milk.

We'll just let her know what we're doing.

Now, what did you just do with what looked like a toy?

I'm just letting her know, hey, I have something

rewardable for you to work,

and then give her a search command.

And right now, I'm just watching for any head snaps,

any interest in your vehicle that you brought here.

What are the cues that you're seeing, if you don't mind

kind of translating them for me?

Yeah, so right now she's pretty flat.

She's checking door seams, which she's trained to do.

I see her ears laying flat. Does that cue anything at all?

Ears up would be interesting, but she circled the vehicle

twice, and she's going, hey, dude,

there's nothing here.

And I'm going to give her her toy,

reward her for just looking.

Now for the real test,

to see if a Agojie will detect the scent of cocaine

hidden in Celerino's vehicle.

- How are you, sir? - And this is a Agojie.

I'll just have you step away from the car

a little bit for me.

Yeah, mama.

So I saw a little head snap there.

Another one right there.

I'm just gonna let her...

- Wow! - Did you see that?

Ears up.

That's that look I was talking about before.

So when she stops like that and I put tension on the line,

we call it line checking.

I say, "Are you sure?"

If she stays there and pushes into it, there's something here.

- OK. - Send her back to the car.

Wow, look at her go.

- You see that freeze? - Yep.

- I line check her. - Look at that.

Whoo!

So I'll pull out what she was scenting on

and I'll take it out of the way.

She's so fast, too.

Yeah, that box in the back left corner.

There we go.

You want to reveal what's in these boxes?

Absolutely. Here we go.

Wow.

So inside this is a mock cocaine concoction laced with

the same smell of real cocaine.

So it's got the ether smell that would come

with genuine cocaine. - Yeah.

In this box, we have the same thing,

only it hasn't been

wrapped and disguised. - Wrapped, ah, yeah, yeah.

But we tried to disguise them with onions, coffee.

Yeah, and that's not gonna work.

They have so many nerve endings at the end of

their nose that we can't even conceptualize

their true potential.

This was a 10-month-old dog that just nailed us.

- Impressed. - I am absolutely speechless.

- Jordan, thank you so much. - I appreciate you guys.

- Thank you so much, dude. - Awesome.

Yeah. Come on, girl.

Here's what the experiment showed me.

It's not that we don't know how to find drugs.

We do. The dogs work.

The detection works.

But that's only one part of the system.

Because dogs can't search every truck, every car,

every container crossing the border.

Agents have to prioritize.

And the moment you rely on human judgment...

that's where things can break down.

That's where incentives and corruption

can enter the picture.

Now what the cartels are doing are sending their own guys into

the Border Patrol Academy.

Yeah, we had one guy that let the trucks come in and he did

that for many years and finally got caught. - What?

Do you have evidence of this?

Yes, yes, it's very well documented.

Jorge Jimenez was charged with conspiracy to commit

wire fraud, paid off by Mexican smugglers

to pass through the I-19 checkpoint

without inspection.

If there's corruption happening at the border,

how much further does the corruption go?

- The highest level of our government. - Wow.

Cele's making a big claim.

He and others believe the real vulnerability isn't

the border itself. It's corruption.

He says it goes all the way to the top

of the US government, even to my former agency.

CIA are complicit in the drug trade,

supporting covert operations.

And if he is right, that could mean something very different

about how this system actually works.

And Cele says he has first-hand knowledge that

he thinks proves it.

Coming up, what if the reason we never won the war on drugs

is because stopping drugs was never the top priority?

We were the enemy.

We were the ones that were involved in

drug trafficking, corruption. - And then...

We'd be on military missions.

We'd land a helicopter in a field.

Wherever you went, there was poppy.

It was like corn in Nebraska.

2 Our experiment proved that we know how to find drugs.

There we go.

So if the drugs kept moving,

the question becomes, who was letting them move?

For Cele, that answer started in Central America.

Because instead of just finding traffickers,

he says he found something else.

Some of us were putting our lives on the line to fight

this so-called war on drugs, but I ended up seeing

and realizing that we were the enemy.

We were the ones that were involved in drug trafficking,

corruption, you name it.

At the time, President Reagan was obsessed with overthrowing

Nicaragua's communist government, and he ordered

the CIA to train and help fund a right-wing rebel army

called the Contras.

Now, the people that are so-called Contras,

they're demanding a restoration of the democratic goals

of the-- of the revolution.

And we feel obligated to give them support.

But after Congress banned military support for

the Contras, the war didn't just stop.

According to Cele, the funding just went underground.

As long as there is breath in this body, I will speak

and work, strive, and struggle

for the cause of the Nicaraguan freedom fighters.

We were supplying cocaine into the US,

and on the return trips, we were bringing weapons

to finance the Contras.

My friends that were CIA pilots were flying the cocaine

into US military bases,

and one of them was in Fort Worth, Texas.

If the CIA has, at times, facilitated drug trafficking

during covert operations, I want to know

how far back that goes.

So I'm reaching out to Alfred McCoy, one of the first

researchers to investigate the global heroin trade

and its links to covert US operations.

How far back does possible CIA involvement with

drug smuggling go?

In the Cold War, the CIA was operating covertly,

and drug smuggling is simply a manifestation of an alliance

that started with the dawn of the CIA and the dawn of

the Cold War.

Whenever operatives during the Cold War were sent to

conduct covert operations, they needed local assets.

And the most likely place to find them, time and time again,

was in this covert netherworld.

So the connection is really through local people who are

already engaged in the drug trade, is that correct?

That's correct, yeah. Right.

When the Vietnam War started

in 1964-65,

the CIA mobilizes a 30,000-man army, largely from

the Hmong highland population.

The CIA's war in Laos is one of the least understood

chapters of the Cold War, a conflict fought almost

entirely in the shadows, with very few Americans even

aware it was happening.

A handful of CIA operatives were tasked with running

an entire covert war, building and directing this

30,000-man proxy army to block communist expansion and disrupt

the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the main avenue for

the communist North Vietnamese to access South Vietnam.

McCoy was one of the few Western journalists

who actually made it into this hidden battlefield,

risking his life to document what America was really doing

inside this secret war.

Now, those Hmong villages have a very simple economy.

They grow sticky rice for subsistence

and they grew opium.

And opium was the source of cash

that sustained those communities.

The CIA's Air America started carrying the opium

for those villagers.

I started investigating.

I got an interpreter and a photographer,

and I interviewed farmer after farmer.

The story was the same.

They grew five, maybe 10 kilos of opium.

They took the opium down to the helicopter landing pad.

The Air America helicopter flew in.

Hmong officers in the CIA secret army got out, paid them

cash for the opium.

They loaded the opium on the aircraft and the aircraft

flew off to the CIA base in Long Tieng.

And if I'm understanding you, the reason CIA was turning

a blind eye was because the larger priority in

the region was being able to protect Northern Laos,

keep the communists out and ensure that

Southern Vietnamese forces had the best opportunity to win

in the North? - Exactly.

So suppression and cover-up of this necessary complicity

in the opium traffic was

a necessary part of that mission.

But that doesn't prove that the CIA was

running drugs as policy.

What it does show is something narrower and possibly

more believable.

When covert missions rely on local allies already involved

in the drug trade, narcotics were often tolerated

if the larger strategic goals mattered more.

That's not the same as ordering it, but it can

lead to the same results.

During the Cold War, the objective was

stopping communism.

But ten years later, when the US

went into Afghanistan after 9/11,

that priority shifted to terrorism.

Today we focus on Afghanistan, but the battle is broader.

In the face of today's new threat, the only way to pursue

peace is to pursue those who threaten it.

The question is, when the US

went to Afghanistan, knowing it was the center of

the global heroin trade, what did we do about it?

I'm reaching out to a former "60 Minutes" producer who spent

months embedded with US forces in southern Afghanistan.

How would you characterize the coexistence of conflict

and drugs in Afghanistan?

The one thing I noticed the most was...

poppy.

You know, it was everywhere.

And we'd be on military missions.

We'd land a helicopter in a field.

Wherever you went, there was poppy.

It was like corn in Nebraska.

And you'd think that if the US military

is gonna solve a problem with drugs,

it would be doing it in the middle of that.

But it wasn't anything like that.

They were going specifically after targets and they just

walked through the fields like it was no big deal.

There was nothing on the ground that showed me that they really

cared to eradicate the drugs coming out of Afghanistan.

Different war, same outcome.

Here's what's documented.

Covert wars where drug production expanded

instead of disappeared.

Here's what shows up as a pattern--

when larger strategic goals took priority,

stopping drugs moved to the bottom of the list.

And here's what's still unproven.

Whether that tolerance was policy or simply the cost of

doing business in the shadows.

Either way, the result was the same.

The drugs kept moving and eventually they came home.

2 If drugs weren't being stopped overseas, the next question is,

did those same networks help enable them here at home?

To find out, I go back to Cele,

who believes the pipeline didn't just exist overseas,

it reached the United States.

The Contra War unfolded at the same time the United States

was entering one of the most devastating drug crises

in its history-- the crack epidemic.

To keep the war alive, Cele claims he discovered

the CIA was helping the Contras traffic mass massive quantities

of cocaine into the United States.

Drugs would fly north, and then the planes would

return with arms.

Cele even provided a sworn report

to the House Intelligence Committee on what

he found, and has spent the next four decades

making a claim that still divides

investigators and historians of CIA's secret wars.

There is evidence the Contras in Nicaragua were smuggling

drugs to pay for their own revolutionary operations. - Mm-hmm.

But I haven't seen anything that says that it was

sanctioned by the US government. - Yeah.

That distinction matters.

There's evidence Contra traffickers moved cocaine,

and that some of those same networks overlapped with

covert US operations.

What's harder to prove is intent-- whether that was

tolerated, ignored, or directed from above.

That's the line I'm trying to find.

You're not going to find much

because everything was stopped by the CIA.

If you look at the history, you go back to

the French connection.

You go back to the Cuban exiles that were running drugs.

You can always say, well, there were individuals.

Yeah, but they were approved and sanctioned by the CIA.

One of the most controversial connections comes from

Los Angeles drug kingpin "Freeway" Rick Ross,

who claimed he was supplied with a seemingly endless

supply of cocaine by a Nicaraguan trafficker

named Danilo Blandon.

Blandon, who is very well documented as CIA asset,

he ran the smuggling of drugs for the Contra,

delivering hundreds of kilos of cocaine to Ricky Ross...

to start the crack epidemic.

He was approved by the CIA to do all this.

What Cele's claiming is just that-- a claim.

It's hard to prove whether Blandon's drug pipeline was

part of an approved US operation,

or if he was just a trafficker exploiting a war for

his own gain.

The US government denies any role in

fueling the nation's crack epidemic.

But Cele's also not the only one to raise that flag.

In the 1990s, journalist Gary Webb published

a series called the "Dark Alliance,"

linking cocaine traffickers connected to the Contras to

the rise of crack in Los Angeles.

I did a series that said that the crack market in

South Central Los Angeles had been created

in the early 1980s with the help of

this Contra drug ring.

And it ended up being a huge controversy.

His reporting ignited a national firestorm.

I will tell you, Director Deutch, as a former

Los Angeles police narcotics detective, that the agency has

dealt drugs throughout this country for a long time.

But Webb's reporting was also met with fierce criticism.

Major outlets like the LA Times, the New York Times,

and the Washington Post pushed back hard,

challenging both his conclusions

and the strength of his evidence.

The controversy then prompted a hefty two-year investigation

by the CIA's inspector general, Frederick Hitz.

I want to make clear that we found absolutely no evidence

to indicate that CIA as an organization

or its employees were involved in

any conspiracy to bring drugs into

the United States.

Even if not all of Webb's conclusions held,

his reporting forced a national conversation about how deeply

these drug networks may have

overlapped with covert US operations.

The least we could do is develop public policy that will

indicate that drug trafficking can never be used in any covert

operation, no matter what is being attempted.

I met with Maxine Waters and gave her my evidence

that I had, my DEA reports

and pictures that I took at Ilopango Airport.

I have a list of all the pilots that ran

for the CIA.

Here's where the evidence lands.

Some Contra-linked groups were involved in drug trafficking,

and the CIA was aware of those allegations.

But there was no confirmed evidence of a coordinated CIA

plan to flood Black communities with crack.

Either way, it leaves me with the same question.

If drugs were moving through these networks,

was it individuals operating in the shadows?

Or something larger?

To find out, I need someone who actually understands

how these operations work from the inside.

Luckily, I have a source close to me who could shed some light.

My wife, Jihi, who is also a former CIA officer and spent

years working counter narcotics.

I had this conversation yesterday...

Mm-hmm.

...that CIA was actively supporting the crack epidemic

in Southern California as part of the Iran-Contra affair.

And the math doesn't add up to me.

When you've got entire agencies trying to fight the war on

drugs, and you have drugs persistently present,

does that mean that we're losing?

And if we are losing, does it mean that we are

losing intentionally?

Because that's really what the DEA guy was saying.

Well I mean, I think, when you think about the CIA,

it has various missions, various priorities,

and narco trafficking is not the priority.

So if Iran took precedence, then anti-narco trafficking

would be put on the back burner.

That may be the clearest answer yet.

Not that drugs were the mission, but that

stopping them wasn't.

So if fighting drugs would have cost us

the Iran-Contra opportunity... - Mm-hmm.

...then we would have put off the fight.

Correct.

To make sure that we were able to get weapons into Iran.

So what's actually been proven?

In the late 1980s,

as the Iran-Contra scandal unfolded,

Congress launched investigations into

whether US covert operations had intersected

with drug trafficking.

Witnesses were called to testify under oath about what

they saw, including pilot and convicted drug trafficker

Gary Betzner.

We found a recording from the subcommittee investigation.

Did you use this modified Comanche for drug flights?

- Yes, sir, I did. - For cocaine flights?

- Yes, sir. - From where to where?

From Columbia to...

the Middle District of Florida.

Where were you operating out of?

- Lakeland. - During this 1983 period?

Lakeland, Florida.

Were you ever tracked by DEA or others

during this period of time? - No.

OK.

You knew Richard Healy was involved with flying

narcotics, correct? - Correct.

Was Richard Healy also involved in assisting

the Contras in Central America? - Yes, sir.

So I feel like this verifies a lot of what you and I have

been discussing as probable explanations...

Mm-hmm.

...for how CIA may have been involved.

Do I think CIA has like a drug dealing arm?

No. Do I think maybe

there were some small operations

that happened? Possible, yeah.

Coming up, I uncover how the war on drugs has quietly

turned into a surveillance machine right here at home.

2 So far, I've been asking a simple question.

If we've been fighting the drug war for decades,

why haven't we won?

Overseas, I'm seeing a pattern where stopping drugs hasn't

always been the priority.

But here at home, we've spent billions of dollars

trying to stop them.

So if the drugs are still here,

what exactly has all that effort been doing?

To answer that question, I'm turning to journalist

Radley Balko.

I'm trying to better understand what the implications were for

the war on drugs here back at home in the United States.

Well, the war on drugs, I mean, it was a--

or is a generational gradual erosion

of basic rights and civil liberties

and a gradual sort of accumulation of power by

government at all levels.

We also saw that a lot of the provisions in

the Patriot Act allowed federal law enforcement

to basically spy on American citizens

without first obtaining a warrant.

It was overwhelmingly used in very traditional drug cases,

not in cases of national security, not in cases of

suspected terrorism.

There were multiple threats growing against

the United States-- domestic terrorists,

there were international terrorists, radical Islam.

How do you differentiate the impact of the drug war

versus any of those other

creeping, kind of seeping threats?

You see this over and over and over again.

A new crisis or a new sort of external threat is presented to

the public as a reason that we need to give the government

more and more power, and then that power is

inevitably used in traditional drug policing.

- Police! - Police with a warrant! Open the door!

Because the incentive for police is to arrest

as people as possible.

They get money just for how many people they arrest.

What Radley is describing didn't happen overnight.

It was built piece by piece in the name of fighting drugs.

And maybe not just to enforce the law, but to expand control.

It sounds like you're making the argument almost that

the war on drugs has been more damaging to the American public

than drugs themselves?

There's no question about that.

I mean, how much privacy are we willing to

give up in the name of...

safety and security?

And of course, Ben Franklin had the famous quote,

when you give up one for the other, you get neither.

That's basically what we've seen.

Drugs haven't gone away, but our privacy has.

At CIA, we have a term called blowback.

We use it when something happens overseas

that affects us here at home.

What if, in this case, that blowback isn't just rising

addiction and violence,

but also the police response to it?

More enforcement,

more surveillance, more control.

What starts as a covert fix abroad ends up reshaping how

we're policed here at home.

As Radley points out, that shift may have changed

something deeper.

How the government sees all of us, not as citizens first,

but as potential suspects.

Which is why I'm meeting up with Will Freeman,

an entrepreneur and creator of an anti-surveillance app.

Will, thanks for coming, man.

When the war on drugs failed to stop narcotics,

enforcement didn't shrink. It expanded.

And surveillance filled the gap.

One of the clearest examples is

sitting above our roads right now.

License plate readers, or ALPRs.

That tag just hit on Maple and Fifth.

Companies like Flock Safety have deployed these cameras

nationwide and are used by thousands of law enforcement

agencies to build a searchable record

of where vehicles have been.

But critics say they don't just track suspects,

they track everyone.

While these camera systems have helped police with a wide

range of investigations,

they also raise significant privacy concerns.

Some communities around the country are coming together

to fight against what they say is a concerning form

of surveillance.

So Will built a nationwide platform called DeFlock,

where people can search their areas for these cameras.

I want to know how bad this privacy blowback from

the drug epidemic has become.

How many Flock safety cameras

are floating around in the United States today?

So we know for a fact it's at least 102,000.

That came from a public records request.

But based on a bug that was discovered, it looks like that

could be around 300,000.

But regardless, it's in the hundreds of thousands.

- That's a lot of cameras. - Yeah.

So I built DeFlock.

Hundreds of thousands of cameras built

in the name of stopping crime.

Will's answer to that system was simple.

If you can't stop it, at least make it visible.

Using crowdsourcing, Will built a live database of these

cameras, turning an invisible network into something you can

actually see and even avoid.

When you pull up this map image, what is it that you see

through your eyes?

I see a society that I don't want to live in.

I don't want to be watched everywhere I go.

So before we even get into how it works, I need to understand

the scope of it.

If I drove through my own hometown right now,

how many times would I be picked up?

All right, on the move.

I'll open the map and I'll make it follow us.

Is that how you would use it to avoid these cameras?

Yeah, you can enable alerts.

So it'll say like, "Hey, you're coming up on a camera."

You can even program routes in.

So if you want to like go from point A to point B and not pass

any license plate readers, you can do that too.

Now, I don't really know what these things look like.

I know you said that they're fairly obvious.

So I'm actually really excited to see what this looks

like up close and personal.

Yeah, in like almost every case,

they have a solar panel above them.

So we should be coming up on that first signal, I think.

Yep. I can see it right there with the solar panel.

So yeah, if you turn right here.

- Oh, I see it now. - Yep.

- So this is it right here, yeah? - Yep, that's it.

I mean, that is the proverbial eye in the sky right there.

This is a park I've taken my kids to, so this is hitting

very close to home.

A lot of these parking lots will have them at like,

all the main entrances so that they can keep track of who is

coming and going.

Now, is it only able to document a license plate?

Is it also able to document people?

It will capture your face through the windshield.

And these are being leased by the city.

So what that tells me is that the actual company itself has

the ability to constantly upgrade its software.

Yeah, exactly.

They came out with an update pretty recently that turns all

of these into video cameras too.

They originally were-- only took still images.

So it wouldn't be hard to upload it with facial

recognition software, with some sort of signals intercept

software, because it's really just software and antennas.

Right, as long as the hardware is there, yeah,

they can make it do whatever they want.

To be fair, Flock says they don't collect

facial recognition data, biometrics,

or driver information, but we know the technology to

do so exists.

In my world, we call this "pattern of life,"

mapping someone's movements from scattered data points.

What's striking is that this isn't happening overseas.

It's happening here, on American streets, right now,

and most of us have no idea.

Coming up, I weigh the evidence and answer the question,

is the war on drugs real, or is it something else?

2 The more time I spend with Will, the more I start to see

how something justified by the war on drugs has spread.

All right. Well, let's follow your map

and find the next one. - OK.

It looks like there's a big cluster of them here at this

intersection, not too far.

There's like one facing every direction.

Make a left at the light

and go up a few blocks. - You are right.

It is kind of unnerving knowing that

our entrance and our exit are all now like, stored.

Though Flock says they typically only store data

for 30 days.

Yeah, most people don't think about having their location

tracked when they go to a park or go to a trailhead or

go to the store, go to school sometimes.

Oh yeah, we got a Flock right there, there.

Oh, I see them right there on the posts.

Yeah.

So there's a camera right here on this light post,

a camera right there on its own dedicated posts,

and then there's a camera over there on the other side of

that post. - Yes.

So we've got three of the Flock cameras.

Now, what is that white Triple camera right there?

That is a red light camera.

And I actually don't hate those much because they only take

a picture of you when you run a red light.

So just in this intersection alone, there's 13 cameras.

- Yeah. - Wow!

I mean, this is really a whole new way of looking at the world

around you when you start counting the number of cameras.

Yeah, there are more and more of them every day.

Spending the day with a guy mapping surveillance cameras,

thousands of them, quietly tracking me, my family,

my neighbors-- it got me thinking.

Because if the war on drugs hasn't stopped drugs,

but it has led to a system like this, then you have to ask,

is it failing or doing exactly what it was built to do?

So let's get back to the question that started

this investigation.

If we've been fighting the war on drugs for decades,

why haven't we won? Here's what's documented.

During covert wars in places like

Laos, Afghanistan, and Central America,

drug trafficking repeatedly

intersected with US intelligence operations.

They loaded the opium on the aircraft,

and the aircraft flew off to the CIA base in Long Tieng.

Here's what shows up as a pattern.

When a larger strategic goal took priority,

stopping communism, fighting terrorism,

funding covert wars, the drug trade was often

facilitated, or at the very least, tolerated.

- So if Iran took precedence... - Yeah.

...then anti-narco trafficking would be

put on the back burner.

And in the 1980s, those same networks didn't just

exist overseas.

In some cases, they helped enable the flow of

cocaine into the United States.

What remains unproven?

There is no clear evidence that the CIA set out to poison

America with drugs.

And here at home, the system that was built in

response to those drugs, the enforcement, the cameras on

every corner, the control, that part is absolutely real.

And it's growing every day.

Drugs haven't gone away, but our privacy has.

So is the war on drugs real? Yes.

Is it working? No.

And that's the part that should disturb you, because the drugs

are still here.

The cartels are richer and more powerful than ever before.

The government has more enforcement tools,

more surveillance, more control.

And ordinary citizens?

We have less privacy and fewer rights than when we started.

So if this really is a war...

who's actually winning it?