RPI Director Daniel McAdams opens the Ron Paul Institute's "Winning the War on the War on Drugs" conference last month with a short discussion of how the "regime changers" use the drug war to drum up support for interventionist US policies abroad.
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Opening Remarks
00:03:39
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| All right, we're going to try to get started here in just a second. | |
| Got to stay on time. | |
| Well, welcome, everyone. | |
| When we started planning this conference a while ago, Dr. Paul and Adam and I were thinking, well, we need to have a good news conference because, you know, every day we do the Liberty Report, and it's often mostly about foreign policy. | |
| It kind of is always a bad news story. | |
| And even when we get a little bit of a good news story, it often turns bad. | |
| You know, we'll first hear from President Trump saying, hey, we're going to get the troops out of Syria and Afghanistan. | |
| We're great. | |
| And then President Bolton comes and says, no, we're not. | |
| So when we get a little good news, it's often tempered by bad news. | |
| But I want to just do a couple of opening things. | |
| First of all, and it's very important, I want to thank Carol Paul for joining us at the conference. | |
| I want to thank Dr. Paul for joining us. | |
| Carol's been a great inspiration to me and just taught me an enormous amount these six years that we've had the Institute, and I'm really grateful that she's here. | |
| I also really want to thank our host committee. | |
| All of you are such generous, wonderful people. | |
| The host committee puts up the money to help us get started. | |
| As you may know, the cost of admission is not the cost of putting on a conference. | |
| And these are wonderful people who step up, get the ball rolling, and they really are responsible for all of us being here. | |
| So I would like to have a little bit of applause for our host committee. | |
| And their names are listed on the back as well. | |
| And I really want to thank our speakers, John Beza, Paul Armentano, Jacob Solom. | |
| These are great champions of liberty, all three of them. | |
| And they are here on their own time. | |
| They're volunteering to share their lifetime of study and learning and understanding and educating. | |
| They're here to share it with us on a voluntary basis, which I think is just wonderful. | |
| So very appreciative of our speakers. | |
| And of course, it would be a pretty boring conference if it wasn't for all of you. | |
| So thank all of you for coming out. | |
| I had a chance to talk to many of you early on, and some of you have come from Montana and all kinds of places far away to come visit with us and to hear this important conference. | |
| So thank all of you for coming out. | |
| It really means a lot to us. | |
| A couple of really quick housekeeping items. | |
| If you've parked in the parking structure, you can get a card, a validation card out in the front so you won't have to pay for your parking, and that's kind of a nice thing. | |
| I did mention the host committee. | |
| One of the advantages of being on the host committee is we have some little private things that we do with them afterward, and the host committee will be joining us for a private lunch afterwards. | |
| So if any of you are interested in maybe a future conference being a host committee member, I think my email is on here and send me an email and we can talk about it. | |
| And finally, save the date, August 24th, storming Washington, D.C. again for the fourth time, I think. | |
| Dr. Paul can't wait to get on that plane and meet his friends at the TSA. | |
| Close friendship. | |
| But we always have a great time, and as many of you who could make it, we'd love to see you there. | |
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Drug War and Foreign Policy
00:02:50
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| I'm not going to give a long talk, and in fact, I don't have any time. | |
| But what you'll hear from the other speakers is very different from what I do because I focus a lot more on foreign policy. | |
| But of course, there is a real nexus between the drug war and foreign policy because our drug war is often used to justify the interventionists' impulse to intervene. | |
| They use that as a justification. | |
| So they establish the fact that there are evil drug dealers overseas that we've got to take care of and take out. | |
| It just happens to be the people that they already want to overthrow. | |
| And so I just have, I literally at random did a search for four examples of this. | |
| And it's just going to, I mean, read like the history books. | |
| Reuters of May 18th, 2018. | |
| Two days before the presidential election, the fateful presidential elections in Venezuela, Reuters reported, Maduro and the number two in his party are accused of drug trade profiteering right before the election. | |
| It's not interference. | |
| So establishing them as drug traffickers the day before the election. | |
| Go back to 2014 in The Guardian. | |
| They quote Matthew Levitt, who they say is a former Treasury official, but actually is with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is a very neoconservative pro-war think tank. | |
| And he talks about Hezbollah has a long history in drug trade for funding. | |
| So there's another one, and that has to do with Hezbollah's actions in Syria. | |
| And in that case, it was actually to help get rid of the real bad guys, Al-Qaeda, who we happen to be funding and arming. | |
| Go back to turn the dial back to March 15th, 2001, The Guardian again. | |
| Milosevic allies linked to drug trafficking. | |
| So notice the pattern. | |
| All the people we want to overthrow are linked to drug trafficking, which we've been programmed to understand because of the drug war. | |
| Aha, that's the thing. | |
| Final one is the Daily Mail. | |
| You've got to do the Daily Mail last because they're always. | |
| Okay, this is about Libya. | |
| Fueled by cocaine, alcohol, cigarettes, and Viagra. | |
| Gaddafi used sex not only as a physical weapon, but as a political tool through which he could exert his power. | |
| Of course, it was all lies. | |
| The whole Viagra story was throwing babies from incubators, you know, the same sort of level. | |
| So all lies, but all using the idea that drugs, drug trafficking, profiteering from drugs is involved. | |
| So there really is a nexus with foreign policy as well. | |
| So with that, I will actually hand it over to my colleague, Adam Dick at the Ron Paul Institute, Senior Fellow, who has been doing this for Dr. Paul for a number of years in his congressional office and now with the Ron Paul Institute. | |