The New Drug War Is Worse Than You Think with Bill Loucks

In this first installment of a two-part conversation, Bill Loucks joins Behind The Thin Blue Line to break down the evolving drug crisis impacting communities across America. A nationally respected subject matter expert in narcotics, transnational criminal organizations, and trafficking investigations, Loucks examines how synthetic opioids, cartel business models, and global trafficking routes have reshaped the threat landscape. The discussion moves from the southwest border to rural backroads, highlighting how modern cartels operate like multinational corporations while adapting to enforcement pressure.

This episode explores how synthetic drugs have changed the risk environment for law enforcement, first responders, and families, and why today’s drug crisis presents challenges unlike anything seen in previous decades.

Episode Highlights

• [02:16] Introduction to Bill Loucks and his background in narcotics and transnational investigations
• [04:36] Why overdose numbers are shifting and how enforcement pressure is redirecting cartel operations
• [07:55] The unseen hazards of synthetic drugs for law enforcement and first responders
• [11:42] How modern cartels operate as sophisticated business enterprises
• [15:59] The cartel research and development model behind heroin and fentanyl expansion
• [19:00] Why rural communities are increasingly targeted by trafficking networks
• [24:27] Venezuela, Colombia, and the geopolitical influence on narcotics trafficking
• [27:47] China’s role in precursor chemicals and the fentanyl pipeline
• [30:59] Why synthetic drugs are more profitable and easier to produce than traditional narcotics
• [36:38] What happens when supply is disrupted and how withdrawal may drive future crime trends
• [42:48] Corruption, cartel violence, and why the United States faces a different threat profile
• [43:59] Smoke shops, synthetic cannabinoids, and the legal gray areas creating enforcement challenges
• [57:17] Why marijuana cases are often strategy-driven and financially motivated
• [59:23] Targeting proceeds through civil seizure and controlled substance tax enforcement

Links & Resources

CDC Drug Overdose Dashboard
https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/

DEA One Pill Can Kill Campaign
https://www.dea.gov/onepill

North Carolina Justice Academy
https://ncja.ncdoj.gov/

Listener Advisory
This episode contains discussions related to drug trafficking, overdose deaths, addiction, cartel violence, and law enforcement operations. Some content may be emotionally intense. Listener discretion is advised.

Connect With the Show
Follow Behind The Thin Blue Line for more in-depth conversations about law enforcement, criminal intelligence, and the real-world challenges facing our communities.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this discussion with Bill Loucks.

Transcript

Bill Loucks  0:00  
That's another way you're going to target these organizations. Is if I take their product, it's one thing, but you start taking the proceeds. You got nothing to operate. This podcast contains real world

Speaker 1  0:13  
accounts and discussions related to law enforcement, military criminal investigations, public safety incidents and violent crime topics may include graphic descriptions, strong language, trauma, deaf and emotionally intense subject matter and may not be suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised,

Mark Bridgeman  0:28  
welcome to the latest edition of Behind the Thin Blue Line Podcast. Today, we're going to be discussing something that's plaguing our communities for decades and decades, but you know, recently, we've had, in the past five years, an uptick in overdose deaths, and most people don't realize, since 2020 according to the CDC, we've lost over 500,000 people to drug overdoses, to put it in perspective, that is more than all the combat related deaths since World War Two. I'm your host, Marc Bridgeman, and this is behind the thin blue line. I've spent more than three decades in law enforcement and criminal intelligence surrogate the both the federal levels and local level, retiring from Fayetteville. PD, after 26 years, my career includes patrol, narcotics, gang investigations, Major Crimes, criminal intelligence, working cases that range from crime organizations, narcotics trafficking, transnational threats impacting both civilian communities and military installations. This podcast is built on four pillars, service, sacrifice, strength and support. All of these pillars are necessary for us to thrive in law enforcement and serve our communities.

Mark Bridgeman  2:03  
Behind the thin blue line exists to bridge the gap between what the public hears, the public perception of law enforcement and actually what happens behind the scenes.

Mark Bridgeman  2:16  
We are going to share experiences through real conversations, the real context, the real people. Our guest today is Bill Lux, nationally respected subject matter, expert in narcotics, transnational criminal organizations and human trafficking investigations. Bill served more than a decade as narcotics and gang detective with Metro Nashville Police Department in Tennessee, where he has authored an impressive over 800 search warrants during that time and participated in the service of more than 1000 search warrants. He has over 17,000 hours of investigative experience. He brings a lot to the table. He's worked in dismantling, disrupting the drug trafficking organizations and complex criminal networks that plague our society. Bill's trained more than 10,000 law enforcement officers and practitioners nationwide on controlled substances, gangs, clandestine laboratories, trafficking trends, and he's also testified in local, state and federal court as an expert witness before his career, Bill served eight years in the United States Army with the elite 82nd Airborne Division. Also even more elite than that, is the 1/60 Special Operations Aviation Regiment known as the Night Stalkers. Bill continues his work in investigation and training into narcotics and human trafficking, including his involvement with the North Carolina Justice Academy, which he's a lead instructor in many of these areas. He brings a rare perspective that spans street level enforcement intelligence analysis and global trafficking trends. Thank you, Bill for being here. We appreciate your continued service to our country, and I want to put a make a shout out to the North Carolina Justice Academy. I am an alum 1987 Academy graduate, and to the North Carolina gang investigators Association, who's sponsoring this podcast. So Bill, I'll turn it over to you. That's very impressive resume. But what are the numbers really mean?

Bill Loucks  4:36  
As far as overdoses, you can kind of see a little bit of decline in what we're seeing out there on the streets. It's not so much that we've, per se, got a handle on it, but we're doing a lot more enforcement activity under a new administration. A lot of new things are actually happening. We're capturing and stopping kind of what comes into the border via. California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. So we're doing a lot of heavy handed enforcement on that, and there's a lot of pressure that's gone on to China, who is been in bed, kind of with the cartels in this aspect of bringing in all the precursors, like anpp, four anpp things are necessary to manufacture fentanyl, which has been our driver of our overdose deaths that have just spiraled out of control. So with all that pressure, we've kind of choked out China a little bit that's kind of moved over to India. China is still a back player, but the Mexican government is kind of stepping in now and taking some more heavy handed enforcement on it, but all we're basically is essentially putting a band aid on a sunken chest wind, because those operations have starting to make the move from places like Mexico and into Canada, where Canadian officials, Royal Canadian Mounted Police are reporting and discussing where they're starting to see an uptake, a rise in fentanyl lab seizures where they didn't have it before, and at the time when you were looking at just the distribution via the Mexican cartel so the transnational criminal Organizations, you could see them in China embedded into it. Now, when all of these labs have been dismantled from the Mexico side, and they've moved into Canada, British Columbia and stuff, you now not only have just Mexican nationals transnational criminal organizations, but you have the Asian criminal organizations who are habitual money launderers within the cartels themselves. You see a lot of outlaw motorcycle gangsters. You see biker gangs that are starting to rear their heads in, a lot of Bulgarian and Russian mobsters that are just coming in, players that have never historically worked together now are showing up on one same location and at same time. Now we're starting to see fentanyl deaths are starting to go down, but we're starting to see the fentanyl seizures coming from the northern part of our country. We're starting to see fentanyl drop from Canada down into the US. So it's a constant cat and mouse game. Yeah, it's

Mark Bridgeman  7:23  
always been like that. So what's different between today's drug pandemic, and I know the numbers are going down, credit it to this administration. But what was the difference between today and in the past, where when we were working drugs. You know, when I was with Fayetteville, I worked open air drug markets and street level drugs and, you know, rising up to, you know, different levels, you know, within those realms, yeah, well,

Bill Loucks  7:55  
today's substances pros, a different risk. Back in I want to say our day, where I'm old enough to say our day, our biggest hazard was getting cut with a broken crack pipe in somebody's pocket. Yes, okay, that was occasionally maybe an open syringe on a needle or something. Now we have all these synthetics and semi synthetics that are out there. So we have our benzene Midas, all opioids, which are things that are stronger than fentanyl, and these are things that generally end in the term NIDA scene, like isotonidosine, proteocene metonidosene. These are things that are 20 to up to 100 times stronger than fentanyl itself. That is a synthetic variation, and it's harder to kind of get a hold of that, because a lot of that goes male born versus vehicle borne or ship born. Okay, then we start to see our new novelty, psychoactive substances coming in, like our medemadine and xylazine, these are things that are Narcan resistant. So our The biggest difference is our big hazard back then was maybe you got cut with a broken crack pipe in somebody's pocket. You may have inadvertently walked into an old P 2p phenotype propanone lab, an anhydrous ammonia lab, and had some exposure. Now you just responding to the actual location, serving a search warrant, arresting a person serving search in a vehicle, can cause you to go into respiratory duress from these substances. So that's this is an unseen hazard that goes easily airborne. You don't see it, you don't smell it, until all of a sudden, bam, you fall down and you're in respiratory to rest, and you don't know what's happening until all of a sudden you wake up. And you're either laying on your back and somebody's got Narcan or Naloxone jammed in your nose, or you're sitting in the back of an ambulance going and.

Mark Bridgeman  10:00  
Those are Narcan and Naloxone are the antidotes for these Yes. Subs, yes, yeah, that's the antagonistic that'll bring you out of that. It'll coat those mu your opioid uptake receptors to stop sending that. And this just isn't a law enforcement threat. This a threat to anybody responding fire EMS. You know any, anybody responding to a call that has to go into somebody else's environment could be victimized by these airborne drugs?

Bill Loucks  10:32  
Because we Yes, and it's it goes beyond just us in first responders. So you got to think, too, if it's a parent, if you're a parent who has a child that has fallen to this level of addiction, you as a parent trying to deal with the struggle, also face that I have a threat inside of my house dealing with this so members of the community, school teachers, this is a national threat, and it's almost like the perfect weapon to have used against a country because of the level of addiction that it creates.

Mark Bridgeman  11:09  
Yep, very good explanation. So let's get into, you know, the the reality of cartels. You know, how are the MARC modern cartels different than what we've seen on TV in the past, or in movies, you know, with Scarface you know, people think that, and I know that movies and TV shows don't represent what's actually going on, but kind of explain, you know, how the cartels operate in today's environment,

Bill Loucks  11:42  
they try to hide in plain sight. That's probably the best way to look at it. In the old days, when you look back at people like Chapo and you know, predecessors to that old Colombian cartel drug lords, they they in Mexican drug lords, they've basically everything was about persona. They had the most everything. They had, the best cars, the biggest ranches, the best horses, the most people around them, the most guns, the just the largest luxurious houses. Over a period of time, people figure out, you know what? This is kind of sending out some signals. And it's very hard for other national governments to kind of hide that when that happens. So the cartels now are kind of basically hiding in plain sight. Yes, you still have your younger factions out there, the younger kids who want to be traditionally out there and show Hey, I'm chipito or this particular faction itself. Look at my truck. Look at my gun, look at my boots. Look at my shoes, saying that you would see with gangsters and stuff. But today they're kind of hiding in plain sight, because this is, if you think about it, from the it doesn't make sense to be advertising. Hey, cartel kind of come look at me, because then the police were inherently going to dive into their business. I think over a period of time, they've got a little bit more smart and with the use of technology, they figured out they don't have to be as hands on, right? There are so many money transfers that happen in a non physical way, and it's just, it's not even bank transfer. It's a Venmo, it's a PayPal, it's a cash app, it's a Zelle transfer of 5000 here, 4000 here, 3000 here, 500 here, 1500 here. And they just figure out they're riding down the road. They have figured this out like most of our gangsters have at this point in time, it's easier to ride with nothing in the car and everything be behind that phone, that app, or something like that. They stay a little bit more well hidden. So that's kind of another way they hide in plain sight.

Mark Bridgeman  13:54  
So basically, they're operating as a business, absolutely

Bill Loucks  13:59  
100% business module, you got to think just I think in 2024 I have to look at the overall numbers that I got, and I think it was number five from border patrol, who had come in, had a conference for the International Narcotics interdiction Association in Chicago last year, and it was Something like $62 billion is what the cartels made in 2024 alone, just off of human trafficking and smuggling. That's not their main player, which is the controlled substances. So it's very much a business, and that business is large cartels. Globally, it's estimated that they employ somewhere about almost 250,000 people. So a lot of people get the perception they're like, why don't we just go in and shut these cartels down? You'll destabilize nations. Because some of these nations, it is already so ingrained, and this has gone on so long, vice. Human Nature, with people are naturally going to be addicted to something at some point in time when you get into the controlled substance thing, the cartels are controlling that. So like the Mexican government, I'm going to tell you, and it's been proven by our own federal government, the Mexican government thrives off of the sale of controlled substance via what they make just off of the US, and it's the US. We are the largest consumer of controlled substances in the world. Europe just falls right behind us. So we are the biggest customer. So from a business perspective, it's, it's, it's the number one licit money generator there is in the

Mark Bridgeman  15:39  
world now, with the business model that they have, if you would, how sophisticated are these guys? You know, are they operating at the same level they do they have Intel? Do they have sources? You know, you know, how do these guys operate? The criminal sophistication, end of it.

Bill Loucks  15:59  
Just like any good business, coke, Apple, IBM, they have various people doing various jobs. So we'll give you an example what this looks like from the just their business aspect. They have people doing research development, you know. And that we talk, I talk a little bit about that we get into, getting into how the fentanyl kind of piece got here, but research and development people figured out via the cartels that we had this desire for opioids, and we got that from the pill mill epidemic, okay, and floor pill mills kind of just opened that to wide up. And then once we started realizing that was a problem, people all had that addiction fed to things like OxyContin, oxycodone and stuff, but we choked out their way to get it, via doctor shopping. We put in a lot of mechanisms like controlled substance reporting systems. Some states call them controlled substance monitoring databases, and it basically kept people from going to seeing five to six, seven doctors a day. But the cartels were hearing the request on their side of the border for these pills because we had already had that addiction. The research development people figured out and said, hey, you know we can do we can put heroin into place, heroin is going to be two times stronger than, like, the actual prescription pill itself. We can derive all the raw opium that we're going to need from places like Pakistan, Southeast Asia, and put this into place, it's two times stronger, and we'll sell it for nationwide. I think the initial pricing looked like it was about $70 a gram. And from a business perspective, it took off because it drove us into the heroin addiction. And because the heroin addiction took off, cartels said, how can we make this better? And the research development people say we can bring fencing onto place. And we learned that straight from previous stops from like, the guy out the Moapa tribal reservation who debriefed the former money man from Sinaloa Cartel, who got exactly this word for word, like I'm talking about this is how he's described it to me, via the cartel. So that's just showing one business. And they have people that delve in technology. They have people that Delve their full time job is investing money, finding houses, stash houses, where you're going to put the dope, where you're going to put the money. People that just do just the cars, just put the people in the course, everybody has specific jobs,

Mark Bridgeman  18:43  
and they also do market analysis. They just don't plant their flag in any town USA. They know what they're getting into when they go there. And how do they select their markets? You know, a lot, a lot of them are going to be these rural areas.

Bill Loucks  19:00  
Some of them are rural areas. You know, a lot of concept. It's got to get from point A to point B first, okay? So it's got to have some accessible framework, via infrastructure. So are roads, okay? So you got to have something close enough to an interstate. Because I think right now, the estimate is probably about 91% of all controlled substances come in that are coming in via through Mexico or coming in through California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas. That means it's got to hit 4077, 8595 all these roadways and stuff. But when they get into particular areas, they're looking to where they can hide into plain sight. Yes, they like the big cities. They like the atlantas, they like the Chicagos. But when you look at big cities like the Atlanta, the Chicago, the Charlotte, there's a lot of areas where they go paint a lot of room here. Okay, we're over top of each other here. And then they. Are investing and looking into the rural areas. And when you start looking at rural areas, a lot of people are like, Well, why would you do that? And you got to think, how many cops literally are logistically, how many law enforcement officers are running around in some of these country areas? No, not that. Not a lot of and when you look at them, when, when you look at that landscape, too, they can hide in plain sight. So they'll get in trailer parks, where it's like a huge Hispanic population, and most everybody is working in construction, landscaping, you know, they're leaving in big work trucks, and there's eight to 12 to 15 people living in a trailer and stuff like that. And you know, there is a lot of perception. A lot of people are like, well, they're extreme. Exchanging tons of dope on job sites and that that's not really how it's actually happening. I could say I've been part of more than within Nashville Police Department. We were a large agency about 1500 officers and working drugs and gangs for probably 12 plus years of my career there, I think we bought off a construction site one time, yeah, one time. Every wire investigation we were dealing never took us into that. It took us into car dealerships. It took us into storage units, houses, rural areas, big city complexes and stuff like that. So yeah, and then you use language barrier. It is very hard, and that's another thing you get into country areas. As I crack jokes when I go to places, because obviously I'm originally from Pontiac, Michigan, but I've been in the south since 94 so I've developed a pretty weird southern accent. And I go to places, and everybody's like, where are you from, son? And I'm like, Bonnie and Michigan. They're like, what? And then, you know, so I'm getting to some of these rural areas. I'm like, how many you guys in here? How many country cops actually speak in language? Raise your hand if you speak Spanish. If I, if I, every 100 cops I talk to, I'll get maybe three that raise their hand. Then I'll start asking about other dialects. How many speak Mandarin, fulan, or some Asian dialect, some other languages where the cartels are working with these other groups and stuff, and I'm finding I don't even get 1% of these individuals. So it's it's kind of very hard, and it becomes intimidating for somebody in a rural area to stop somebody, and you're the only person that speaks English, and there's maybe three of us sitting there speaking English, and there's seven dudes who speak Spanish. We're like, we're on our phones, yep, trying to do some translator thing. At same time, there may be probably three or five kilos sitting in a spare tire somewhere embedded in that car, you know, could be up in the barn or something like that where, or a

Mark Bridgeman  22:50  
hidden compartment, you know, and that's a whole nother specialty

Bill Loucks  22:55  
in and of that is a unique specialty that is, that's, you have to be almost like an engineer, some of those interdiction guys, I can't fat like their mind. They'll sit in the car and they'll start, they'll turn the radio station, like 96.3 turn the left, blink around, tap the brakes twice, and then turn the air conditioner on, and you'll hear like something popping. You hear like an actuator moving. I'm like, how did you figure that out? And they're like, I could see the sequence of events on the panel. And I'm like, okay, yeah, all right, okay, so well beyond mine,

Mark Bridgeman  23:30  
yeah, that's beyond my expertise. Well, you know, talk a little bit about current events, you know, you know Venezuela. And by the time this airs, this may be old news, you know, but you know, we're taping on the sixth of January, it's still fresh in our minds about Venezuela, and why does that even matter in the whole drug trade? Now, this is a little geopolitical, you know, it's just kind of like most people working at the street level type stuff, they really care less. I mean, they may care, but, you know, it doesn't directly impact them or it indirectly impacts them. So why does Venezuela and Colombia and these other state sponsored producers of narcotics really matter to to our country?

Bill Loucks  24:27  
Well, everything has to start somewhere. Okay? You want to say, Where does our bulk of cocaine come from? Cocaine hydrochloride, that's what you're going to end up snorting. Colombia, Mexico right now, Mexico is kind of in a with the cartels. It's it's a state of chaos where you used to look there would be like 12 to maybe 16, with some of your bigger players, cjng, Sinaloa, Juarez and stuff. Now that's. Split down about six different factions, okay? And we've taken some we've got Chapo, we've got Maya, we've got Chapo son. We've taken big people out of the game, but we still haven't touched places like Colombia, which is one of our biggest, largest cocaine producers, where it originates from the coca leaf itself. Why does Venezuela matter? Because Venezuela is, if you look at it from the drug trafficking route in, in the scheme of, hey, Mexico has so much going on right now that Maduro is kind of rearing his head to be Venezuelan Chapo at this point in time, and because they have that tight connection within Colombia itself, it made sense to stop that it was a major trafficking route, and that is what this current administration is doing, is stopping the flow as much as possible, that that was a large place that needed to be dealt with. A lot of people are like, Oh, we're going after the oil reserves and stuff. I couldn't tell you the back story, but from a business perspective, if I had to sit down and be the commander in chief and looking at this and say, what is going to be the big drug problem here, now that we've kind of got a little bit of hold on the Mexico side, what's our next problem besides Colombia and it's Venezuela, we had already had indictments on him. Previous administration, Biden administration, I think, put out a large bounty on him also. So it was time to go on ahead and pop into that, because he was, you could see his rise, just even the way he was talking. It's like, almost like Pablo Escobar just challenging a superpower government. You want me? Come get me. You're not going to do a thing to me. Yeah? Well, okay, surprise,

Mark Bridgeman  27:02  
yeah, well, you know. And delta, you know, and your old unit, you know, 1/60 soar, you know that they Delta doesn't go any place without those guys.

Bill Loucks  27:13  
You got to have a glorified tax service to get you. But they are the best of the best.

Mark Bridgeman  27:20  
Okay, you know. And within Venezuela, you have Russian assets, you have Chinese assets, you have Iranian assets, Cuban assets. It kind of leads into our next segment about China. You know, what role does China have in this whole pandemic we've experienced over the past half decade of the Fentanyl crisis.

Bill Loucks  27:47  
They're the main producer of the precursor it's necessary to manufacture fentanyl, so they are the driver of it. Okay, for a lot of people, a lot of people, a lot of people don't understand. And if I put it back to the old head cops when we were out chasing like meth labs, one pot meth labs. To make that one pot meth, you had to have that pseudo federal and, or federal, because all you are doing throughout that process is you're just reducing that pseudo federal and, or federal by one oxygen molecule to become cement. Okay? So your pseudo federal interferon is your necessary component. You got to have that. So within the fentanyl world, you're going to have to have that. NPP, anpp, four dash, an PP, and I'm not a chemist, so I can't break it down like that. Yeah, that's, those are, those are the necessary components, and they are the ones that were pushing that in to Mexico, into a Chinese owned port. So that's a lot of things. A lot of individuals did not understand that China had a Chinese government controlled port into Mexico that was thoroughly protected, that all of those precursor chemicals went into and then from there it was moved over to the transnational criminal organizations, or cartels, who were then converting it into fentanyl in various forms, from pills, powders, liquid forms, and pushing that poison here. So it had to start with China. If you look at it again, this is almost like the perfect weapon. You get a nation fed by addiction, by this stuff, it's killing like half a million people. And I think in 2021, I think was one of our peak years, like little over 120 some 1000 people United States died from that, and it wasn't just users. That's the bad thing. It's never just a user. There's also children that crawling along the floor where this stuff is at, where parent was previously using, and they come into contact with that it's a mom or dad that found their son, daughter, Henri. Responsive. It's a husband that found his wife, a wife found her husband unresponsive. You know, they were dealing with this, and they become exposed to it, but so China made the bulk of the money. If you look at it from the business perspective, nothing had captured the level of addiction as fentanyl had done historically, and China was the main producer of what was necessary to make it

Mark Bridgeman  30:25  
and the equipment that goes with it, the pill presses, everything needed to set up an operation that China was supplying this equipment to the cartels Mexico and other countries as well, I guess, Venezuela. So how is it easier or more difficult, to make a synthetic drug versus the old fashioned opium, you know, going through, you know, the process for heroin? Is it faster? Is it more efficient? Is it more profitable?

Bill Loucks  30:59  
It's well, more profitable profits from the synthetics, things like our benzene mitosis, opioids and our novelty psychoactive substances, again, like xylocene, Medina, Medine and stuff, those have already exceeded. Even though they're new, we've already seen the acceleration, where they've exceeded the profits what we saw out there by fentanyl. These are technologically advanced, something you can do either in a big pharmaceutical grade lab, or somebody can take a bunch of powders that they get off the internet, make themselves. So in most ways, it's a simpler process, because a lot of IT processes don't even take liquids. You know, there was in in the old one pot meth labs. You could mess it up pretty bad. Okay, if you actually using water, if you're brave enough to use water, if you're outside on a rainy day, some sweat gets into it that creates that mess around and find out situation where the fire department's in there. Down here, it's just a few chemicals mixed. It's some of these chemicals already pre mixed. So it's a lot easier to produce the profits, because you're talking about like the average user, I want to say, is probably of meth. Some users are using up to a gram to a gram and a half a day of crystal methamphetamine with high level of purity, okay, with a standard dosage unit. And I'm coming from the drug aspect, not the DRE so a drug recognition expert, dosage unit differs from what a drug cop when we're interviewing drug users, yeah, how much you use at a time? And we're finding that, you know, a lot of the fentanyl users, we've heard some of them say I would use, like, 1/10 of a gram at a time. Or someone would say I would just try to take a pencil eraser out of a pencil and just put enough just to coat the top of the pencil. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's an exact science. Yeah. You know, with it comes down to synthetics. We're talking about stuff that it it, you can get it down to the microgram dosage unit, and that is what physicians would use to put you down for like anesthesia for surgeries and stuff like that. So very, very small particle amounts is what it takes for a user to get high. So the United States can outlaw this stuff all day long, you know, and make it illegal, but on the world stage, there's really no regulatory body that says a nation can't produce this correct I think NATO tries to step in and do a few things, but that's all I can say on that, until you look at it from that aspect of taking certain things out, because I don't know where in the grand scheme of things, all the precursors would go into for like things like orxylacene or medenumidine or something like that, and those are animal sedatives. That's something that the veterinarian would use to actually put somebody down, but it's well within the US pipeline, and we have multiple seizures of it here, and it's been at our labs, all of the labs here. And when we talk about something just as simple as xylazine, I want to say we're a little bit behind the curve on it, because xylazine is you can it's up to about 60 to 80 times stronger than fentanyl right now in North Carolina, I think that is still just a watch substance, so I theoretically can run around with a couple kilos of that. What are you going to charge me with on the state side? Yeah, really, unless you're taking. Me federal now, if I got a couple kilos, I'm sure a federal prosecutor is going to say, Bring him to me. I can understand that. But right now, we're, we're so far behind. We've seen xylocene in our pipeline, now in our supply, all the way back to like 2010, or 11. We should already have it. Every state already knocked off somewhere, at least a schedule, because they're not. It's not for use here in the United States, for veterinarian use. I think Mexico, one of their country is the only two countries that allow it. We could still at least lock it down to at least a schedule two here. So, yeah,

Mark Bridgeman  35:44  
so that's part of the reason why these networks are so difficult to disrupt, you know, the the availability, you know, the basically non regulatory type precursors to make this type of narcotic. Yeah, we touched on it earlier. We're talking about cartels to the corner. You know, people you know often think that cartels, you know, that they're 1000 miles away. That'll impact my life. So now that the southwest border is effectively mitigated. You know, they've done a great job. They continue doing a great job. What's next? You know, what's the they're still going to operate. These cartels are still going to operate. They're not going to stop making money. What is their next phase, in your opinion?

Bill Loucks  36:38  
And the next phase, in my opinion, we have to start looking at the best way is to how to work with what we're what we're taking out of supply. Because right now we are, we are doing some damage to the controlled substance flow into the US that is immediately impaired. Okay, you could see that nationally. You can see that in large seizure booms from the borders and stuff like that. But we have to look at it from the the aspect of now that we're taking this away and making it harder for our users, our people that have substance use disorder, I mean, our true levels of addiction. What is the next step? We have to automatically start looking at that. And there is nothing cheap when it comes to rehabilitative measures, so we have to look at how we can effectively treat something that really hasn't been effectively gotten hold of before, because there was so much availability of that we have to be prepared for the outcome of this, because people that can't get that substance that their body desires, they're going to start looking at alternate means. They're they're going to, they're going to start developing a lot of mental health issues. Again, we're not talking about something cheap. So essentially, by us choking out right now the supply we have to there's no trickle down. Just turn the faucet. I've heard some experts, some criminal justice experts, sit down and say, we just need to dial that down, little by little. And I'm like, No, it's, it's time. It's time to take this down. But we have to be prepared for, man, if, if a fentanyl user, an opioid addict, a cocaine user, a meth addict, cannot get that substance, what is going to be going on? You're going to have a huge level of psychosis going on, a lot of mental instabilities, lot of aggression. So we have to be prepared there will be an uptake in crime, because they're going to be looking for it, and they may target you just because of the fact that they don't think you're a dealer, but in their mind, they're off because they don't have the substance. They're going through withdrawal symptoms. We're going to see an influx of we're already starting to see it in like emergency rooms and Medical Necessities for intervention when somebody goes into withdrawal, like, for example, of xylazine, for some reason, xylazine is putting people into a significant high withdrawal level. Like, as soon as it comes out of their system, it is almost they almost have to have medical intervention for the level of withdrawal that they're seeing at the time. So I think we have to start looking at this now and start working on that while we've taken the root cause away outside of that for us, for law enforcement, we have to account for this in our investigations. You got to think back is as drug cops, if I'm a supervisor a drug unit, I have to look at the market drug prices, because historically, you know, and I know, if we go into an undercover deal and we're overpaying for drugs, we're going to look down to working in of a pistol. Yeah, and that's, that's, that's not a fun I'm going to give that. One out of five stars. Nothing good about that. Okay, when we underpay for that controlled substance and that undercover buy, we're buying brown sugar, powdered sugar, flour, baking soda or something like that. So as we choke down this level of supply, obviously the band goes up, and so do the prices. So we're already starting to see the skyrocketing prices. So whereas we used to may have been out on the street purchasing maybe a gram of cocaine, and our going rate was 80 to $100 I have to count as a supervisor that could potentially be $175 right now. Okay, so I have to account for that is I'm bringing in my new guys and gals, my new detectives, coming in, training them, letting them know, and that has a trickle up effect, because that money's got to come from somewhere. So that's got to go from a council. Some accounts got to get approved, confidential funds. So we have to look at this overall. So there's several approaches from the law enforcement side. We're we're we're going to be doing some extra work. Crime will go up, because we're going to have a lot of people who are outside of their normal substance use mind. And then we're going to have individuals that are just going straight into a level of withdrawal, mental just fatigue, like they're just, they're seeking something that they can't find, and it's going to drive them to drastic measures to and that's going to create some new level of crime. So we have to be able to account for that in the upcoming future. We don't say, Oh, that'll happen two years from now. That's that's already currently going.

Mark Bridgeman  41:37  
It's already here, yes, yeah. And then then the associated violence that goes along with the drug trade, you know. And that's always, you know, been a given, you know, when, when I was working as patrol officer, I had in Fayetteville, I had the downtown area, smallest geographic area, but the most violent crime, and most drug trade and human trafficking and all the ancillary crimes that go along with it. And it wasn't unusual to see, you know, somebody shot, stabbed, you know, because of, you know, the drug trade, yeah, you know. And that's one thing that the cartels going back a little bit, they're very good with their levels of violence, you know. And people, a lot of times, don't understand that we're very blessed here in the United States versus in Mexico, in the violent crime that's occurred on behest of the cartels in Mexico, you know, it's just we don't see bodies hung from bridges. We don't see beheadings, correct?

Bill Loucks  42:48  
That doesn't just stay with the cartels, because there is, we're talking billions and billions, the trillions of dollars that this industry makes meaning the drug business makes it breeds corruption. So you see whole governments involved in this, local police, state police, Federal Police, and other countries and stuff, and a lot of people just they don't understand the fact that you don't see that. Yes, we've had corruption within police work and stuff like that, but we are no nowhere near what you would see in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, or something like that, where that economy thrives off of just that actual product that is getting produced there, and it's going To be sold as illicit controlled substance here, yeah,

Mark Bridgeman  43:43  
yeah, and that gets into another area, and this is kind of hidden in plain sight. You know, we're talking about the vape shops, the smoke shops. You know how dangerous synthetic drugs are being openly sold with no age restriction.

Bill Loucks  43:59  
I want to say, when it comes to vape and smoke shops, we have padlocked a lot of those in Nashville, Tennessee. And as I look and talk to other officers that are continuously doing investigations into these, number one, there's always a narco terrorism piece to this. This money is going somewhere into a Hawala network, whether it's a black wall or white Hawala. Black koala is what we're going to what's a Walla network is, is in a formal money remittance center, like here we have banks, right? Okay? And we have money transfer systems like sell PayPal, Venmo, Cash App. In other countries, you don't have banks and you don't have technology like we do, so it is word of mouth, so I may send my money from here that I make back to my family somewhere in Uzbekistan, okay, and it's going to go through. To a Hawala network. So somebody makes a call from here. It basically goes to that country, and this guy here, voucher says, Bill gave me money here. I'm going to give that money back to you there, and it goes to my family member there in Uzbekistan. Okay, that is, if I'm sending it legitimately. That is called the white Hawala network. Okay, we saw this throughout Afghanistan, Iraq and a few other places where you would just see people sitting on piles of money in a village somewhere. Now the black koala network is what feeds terrorism. Okay, like it was proven. The events of 911 were funded behind the coupon stuff, but a lot of it was a major portion of it was drug paraphernalia coming out of the bodegas and stuff around that area. And if you look at every single smoke shop, it's got to tie into some country that we have, either as a suspected terrorist laden country, or it is just straight up, hey, you can't even travel there, type situation. So all of that money get a lot of that money gets funneled back into those smoke shops. The biggest thing we tell with smoke shops, you can make tons. There's a lot of good investigations these smoke shops. We just got to go about them in little bit smarter way. This year for 2026 there's actually a mandatory in service lesson plan. It's a four hour block called illegal businesses. And we identify and talk about a lot about the smoke shops, because one thing we have been finding there is a lot of cops getting in trouble because they're not understanding when they're going into shutting down a smoke shop that they're going after the green product, green leafy plant material, right? We think is weed in there, and it's listed as CBD, Delta eight, delta 10, THC, oh, THC, a, THC, O, thcp. And that is such a hot topic right now that even the UNC School of Law in one Phil Dix and one of his blogs talks about that some of those formulations, some of the like the extraction processes, are actually hemp, legally hemp. So a lot of cops are getting jammed up because we're actually shutting these places down on the product versus let's take a look at the other products in there and start to articulate the proximity. Why would a smoke shop sell a set of digital scales Correct? Why would you also have that set of digital scales next to a couple boxes of fold over sandwich bags that are sitting next to canisters of nitrous oxide? So we talk about that and address that in there, but the smoke shops, when you talk about the synthetics, there's no FDA oversight. There's no nothing in it. So it, it creates. People are making some of these extractions of what they think is weed and the kids getting a hold of something, and it may truly be delta eight or delta 10. All of these products will get you high, but there's, there's so much argument in between, when they became a downward product of in an extraction process, is it actually hemp? If it starts off as hemp, and right now it's testing at a high percentage, but it started off as from the actual hemp plant on a driveway basis point 3% or less of THC concentration, it's basically still hemp. That's where a lot of these kids end up in emergency rooms. Cops are doing the right thing. We're going in and shutting this piss down. We're like, Hey, you're selling to this CBD to a 12 year old kid. But unfortunately, in the state of North Carolina, there is no age for possession andor sales. Now, some really good attorneys, and I, and I'll actually give the guy's name, Rod kite. He is a really good attorney out of Asheville. He's actually been in front of DEA, North Carolina Department of Agriculture. He's been in front of FDA, big names talking about weed, the whole hemp stuff. And as I've talked to him and asked him about this, he said he advises his clients don't sell. I tell my clients, do not sell this product to anybody under the age of 21 you will see police less when you treat it like it is an alcohol related product. The other thing is, there's no specialized licenses to sell that if I'm a business, I gotta have a business license. But that makes it a unique situation. But there's a way to look at smoke shops, because I've never seen a smoke shop that is not seedy in nature. There's CIGAR BARS. CIGAR BARS absolutely different than like the smoke shops. You got the big neon lights. A big blowy thing. It's got kratom written all over there. People are hanging out in the parking lot, stuff like that, but they if you look at every single one, I challenge anybody to show me one of them that does not have a narco terrorism tie somewhere, that's not feeding back financially into another country.

Mark Bridgeman  50:20  
So community leaders, not necessarily law enforcement, and I'm quite sure law enforcement is uneducated to a certain extent as to these chemicals, these what's being sold in these vape shops, smoke shops. But do the community leaders actually understand what's being sold, in your opinion, in these smoke shops and how harmful it is. And they then, a lot of times, they could pass a city or a county ordinance, waiting for the state to come up with some type of regulatory or law that pertains to these types of dangerous substances being sold to our miners.

Bill Loucks  50:59  
They should be able to. I mean, at this point in time, everybody should understand that there's some uniqueness to this, whether or not they've opened up their eyes to understand the actual dangers themselves. But if you look at a lot of these products, like CBD is sitting on the shelf at a smoke shop, but CBD is also sitting in a lotion for sale at Walmart. Yeah. Okay, so product labeling, there's a whole lot that goes in to this. It's the best way to explain. It's probably the second most confusing world behind DC out there, if anybody figures that one out. But it's extremely confusing, and it changes. It's everything is a technological advancement. This is extraction process, if you think back to the 70s when sense Amelia weed, the seedless formulation, was coming in. And then hydroponics, nobody ever thought about the extraction process and converting this into tinctures or oils. A few people were doing it, but not like in the lab setting now, converting it into distillates, crude distillate isolates, powders, putting into lotions, nasal sprays, stuff. It's a continuously changing world, and it's, it's, it's gonna get a little bit more cloudy. Once it does get removed, it won't get removed, it'll get rescheduled federally, and that'll allow for some medical applications. But out here, what we see in the world right now, once it turned into hemp, and the bad guys and gals got their hands into it, ie our bad actors with smoke shops and people trying to, oh, this is not really marijuana. This is actually hemp. And they figured out, Hey, we could figure out that 150 plants that you got there is actually not hemp because you're not licensed to grow it, right, you know? So this creates a nightmare for prosecutors. It's extremely difficult for them. I have to sit down, as I sit down, and explain this, because the benefit of my job, and that's kind of what I like getting to do here at the Justice Academy, is I not only teach here within North Carolina, but I get a lot of vested interest from like the High Intensity Drug trafficking area centers the hideas, or federal counter drugs will ask me to come in and train, and I'll be able to have other prosecutors, and I'll have federal prosecutors sitting in there. And as I'm explaining, this whole hemp process, the extraction, the downward products, I get this look, yeah, they and they just, they're they check out, and they're like, I don't understand it. And I'm like, it's very hard to understand. The only reason I understand is because I've went through numerous, numerous courses. We saw this in Nashville before I was about to leave. We were set up at one point time. But as I was about to retire, CBD just started evolving and started coming onto the shelves into my DAs office, my agency, took an inherent interest in it, and I was set to padlock 66 businesses throughout Nashville, Davidson County looking at it now, I'm glad I didn't, because later on, that turned into a different situation where turned into a larger lawsuit, because there's such a unique argument about it. And that was my thing with my Das. I was like, right now, yeah, this is testing hot, but this started off as a hemp plant, and through the downward product, through the extraction process, it is going to come up hot. But because it started here, by definition, this is weed. They're like, No, we'll make that argument. Glad I kind of stepped away from that, because in that lawsuit later on, the chief of the Sheriff of the town of and. The District Attorney's office, they were told you are now civilly liable. How many times do you see a prosecutor's office get yanked into then in the actual courts, federal courts? Yes, no, you're in it money wise now, wow. And that just it dialed down to 13. I was at 66 when we we were looking at it. So it is very it is very challenging. So for prosecutors, it's very hard to explain. It would take a prosecutor a good if I could sit them down through two good training courses and give them two solid weeks, two solid weeks, they would be very aggressive, and I want to say they would be hell on wheels, prosecution wise, when it came to that, because they would understand it, because it's a two week process. But if you give me about 70 hours of actual classroom learning, online stuff, they could be some really good rock stars. And now there are some prosecutors out there. Nashville had a few. There's several on the federal side that understand weed down to a science like they've actually went through cannabis training University and several other schools and actually got certifications. They can take it from seed to soil, down seed to point of sale, bar coding, even down to the nutrients and pH levels. And I sit down and look at them and giggle, and I'm like, I think I know what you're going to do after you retire. Well, you

Mark Bridgeman  56:27  
know, it brings up a good point, because you look at the these cases, and a lot of the cannabis marijuana type cases are going to be misdemeanor type cases, and for a local prosecutor's office, they would have to bring in expert testimony, you know, labs, you know, I don't know if the North Carolina SBI labs, they're always backlogged. You know, they have various labs around the state that a lot of these labs are being civilianized. Now, you know, which is a good thing. You know, advances the prosecution faster. But at the same time, looking at the economy of courts, you know, why are they going to invest this much money to prosecute a misdemeanor?

Bill Loucks  57:17  
Yeah, when it comes to marijuana investigations, and this is how I've always put it. If I'm a supervisor and you're coming to me and you want to start a weed investigation, I have to look at it from a manager, okay, I have confidential funds. I've only got so many, so much confidential funds available to me every month before I have to re up. So I have to look at, what are we going to do in this okay? Is this marijuana tied to maybe a street gang is out there hustling a couple pounds, or something like that, and a street gang may have some guns, those guns that are inside of that house, so we could potentially get in via that route of investigation, may be involved in a homicide, or is this something that we're looking at financially? And if you looked at a marijuana investigation from the financials, it would make sense, because the money that comes out of that is pretty significant. Weed is, yeah, weed is kind of cheap, but there is a lot of money in weed seizures. And I have never when somebody from California, the big weed states, have called and said, Hey, can you look at something for us? It's related to weed. We can't really touch it. As soon as I hear that and they're calling me, I'm like, Oh yeah, we're on it. So if you come to me as my investigator and say, Hey, boss, I want to do a weed deal, I'm like, Okay, let's talk about it. Because I know prosecution wise, what is a pound going to bring in the court system? Very minimal. I know of das in this area that have told their investigators, if it is less than 50 pounds, do not bring it to my office. And I'm like, okay, that's, that's, that's a lot of weed. Yeah, that's, that's a lot of weed for bail. That's, that's, that's, that's more than a user amount, right there, yeah, you know. And their guidance is, just sees it, put it in the property and stuff. But if you come to me as the investigator, and you start showing me the financial trails, and I can see the benefit for the seizures, aside from the criminal case, yes, we will look at it, because that's another way you're going to target these organizations. Is if I take their product, that's one thing, but you start taking the proceeds. You got nothing to operate.

Mark Bridgeman  59:23  
That's where it hits them. The hardest North Carolina has the North Carolina Controlled Substance Abuse Act, where, if a law enforcement officer seizes, you know, an illicit substance the citizen. It's a civil thing. Through the North Carolina Department of Revenue, they can levy a fine based on the amount. Yes, you know, and 75% of those fines go back to the agency that seized it, state or local. Yes, you know.

Bill Loucks  59:59  
So. So that's a powerful thing.

Mark Bridgeman  1:00:02  
Oh, absolutely. That is, you know, absolutely powerful. I've been on a number of ops providing security for the North Carolina Department of Revenue when they're paying visits to collect the

Bill Loucks  1:00:19  
monies that are owed to the state. You know, it's pretty effective, especially when they pull up in U hauls and rider trucks and absolutely, you just kind of giggle. You're like, Yeah, wow. And they're like, this dude ain't had a job 15 years. Y'all seized a bunch of dope out of him. He's got nobody preside This is not mama's house and stuff like that. And, yep, you know. And when they leave, they empty the house, and they'll leave a mattress, and they're like, he doesn't need that $5,000 couch that he actually does not have a job. Yes, actually buy that $5,000 couch? Yeah, we can leave him the mattress because you got to leave.

Mark Bridgeman  1:00:55  
Yeah, that's and I would encourage other states to follow suit with that, you know, and it's stood, you know? I mean, it's a civil thing, and it's very effective. It is, you know, and it's a good way to take the proceeds of the drug trade, but bring it back into local law enforcement, where they can use it for equipment, training, that, that type of stuff, because local law enforcement, you know, budgets and state as well. They're, you know, they're always operating on a very thin line.

Bill Loucks  1:01:33  
I've never heard a boss at an agency go, we're fully funded. Don't worry about

Mark Bridgeman  1:01:38  
this. Yeah, that's Yes, exactly.

Unknown Speaker  1:01:40  
Next time on behind the thin blue line,

Bill Loucks  1:01:42  
somebody kicked in my shed, took my weed eater. Why did a husband beat a spouse? Was he on a meth rage? Why did that person pass out while they were driving and hit that telephone pole? And if you think about it, how many calls for service have a tie into controlled substances

Speaker 2  1:02:02  
you an

Buzz Burbank  1:02:08  
ironic media production. Visit us at I R O N, I C, K, media.com you.

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