First episode, not even five minutes in, LEO says "If I've prevented just one person from smoking a bowl, getting behind the wheel and killing a minivan full of kids, I've done my job".
/facepalm like a mother fucker
Yeah, I heard that - it included his being willing to shoot, AND kill lawbreakers, parade around in paramilitary garb and acoutriments, spend hundreds of thousands on overflights and sophisticated detection equipment. If he really wanted to save a life, he might consider donating the salaries of all those highly paid interdiction officers who get hazardous duty pay each time they walk into the forest PLUS the choper fuel to Saint Judes - odds are he will be saving dozens of children's lives - but it is the other thing he said that got me.
"If we can keep just one person from picking up a pipe and going on to harder drugs...." or something along that line. Of course it is highly probable that he and his unit stop by the local watering hole after a hard day of uprooting the work of mostly honest craftsmen and nurturing farmers. As likely- many of them climb into their SUVs and take those winding two lane roads back to their homes.
What a load of rot - I'd love to confront some of them.
I did have a chance once - I may have told this story before. I was involved in a church group that traveled deep into Mexico to assist in building a school and low income habitat.
Two of the proctors smelled funny (some of us who have been in the trade long enough can smell authority). I asked one of them (FBI or DEA?) he said DEA and he didn't want that to get out because he could be in serious trouble with the natives. The other guy was, as I had suspected, FBI. The DEA guy went on and on about a child he held in his arms as she died of a heroin overdose, she was a 13 year old mule and one of the balloons burst in her stomach. He said he was going to spend his life hunting down those who would do such a thing.
Over the course of the two weeks we were there I actually managed to convince the poor guy that he was at much at fault for the child's death as the dope runners. The guy actually thanked me for my concern and my reasonable discussion- he was the only DEA that I had ever seen seriously contemplate the results of his actions. The other guy, the FBI guy simply claimed over and over that my arguments were rubbish and we didn't part company as friends.
In my previous employments I have had contact with many FBI, CIA and a few DEA. They are all different breeds. CIA has little or no sense of humor and an inability to see themselves(except for that one spoke to - but I am sure he went back to his office and was set straight in short order. FBI are usually insightful and actually have an ability to laugh at themselves (save the guy at the church) - DEA remind me of the seventh day adventists who knock on your door with bible in hand looking to convert (I am never sure which) either you or themselves - to their faith. And that is the trouble with Fed interdiction people - they operate not on the basis of the law (as they have no respect for the law, they simply "hate" lawbreakers", they are rabid evangelicals who see it as their holy mission to "eradicate" this scourge. They see the world as filled with the good guys "them", the civilians (everyone who gets in their way or . . votes, and the "bad guys", who are always, always always - completely bad, they can have no redeaming qualities whatsoever and they will use any situation to enhance their "religion". If they give up quietly they are pussies, if they put up a fight they are clearly uncoperative and so are indeed the bad guys, if they have weapons that is even more proof, even though they are all armed to the teeth. And woe to any "bad guy" who wears personal armor. Worse to me is the way they strut around after even the mearest "bust". They find a fucking SEED and they parade it around as though they had just taken down a 6 point buck.
And of course you see the pictures of the neatly stacked bags of this drug or that behind them, then the well laid out weapons they found on the premisis and finally the stacks of cash. All of which will go into their own coffers.
They point to the pollution in the woods as evidence of the bad guys when they know full well that the growers cannot properly dump their leavings as that is usually a direct trail to their proceedings in the woods in the first place. In short they force these folks into doing what they later claim to distain.
I don't wish pain upon anyone but I come closest when I speak to a DEA guy and he is unable to differenciate beteen a cancer victim in need of opiates and a doper on the street using diverted dilaudid. They would (and attempt at all times) rather simply stop all pharma from making any useful chemicals if those chemicals could in any way make anyone happy.
