Michael Brown’s Background

All right, welcome back to another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour. I’m your host, Jake White from Vive 18, and today I’m chatting out with a new friend, Michael Brown, and I’m really excited for our conversation because Michael has a pretty cool bio, and I’m sure his experience in this field is just something we haven’t had on the show before. So check this out. I’ll tell you a little bit about Michael before we ask him to introduce himself. So he’s a retired senior agent for the USDA of 33 years. And he’s the current director of counter-narcotics technology for RIGACU analytical devices. And I’m just gonna do a quick plug before and we can do it after, but he also has a podcast called the Opioid Matrix. And so if you like this one, just make sure to pop over there and check that out afterwards as well. So Michael, thanks for being on the show.

Hey, Jake, thanks for the invitation. Looking forward to our conversation.

Yeah, well, can you kind of fill in the gaps. You know, it’s our first time chatting. Tell me a little bit about you and then how you got into this field.

The Role of Technology in Counter-Narcotics

Well, you know, I recently retired about three years ago from the US Drug Enforcement Administration. As you mentioned, I was a federal agent for 33 years. I spent about 25 of those years working overseas, chasing the precursor chemical supply chain that’s utilized to make narcotics. I had the opportunity to go through US Army Ranger training in the early 1990s, and then was assigned to a special operations group that worked in Central and South America. So I spent time in Bolivia, working with host country counterparts, going after drug labs, precursor chemicals, fugitives, the whole nine yards for about four years. Then I transitioned to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, worked in Pakistan for about 10 years. I did a year in Afghanistan after 9-11, then Central Asia, Tajikistan, and then India, Southeast Asia. And my last tour overseas, 2017 in 2019 was in Miramar where I worked with the counterparts on degrading the methamphetamine precursor supply chain coming in from China.

And of course, as you know, Miramar is the world’s largest producer of methamphetamine. you know, they were dealing with the same problem we’re dealing with, excuse me, here in the United States with precursors from China to Mexico where fentanyl is produced and then shipped into the United States. after I retired, I was recruited by a company called RGACU and they make what’s called Raman spectroscopy. It’s a handheld laser device that can be used to identify unknown substances. So when I was in Miramar, I purchased a lot of their units, trained the counterparts on how to inspect precursor chemicals or cargo coming in from China because they were slipping in using chemicals that were mislabeled or not labeled at all. Then they would divert it into the jungles and then they were used to make, you know, multi-ton quantities of methamphetamine. So we bought them a couple of these hand units. Within the first month, they seized between six and 10 tons of precursor chemicals that previously they were missing. So they had an aha moment. They’re like, all we have to do is use advanced technology, do 100 % scan on what’s coming in our country, and we can degrade that methamphetamine precursor supply chain by two to 3%.

This pilot program only had three units, but imagine if I could approach just a hundred units and hit all the choke points of roads coming in from China into the jungles. I think I could have shut down methamphetamine production comfortably by 85, 90 % just using advanced technology. So I retired RIGAC, who hired me as their business develop manager. I work with foreign governments, law enforcement agencies, harm reduction, school resource officers on how to integrate ramen technology into their counter drug or harm reduction strategies.

Wow. Okay. That’s incredible. And the fact that they have these units, these devices to help them see what’s, I guess just what’s in, like what chemicals are being used is, is this new technology that hasn’t been out there before is just being used for something that hasn’t been used before.

Well, Raman Technology has been around for quite some time, but I’d say within the last five to 10 years, it’s really been perfected. And at that time, when I was with DEA, I researched a lot of companies, looked into RGACU, and they had, in my opinion, the best unit on the market. This unit had a library of 14,000 different substances, right? Precursors, industrial chemicals, explosives, everything Miramar Customs needed to have at the border to identify these things coming in. Of course, Miramar has about 15 to 20 insurgency groups right now that have been involved in a civil war for the last 60 years. So they were concerned about explosives coming in across the border, chemical weapons coming in from China. And of course, those precursors that were mislabeled, that really, methamphetamine production fuels the insurgency. In my opinion, they used to be insurgency groups that were using narcotics to fund insurgency. They were making so much money, they then became insurgency groups to support narcotic production because that was more profitable. And we see that same in Mexico. We have narcotic groups who are insurgents to some extent, but they’re insurgents to protect a multi-billion dollar narcotic business, which of course is causing great harm in America with fentanyl and overdoses ranging to three to 400 a day.

Global Drug Trafficking and Coalition Building

Wow. So this is wild. Cause I actually, when you mentioned Miramar, I didn’t know what that was. I was going to ask you. So thank you for explaining that to me and how things are coming across the world and somehow it’s still cheap enough for people to buy. I guess just because of the quantity. what do you, technology is a piece of the puzzle, right? To help reduce that. What are the other pieces of the puzzle that you see that coincide with your work and are you at RGACU? Are you all involved with them or partner with them? You mentioned SROs, things like that. But yeah, what are the other pieces that need to be in this?

Well, the other piece is really is a coalition working together with countries around the world because, know, the Sinaloa Cartel and CJ &G Cartel are otherwise known as the Jalisco New Generation Cartel in Mexico. They’re a global corporation. They have embraced globalism and they have perfected the art of moving commerce illicitly all over the world with seamless perfection. So what we need is that joint coalition. I worked with DEA. DEA has offices in over 90 countries in the world right? Where they were everywhere. And we build that coalition working with private and government partnerships to identify those domestic international trafficking organizations, working with the harm reduction groups on identifying what’s affecting substance users the most, right? It’s kind of a whole of government approach is what’s needed. You know, and on my podcast, I talked to a lot of harm reductionists and law enforcement officers. And what we’re seeing now is something we never saw before. And that’s a whole of community approach, right law enforcement going into the communities, working with church groups, school groups, the communities of black and brown individuals in America, and saying, have to work together, because if we don’t, the drug traffickers are going to divide and conquer. And that’s what we’ve been seeing in America for at least the last 33 years of my career. I worked in Detroit, worked in Washington, DC, all these inner city groups, which are getting hit hard. And of course, the communities of color are getting hit the hardest for economic and other social inequity reasons.

Yeah. And it’s evident too, like you walk into the neighborhood and you see more distribution there. Like, and a lot of it’s below the surface too, but yeah, for anybody who thinks like, no, it’s, it’s equitable. It’s like, not, not really. You can, you can see it on a map how kind of wrong it is, but what, what do you think that people from, from the coalition world? Cause that’s a lot of the people that are listening to this is they belong to a community coalition. Maybe they’re directors or they’re volunteers for that, or they represent one of the 12 sectors, like you said, law enforcement, schools, churches, stuff like that. How can we benefit from the great work that you’re doing at RGACU and like the DEA as a whole? Is there anything that you think people aren’t taking advantage of that we should be?

Challenges of Progressive Harm Reduction Policies

Well, I think the biggest problem that I see now within the last four years is what I call progressive far left harm reduction policies. And for example, let’s look at Colorado. 2018, passed measure, I think it was 110, which basically decriminalized or reduced the possession of any narcotic under four grams as a misdemeanor to include fentanyl. So in their attempts to excuse me, reduce substance use and abuse and reduce the inequities of people who are getting arrested. They basically unleashed Pandora’s box and they saw the escalation of fentanyl use, the escalation of methamphetamine use, and a severe surge in overdose-related fatalities. And Colorado became a narcotic vacation spot, people from all over the country. Substance use then went to Colorado because they know they could purchase under four grams cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine within the first year of fentanyl.

And what do you think the cartels thought about that? Well, this is fantastic. We can bring in more distributors. We can sell more drugs. We just can’t have more than four grams on a person at that time. So this really tied the hands of law enforcement because they couldn’t go in, make those low level arrest of dealers, flip them and work up the chain to identify the larger sources of supply, right? All drug investigations start at the very bottom and they work up very rarely.

Can DEA or state and local law enforcement come in at the top echelons and then work down? It just doesn’t work that way. Find the weakest link, break it and work up. So in my experience, excuse me, these progressive policies, New York, Philadelphia, California, Colorado have enabled greater drug use. Now I understand harm reduction. We want to meet people where they’re at. We want to reduce the harm of dangerous narcotics, but it’s a very, very thin line.

You know, I like to quote a line, from the merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare. And it’s the pound of flesh, which I demand of him is dearly bought to his mind and I will have it. And that means there is a price to pay. The devil will collect his due. And that pound of flesh is greater addiction, greater overdose fatalities, greater homelessness, greater economic instability, and everything else that comes along with severe long-term mental illness associated with drug use. what I think we need to we need community and law enforcement to come together. We need to reverse these policies. We need to pay that pound of flesh. And we just need to work our way out of addiction, the old school, the hard.

Yeah. And you mentioned the line, right? Like we want to support harm reduction, support treatment, stuff like that, while also incorporating prevention and the laws matter. You know, it’s, if there’s no consequence for doing it, how could you even say, Hey, you, like, this is a problem. need help if we’re enabling everyone to do that. So I think I do understand. I’m wondering though where do you think the line is or like, do we make the line? Is it restorative practices? Like, okay, there’s a fine or there is a consequence, but if you get treatment, if you do this, if you are educated, like there’s a way out or is there a different line or strategy or does it all just come back to education and collaboration?

The Thin Line of Enabling vs. Supporting

Well, I think we’ve been educating collaborating for 33 years, just say no drugs are bad, it’s poison. And when I was a teenager, I didn’t smoke or drink, but I had friends who did it. They’re gonna experiment. Kids are gonna experiment. Problem is that experiment since they can kill you, will kill you, right? DEH is seven out of 10 of these fake pills contain a lethal amount, two milligrams, 10 % of fentanyl or more, and you’re gonna die. Question, game over. There is no tomorrow, I’ll figure it out, right? So we’re really in it. We’re at a crucial point in our drug demand and drug prevention phase. We don’t have the do-overs of the 1990s and 1980s. know, jokingly, was talking to a friend of mine who also retired from DEA. We missed the old days of heroin because heroin, took a user maybe 20 years to die. So you had 20 years to work with that individual to save them, get them off of heroin, get them back into productive society.

Now you have 30 seconds. If you don’t have Narcan or if the fentanyl has xylazine, metamidine, BTNPS, which is a plastic polymer, Narcan’s not gonna work. You’re gonna die in 15 to 30 seconds. That’s the reality of the drug situation. Narcotics or narcotic or narco trafficking, as I call it, has evolved to where the traffickers are now not concerned about losing 100,000 customers, because they’re gonna make 300,000 customers, and they’re gonna make a billion versus a million a day across the country across the now, when I talk about that thin line, for example, New York, the thin line, well, we want to help crack users. We want to reduce the harm in smoking crack, which is almost as deadly as fentanyl. It just kills you in a little longer time phase. They put a vending machine out where you can get heat resistant crack pipes. To me, that’s just saying, hey, we’re not trying to stop you from doing something that’s dangerous to your health, but we’re going to give you a way to make it easier to inflict greater harm on yourself. All right? That’s a red line that we crossed that I think in New York has enabled additional crack use. If you talk to crack users, they’ll say, hey, this is fantastic. I can smoke more crack and not worry about burning my lips. So now there’s no deterrent. There’s no downside to bad behavior. Now imagine if all the parents in this country said, we’re no longer going to punish our kids from bad behavior.

What kind of generation will we be raising? Now know if my mother did that, I’d be talking to you from Sing Sing probably because I was a pretty bad kid and she did not hesitate. The backhand, the shoe, the belt, a piece of furniture, whatever was closest to hit me with, and it kept me in line. You can’t do that today. Some parents, of course, would go over the board. But what I’m saying is there needs to be some sort of pound of flesh that must be paid for bad behavior. And in most cases, most drug users will not seek treatment. I think Governor Newsom had a program last summer where they detained 800 drug users, big crackdown arrested a lot of mid-level drug dealers, seized a lot of fentanyl and heroin, and offered 800 substance users treatment. Only three took it. Three out of 800. Now, those numbers may be off a little bit, but a significant number rejected treatment in order to go back to the street because all the negative aspects of using narcotics had been removed. No detention, no forced treatment.

Cultural Perspectives on Drug Use and Prevention

You’re gonna give me money, you’re gonna give me food and housing, and I can still use? Well, that’s just a win-win situation, right? So that’s that thin line I think we’ve crossed and has increased the numbers of substance users, mental illness, or homelessness, and everything else negative that goes along with long-term substance abuse and usage.

Yeah. And not to mention the fact that if students are using early and it’s leading to all these drugs or fentanyl being found in different things that they didn’t expect is there’s, it’s scary to think about the next couple of decades of raising a generation on even something as what some people would say, Hey, well, nicotine is not like a harmful drug. Like, yes, it is.

And it leads to so many other things. It’s conditioning your brain to now rely on drugs. so it’s, it’s, part of the job that feels. It’s hard to find the hope in it. When, when we know how big the problem is and how coordinated the enemy is and that they do have a global distribution, they do have global partnerships. They’re coordinated, they’re great business people and they make it work. And then we’re working on a local level to build partnerships.

So every, every struggle seems like, dang, I’m up against this big, this yeah, big company in a way. and we’re, when we’re stuck here and I think about the, harm reduction things, the thought is very, it’s very great that we’d want to save someone’s life and give them a second chance. And I think that’s correct, but are we that line of enabling.

And what does it show young people? this is an okay behavior. Why wouldn’t I do that too? Because we’re all looking to escape pain. And when you’re young, like the front of your brain isn’t developed either. So they’re looking for those quick escapes or things like that and have to be taught. Like you said, like I knew my parents would punish me if I made that decision. That was a good thing to stop me from doing things. And if we remove that and on top of that we see use rise all across the country and vending machines places to get drugs and it’s legal to now have like you said a certain amount on you in certain states it just makes other people think well this can’t be that bad then why shouldn’t i just start using.

The Importance of Community and Values

Sure, exactly. mean, the excuse when I used to get in trouble was, well, Jimmy did it, right? My mom said, well, I’m not Jimmy’s mother and it’s not acceptable in my household. I don’t care. know, if Jimmy jumps off a bridge, are you going to jump off a bridge too? How many kids of my age, you know, heard that old saying? And he’s like, well, no, I wouldn’t do it. Then why are you following bad behavior? But, know, bad behavior, you know, we talk about as though it’s affecting every culture or every group in America. You know, I have a lot of, you know, I worked in India.

For four or five years. I live in a part of Northern Virginia where there’s a lot of Indian communities. It’s a large Indian community. I have a lot of Indian friends that go, know, Mike, we don’t have this drug addiction problem in our community. Our kids are not getting arrested. They’re not using drugs. They’re all A plus students and they’re going to college after their sophomore year in high school. That’s because we have a solid community unit at the base of which is our religion, right? We are grounded in our religion. Our religion is our law.

And everybody in the Indian community says and thinks and does the same thing. Our kids don’t grow up to be professional ballplayers. They grow up to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and IT professionals. Right? That’s not happening in the African American community. That’s not happening in the upper middle class white communities, right? Who were being affected by drug addiction, by prescription drugs at the age of five. Right? America is the most prescription addicted country in the world. Why is that? We’ve dealt with more in our history of America, we’ve dealt with more strenuous times, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, right? We didn’t turn to narcotics. We just pulled up our pants as my grandfather used to say, go out and do the hard work, right? But now we’ve invented all these excuses. Everything we can’t succeed in is because we have some sort of mental deficiency. We have some sort of disease. We can’t stop eating because we have a disease. Because we don’t want to work out, we have a disease, right?

We’ve labeled everything a medical excuse for our failures, which enables more failure. So I look at my Indian friends in our community and I said, you you guys are onto something. You know, when I was talking to one Indian friend of mine, his son got married recently and I went to the wedding and his son was giving the speech and he said, you know, when I was growing up, my mother used to ask me, what do I want to be? And I loved playing with these plastic dinosaurs. I said, when I grow up, I to be a paleontologist travel the world and dig up bones. And his mother said, that’s going to be a great hobby when you’re not being a doctor. Now put those dinosaurs away. Right? So the guy today, he’s a doctor because it was just like no way you’re going to be a paleontologist because there’s no money, there’s no career, there’s no upward mobile advancement. And that’s how Indians think because they come from a very impoverished community. If you go to India sometime, lot of Indians are struggling. We don’t know what poverty is till you go to India and you see poverty.

The Need for Radical Change in Drug Policy

So they bring an attitude to America like, in America, this is the land of milk and honey. You can be anything you want to be if you put the hard work in. And when people say, you know, America is terrible, it’s racist, it’s misogynistic, it’s homophobic, you know, those are excuses for, I believe, the lack of hard work and accepting failure as the norm and then excusing failure as mental illness, sickness. So hey, we just can’t beat the system. So I reject all and I look at the narcotics situation and I say, well, if my Indian friends and my Jewish friends and my Pakistani Muslim friends don’t have this addiction problem to the same level that we have, then we must be doing something.

Yeah. Well, in the human spirit, right? Like we’re built to overcome these things. Even our bodies adapt to injury and things like that. We, we aren’t supposed to take the easy way out yet when we introduce those things to our brain, that’s what we become attached to. And I, I love that you brought up the Indian culture because it really shows the importance of faith and values. Like their whole culture was built on that. And that’s one of the top protective factors from risky behaviors is having that value system, whatever your faith might be. And so I think of America, our value system is independence.

How can I get the most, consume the most, win the most, do the most? It’s like baked into our culture and that’s what we reward. And we have people wanting to be, you know, I’m going to be a star doing this or I’m going to be a star doing this or famous doing this not, I’m going to enhance my community or I’m a part of this thing and I want to bring us all up is yes, we do have people on both sides, but it seems from the outside, the star gets more accolades than the person creating change and more rewards. So it’s like that quote career or that aspiration of being the independent me first person seems more attractive.

Whereas in a different culture, your family or your faith and your legacy might be more important.

Conclusion and Call to Action

You’re 100% right. And we used to have that. And I look at the African-American community and I look at the church that my father and my father’s father came up with. I mean, the church was the basis. That’s all African-Americans had. They had the church, they had God and that got us through a lot. And I look at, my grandfather in 1920s, 1930s had a suit, had his own farm, had his own business. African-Americans were prosperous. They went to church. And I recently went to my service church I go to last Sunday and the bishop said, you know, the problem with America is 20 years ago, we used to have to reach the standard that God set. We had to strive to hit that standard. But now, in 2024, we’ve lowered the standard to meet our own expectations. We’ve lowered what God said, this is where you gotta go, to a lower level saying, well, this is only where I can go, so I’m gonna meet you halfway God, and you’re gonna have to like it. So we’ve changed God’s to meet our failed expectation and so what if this is as high as I can go and you now have to accept that? So I don’t know how, if you’re a Christian, if you’re in the religion or whatnot, but is that part of your theology? We can go in and change the word of God to meet what we want it to be? We can’t do that, right? And when we try, we fail. Right. No, it’s God’s word, right? It’s his plan. It’s our body belongs to him. Our brains belong to him. Like this is his plan. He gave us the rules how to do it the best. Yeah, you can’t go changing it. You’re going to get different results.

Sure. You know, exactly. You know, when I hear my body, my right, I say, no, it’s God’s body, His right. And if you follow His law, then we wouldn’t have a lot of these problems. Now, whether you’re a Hindu or you’re a Christian, there is a baseline rule of law, you could say, within those religions. And you have to follow them. The Hindus are following theirs. We are not following ours. And thus, we are now demanded that pound of flesh that we have to pay.

Yeah, dude. the good news is that Jesus paid it for us. Like we get to follow based on his example. He’s not asking us to do anything he didn’t do. Like it’s there, it’s out of love. It’s the best deal on earth. Like so I think, no, you’re a hundred percent right.

we’ve unfortunately moved away from that spiritual base. And when you lose your base, like any building, if the base is not solid, the rest of the building sooner or later will fall. within our culture and American culture, our buildings are falling over every day. Go to Kensington in Philadelphia, go to Dettenderloin in California, go to Colorado, go to all the hotspots where drug use has been more or less, decriminalized, open-air drug markets, people living on the streets, homelessness, and we just accept it as part of the norm. Well, we can’t fight it, so let’s join it, let’s pay for it, let’s enable in it, and hopefully people will wake up one day and realize they’re on the wrong side of the fence. That doesn’t happen. It’s just not realistic.

Yeah, absolutely. So let’s, I would love to kind of finish off this episode with any, any tips you have from your 33 years of experience, your new role in RGACU, what y’all are doing. Is there anything that we should know as people who are on the prevention and harm reduction side of things that you think, Hey, this can help us get 5% better. If we start doing this we can see some change.

Well, you know, we have a new administration in. President-elect Trump has said he’s going to go after the cartels. He’s going to close the border down. Because until the source of supply, until the fentanyl flowing into this country is reduced, you cannot begin to put in place effective harm addiction programs that are going to effectively treat more people coming out than more people are going in. Meaning the oversupply of narcotics makes it almost impossible to treat enough people to see any success.

And then you’re talking about recidivism. You’re talking about putting people after prevention back in the same environment that got them addicted in the first place. So I’m here to tell you as a former DEA agent, I don’t think we’re going to see a severe reduction. There’s going to be no assistance from the Mexican government, no assistance from China on the precursor chemicals. The cartels are going to move more and more narcotics into this country. So we need a new form of harm reduction that does not enable, but aids the individual in getting out of addiction.

And I don’t know if that’s gonna be, if you get caught with two grams of Coke, well, you gotta go to rehab. It’s gonna be mandatory. We’re gonna put you in rehab. We’re gonna make you get clean. I don’t wanna see it go that far, but again, there’s no easy way to pay this debt. When I think of it, I think of a patient who comes to their doctor and says, I’m not feeling well. Doctor says, man, you’re stage four cancer.

You’re going to die unless we do some radical treatment. We’re going to do chemo, radiation, and three other things that are going to come close to kill you, but we may save your life. That’s where we are in this country. We’re at a stage four diagnosis that if we don’t do something soon, people are going to die. But that cure is not going to be easy. It’s not going to be comfortable, but we just have to buckle down and we have to do the hard thing or we’re going to lose another 80,000 Americans by the end of 2025.

And the tough part of that is that demand or supply is directly related to demand. And so as we’ve been talking about this whole time is it’s about these coalitions, it’s about community, it’s about values and bringing us together and working together because the opposition is doing it. They’re doing it really, really well. And if we can learn to do it, that’s how we’re going to stand a chance. It’s how we’re designed. So this has been.

Absolutely really cool for me to learn, Michael. appreciate you. Like I’m getting educated. So I appreciate you spending the time with me. And I know our listeners will say the same. If we want to check out your podcast, the opioid matrix, can you give us a quick synopsis on what you talk about that? And then tell us where to find all your stuff, all your stuff.

Yeah, certainly. I’m all over LinkedIn. If you just Google Michael W Brown at regaku.com, that’s my email. If anyone has any questions or they want to talk to you more extensively about, you know, some reduction technology or strategies that could be implemented, how to work with, how to develop a community outreach from the police to the inner city communities or any community, really, because this is not a black or white issue. It’s an everybody issue.

I’m on LinkedIn and sort of check out the Opioid Matrix. think you’ll find some conversations just like what we’re having here, Jake. I like this. podcast is about the unvarnished truth. You may not like what you hear, but it’s going to be reality. And I think Americans need a dose of reality, a wake up call, because this nightmare is not going away called fentanyl.

Well, I’m excited to check out some episodes and follow you on your platforms and everything. And for everyone listening to this episode right here, you’ve been hanging out with Jake White and Michael Brown, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour.