Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2023 21:03:47 -0700 From: Boris Chen Subject: Response Team Prequel Chapter 13 replacement Chapter 13. The next call for help came from eastern Washington State, the town of Spokane Valley where they had reports of civil unrest as activists were organizing strikes of migrant farm workers ahead of the annual potato harvest. Although the harvests were mostly mechanized they still used lots of people to inspect, maintain, drive vehicles, and try to hand collect potatoes dropped by the machines, lost/dropped taters accounted for over 8% of the total harvest. The workers organized a walkout in protest of pay issues (stolen paychecks and pay rates lower than promised) they were also protesting discrimination since so many of the workers did not speak or read English. Before we left our boss told us the entire story in Washington had a rotten taste and might be dishonest, it appeared they wanted us to make the strike organizers disappear without warrants, evidence, or criminal charges. And in Washington State labor organization was not against the law. We flew to Seattle then to Spokane Valley to investigate both sides. We found strike organizers had a folding table outside a local grocery store trying to get signatures on a petition to be submitted to the governor. The petition was in support of a state law making it illegal for employers to retaliate against people trying to improve working conditions, pay, or salary via union representation. Local police had reports of hundreds of stolen paychecks the employers refused to replace or investigate, and hourly pay rates lower than promised. There was a law in Washington State that prohibited non-residents from organizing general strikes, union drives, or promoting labor stoppages. Migrant workers were trying to change that law. The potato crop was a huge source of income for a lot of people; wealthy and poor alike across the Northwest. As we asked around we heard the same names and businesses again and again as being the probable source of most of the trouble. The complaints we heard ranged from theft to suspected murder, and possibly even mass murder. One of the things we figured out early on was we knew nothing about potatoes, the business, the economics, or potato politics. After three days of asking questions around town we flew home to continue our research. ---- Back in El Paso we had dozens of phone calls to make and found a great information resource (about potato farming) was the fast food industry. But finding someone willing to spill the beans on potatoes was difficult but we finally found one lady that was a regional manager of a burger chain which I agreed to never mention out loud while I was working on the case. We'll call her Mrs. XX, which David suggested was a sex chromosome pun. We met her for lunch at The Italian Kitchen on Pershing Drive in El Paso, a restaurant we've never been to before. She was the regional manager for a fast food chain that owned hundreds of stores across the country and had fifteen locations in El Paso and Las Cruces. It was a fast food burger chain that sold French fries by the ton. The first fifteen minutes of our meeting (over lunch, we paid) we tried to convince her we were not competitors, more like superheroes investigating possible crimes being done on the migrant workers that harvested the very potatoes they deep fried. We both brought notepads and pens along for taking notes, like we said both of us were potato ignorant. She seemed supportive after our explanation of investigating crime in the Northwest potato harvest and assuring her our investigation had nothing to do with her employer. She explained there was only one potato crop in North America a year. They grew at a depth of between five inches to a foot deep. There were many different varieties but the three common ones were red, yellow, and Russet. Russet-Burbank was an American hybrid created in California in the 1930s. She said it was an expensive crop to harvest compared to soy beans and wheat. They were even more expensive than sugar beets to harvest but never explained why. She said the reason why potatoes were never out of season at the grocery store was because potatoes could be stored in climate controlled buildings longer than almost any other crop. Because the harvest was seasonal (September to November) the potato harvesting business was also seasonal. That meant most raw frozen fries were made during and after harvest. That meant that for most of the year the French fries you got with your burger were up to a year old, and that was a closely kept industry secret. She explained the frozen fry industry (aka: Big Potato) could clean, slice, pre-cook, and freeze a year's worth of potatoes in a few months, they sat in frozen warehouses for up to nine months before they were delivered to restaurants and stores. Nobody that ate fries knew they were nearly a year old, and Big Potato did not want that truth to be widely known. She also said there were other crops that worked the same way, she cited apples, cucumbers, oranges, and some peppers as being long term storage crops. David laughed and said he'd keep it to himself, nor would he ask at the order counter at Wendy's how old their fries were. She asked what we wanted to know about the industry. She said it's a lot like Big Oil. The processors bought them in bulk via contract, so many tons and when those were to be delivered. She said there were a lot of investors and speculators with one hand down the shorts of potato farmers. Raw potatoes arrived by the train or semi trailer load for long term storage then they used backhoes to scoop them into machines to process. Raw potatoes went in one door and forty pound bags of frozen fries came out another door into the back of refrigerated semi trucks. They were sorted by size, cleaned, inspected, then sliced, pre-cooked, inspected, sorted, and frozen in massive quantities. Most potato chip potatoes came from Pennsylvania, most French fries came from the northwestern US mostly due to the soil Ph. She said they grew in every state in the USA but the ones we bought raw in the grocery store produce department for cooking at home mostly came from Pennsylvania. The northwestern crop mostly became fries and 'De-hy' here and in Asia. In the olden days much of the scrap from that industry went into landfills or was sold for animal feed but today much of the scrap was turned into tater tots, which were mostly made from the rejected bits of potato. When she said that David commented: "I'm never buying them again, if they're reclaimed scrap the price should be a lot lower." She cited some companies as the major producers of potatoes for fries, the biggest growers in the northwest (Risby Produce, Simplod, McCaine Inc, Idaho Pacific, and others). When we asked which ones were the most likely to use underhanded means and illegal treatment of migrant workers, she coughed and said all of them could be guilty, they all needed migrant labor but hated them at the same time. The waiter brought our desserts then she offered us some advice: use hidden cameras and microphones to get recordings of what we were talking about and then call her back. She suggested doing the same work as an investigative reporter. That would work on a small scale but for large scale corruption it was probably not something that could be corrected except maybe by making an example out of a few big bad guys. She said corruption likely already spread into other facets of life in those areas, not just farmers and migrant workers. She paused for a moment then suggested the criminal elements were probably also found in retail, banking, groceries, housing, medical services, and even religion. She said she'd heard stories about those areas before and none of them were nice, but any time you got that much money moving around eventually organized crime appeared. This lady was like a walking potato encyclopedia. She also said parts of the potato plant were toxic to mammals, never eat the leaves or stems. Potatoes themselves can become toxic, don't eat green potatoes even though the green was chlorophyll and not poison the green was a sign that it could be turning toxic. If they were handled properly the chance of being sickened by a potato was tiny, but every time you ate potatoes you were exposed to multiple toxins in tiny amounts. And she said certain specific cooking temperatures destroyed the toxins but few people could achieve those temperatures at home. And she noticed all the stores she went to always had poor lighting over the stacks of potatoes. She summarized that subject by suggesting we never eat potatoes with patches of slight green on the skin or ones with significant skin damage. Our conversation continued for a while longer and she gave us coupons for free meals at the chain she worked for, we laughed and thanked her for sharing her expertise, she wished us luck and invited us to contact her again. I whispered to David that she wanted his body. He coughed into his glass of water as we started to leave the restaurant. David asked her if they used pink slime in their burgers and she just smiled but never answered. Then she said it's no longer called pink slime, it's called Finely Textured Lean something or other, but she was in potatoes, not meat. She also said it wasn't just beef, finely textured meat was also in chicken and fish nuggets or strips. On the ride home we discussed if this was still something we wanted to tackle, it was definitely out of our league and possibly not something Uncle Sam paid us to do, but for our superhero self-images it had a certain attraction. We've both grown to love seeing bad guys punished, especially if the victims were gay or very poor and unable to protect themselves. Early in our investigations it looked like all the culprits were very wealthy. ---- Back at home I walked across the street to talk to one of our neighbors, he was a retired union guy and we discussed hiring someone to spy on anti-union tactics of big business, illegal practices and he said he could recommend someone to call in Oregon who was a private investigator that might put us in touch with someone to pose as a migrant worker to record illegal acts by employers in Washington. Three weeks later we had our name when our neighbor walked over and pounded on the front door; the investigator guy was Marco Robles. Marco was a private investigator (PI) and he passed our background investigation (done at work) and had experience in infiltrating groups and gathering court-room grade evidence. We decided to do this one ourselves, we paid him in cash from our savings which meant we didn't have to follow all the Pentagon guidelines. It was something we donated to the farm workers in Washington and Idaho, most of them were from Mexico, and some were from Guatemala and Nicaragua. We interviewed Marco in Bakersfield and told him we were just interested in helping out the migrant workers and we liked getting back at bad guys, especially wealthy Americans that got wealthy off the backs of the poor, the most vulnerable in our society. He accepted our offer and applied for jobs at potato farms through the temp agency in Spokane Valley which did all the hiring of migrant workers in northern Idaho and eastern Washington State. It only took him a few weeks to collect evidence of who was doing the bad shit to the migrant workers. The big problem was the stuff he learned all seemed to point to the wrong person, a middle aged lady that ran a small company out of her spare bedroom and rented a tiny store front in town to meet applicants. On his fifth week his paycheck also disappeared and the company said it was cashed at a local bank and would not be replaced. He asked for a copy of the returned check and was told no. So he drove to the office and made a big stink and got them to go online and print out both sides and handed it to him. On his way out of their office he was quietly threatened and two days later he was fired, but he still had another job, essentially working for the same people. We got the check image and contacted that bank since it was time and date stamped and requested a security camera image of the person that cashed it. It took two weeks and some angry conversations over the phone but we finally got a fuzzy image by email of a lady that cashed the paycheck for $310 made out to Juan Valenz Jr. The lady in the photo matched the lady we talked to in her home office that seemed to be at the center of a lot of small crimes against migrants, her name and photo kept appearing over and over. While we were in her office the second time about stolen pay checks David managed to get her picture with his cell while pretending he had just received a text. We also paired his cell with hers and downloaded its contents. We used the DOD system and found out she was living and working under an alias, then it took hours of searching and using facial recognition but identified her as (Karen Slinkman) a person with five felony warrants in Nebraska for theft, mail theft, and forgery. We continued to have the PI (Marco) talk to the locals (that were organizing for a possible strike) and it started to look like we found the central person in the theft operation that also involved managers at several potato processing and growing operations all across the two-state area and Oregon. What we uncovered over time was a theft operation that involved about eleven people, men and women, and seemed to be directed by one of the bigger growers in northern Idaho. ---- While this slow-motion investigation was going on we still did our regular jobs and kept up our home and even started taking cooking classes two nights a week at Parkland High School. We hung large poster board sheets on the wall inside our 2nd bedroom and made a diagram to show how the potato crime syndicate was organized, who was in charge of what and how all the stuff we discovered was involved, the diagram grew steadily over time as we exposed the root network. We had to extend the poster board sheets to a second wall as the diagram got larger, like an underground root system. After three months and $290k of our own money we'd reached a point where the list of named suspects stopped growing and we could identify three people that benefited the most from the criminal acts: mostly theft, forgery, and assault (possibly murder). Next came the plan on how to eliminate them on one day. After getting the official okay from our boss to use spiders our next trip was to Spokane Valley to meet with Marco to pay him in cash and thank him for his hard work and tons of hours. He risked his life to get the information we needed to take a huge fucking bite out of their crime syndicate. We paid him (in cash) more than what he usually earned in one year. We spent two weeks independently verifying the accuracy of his data. He also said he was going to partner with a TV producer to make a documentary about his undercover investigation. We asked him to wait for two months before he started then he could proceed with our blessings and maybe a contribution to the project. We also told him to leave our names and home town out of his film and his notes. ---- We decided to focus first on the woman that ran the labor recruiting business from her home, she was directly responsible for most of the missing paychecks that robbed innocent migrant workers of hundreds of thousands of dollars, our best estimate was she made about $500k a year with that scam alone and was cashing those checks at a dozen different banks in the area which meant people at those banks were involved. We presented our evidence to the prosecutor, they arrested fifteen bank employees at ten banks on felony charges of conspiracy, financial transaction fraud, identity fraud, and theft. We went in person to the lady's home again, her name was Jennifer Gordon, she was single with no kids, she was 45 years old and self employed as a labor rep and temp agency labor recruiter. We posed as friendly state labor board reps and wanted to take her out to dinner, which she gladly accepted. We were to meet her at 8pm at a steak house in Spokane Valley on South Street in an area with lots of strip malls and used car (buy here pay here) dealerships. It also had a bar and was known to get loud on the weekends but their food was fantastic and expensive, despite the sometimes rowdy crowd at the bar. David put the grin on her and acted like he might be interested in more than her organizing skills. Using my laptop computer I sat at the bar and accessed her bank account and transferred her retirement funds to a local homeless shelter (that served mostly migrant farm workers), the transfer was for $1,705,400.00, I left her $50 in each account. ---- After she arrived and met David inside I went outside and put a spider in her truck with a poison gas pellet. They chatted and ordered cocktails. I put the laptop back in our rental car and went back in to the bar. All I was doing now was watching them from a safe distance to make sure things didn't get out of control, I had a knife in my pocket and a small can of pepper spray. She was about to receive some extremely bad news. From the far side of the bar I watched their table and was close enough that we could still use Whispernet. David almost choked on his pork chop when he tried to whisper while swallowing a bite of his steak. I suddenly laughed and the guys sitting by me at the bar looked at me like I was nuts for suddenly laughing at nothing. The music at this bar tonight was mostly oldies. I loved the voice of Charlie Pride. After she set down her fork and wiped her mouth David got serious with Jennifer, at least she had a decent last supper. Unfortunately for her she had no idea this was the final hour of her life. "So Jenn was your steak as good as mine?" She smiled and thanked him and said she also loved their Ranch dressing, it was house made. Jennifer said she knew people that worked there and was able to get a secret photo of the ingredient list for their house dressing. Then David continued, "I wanted to tell you we've been investigating you and found some pretty neat stuff, like five outstanding felony arrest warrants in Nebraska and hundreds of photos of you cashing stolen checks at banks around town." He handed her some papers with six color images on each sheet. Some of them were old booking photos from Nebraska, some were newer color pictures of her at local bank teller windows cashing forged checks. I also showed her surveillance camera photos of her being handed 'stolen' checks inside the pay office. David told her the bank people were being rounded up by the state police right now and many of them would point her out in a police line-up tomorrow. "I think you got the wrong girl, I've never been to Nebraska in my life. And those photos are not me cashing checks." So David pulled out the high def color glossy photos where her face was clear and easy to see and suddenly the expression on her face totally changed. She suddenly looked pale and angry. David told her the bank teller in that photo was already in jail. "If you lay a hand on me I'll scream. See all those guys at the bar? You know what they'll do to you after I scream for help?" David raised his hands to show he was unarmed and told her, "Jennifer, I am not gonna touch you. But I want you to know that your long career as a thief is over in about four minutes from now. When I looked back at the damage you've done to hundreds of innocent families I realized that sending you to jail would never compensate them, so we already took all your money and realized you're too evil to redeem. We've decided to kill you to stop you from hurting more innocent people." It was obvious from across the bar that she freaked out. She put her hands on the table, leaned closer to David and told him, "You don't scare me little boy. I know most of those guys at the bar and all the cops in town. You can't touch me weirdo!" She growled at David across the table. David reached for the linen napkin and wiped his lips and smiled at her but he could see that inside she was furious and very scared. Without warning she slid out of the booth, grabbed all the photos off the table and stuffed them in her purse and stormed out of the bar, got in her truck and sped off. He turned to look at me and gave me a thumbs-up. I pulled out the Batsuit keypad and activated a short burn with self destruct and slid the pad back inside my shirt. I paid my bar tab and walked out the door. David paid the bill for their dinners and walked out too. We slowly walked across the parking lot to our rental car. The normal routine for a spider inside a car or truck was to identify the vehicle and how to disable it. The first thing they usually did was to crawl up onto the top of the driver's seat to image the interior and any occupants. This spider would do a full burn of the pellet but it was less than two feet from her nose (inches behind her shoulder) so unless both windows were down she'd get a lethal dose quickly, then it was just a matter of time inside her body until the chemicals did their job, which was to halt nearly all electrical nerve impulses. The primary effect was to paralyze the heart and lungs which caused the person to become briefly dizzy and perhaps feel a brief head rush and high, then they felt lightheaded and faint. Soon after that their breathing and heart would cease forever. It was usually a painless and humane way to die. We got to the rental car and opened the doors and stood next to it to listen for the sound of success. Way down the empty street we heard the unmistakable sound of a vehicular accident, a truck suddenly veered into a street light pole and sat there smoldering, the light pole fell onto the street. We got in the rental car and drove to the hotel in the opposite direction. It was unknown to us if she was awake when she hit the pole, but not wearing a seatbelt meant she impacted the steering wheel and windshield in the final seconds of her life. The coroner would probably say she was an intoxicated unrestrained driver that drove into a light pole, snapped her neck, and took the steering wheel in her chest and face at 45mph. "How did it go?" I asked him. "At first she denied everything, she'd never been to Nebraska in her life even though she was born there." He sighed deeply then told me at first she denied everything, "...then when I showed her six pages of photos of her going back three years and two states she said it wasn't her, then I showed her the hi-res color images of her cashing checks made out to Mexican men and told her the people at the banks were already arrested, she came unglued and threatened me. At that point it became clear to me she was too dangerous to be alive anymore. Jennifer was a sick fucking sociopath." "Well, at least she had a chance to do the right thing." I offered. "Yes, but the only regret she showed was that she got caught. When I saw how nasty she could be was when I realized there was only one option for her, which was to die right away. I even told her she'd be dead in a few minutes but she didn't believe me. She was clearly a threat to a large number of innocent civilians. I spared her the stress of a lengthy trial and decades in prison." I just nodded yes knowing if she had confessed or asked for help I know David wouldn't have given me the sign, but she made the decision for us. After we heard the crunch of her truck running into the pole down the street we both glanced that direction but it was too far to see anything. ---- Back at the hotel I loaded another spider with a toxic gas pellet and we drove to the house of the guy that received the biggest portion of the stolen money and paid for the illegal acts to stop union organizing. They beat and kidnapped the workers involved in organizing, some of those people also disappeared. That guy owned one of the largest farms in Idaho and according to our research was the tip of the criminal pyramid. We drove to his house and parked in the street near his driveway, it was 12:10am. We had an overwhelming amount of evidence to convict him so he was not going to be given a choice. I lowered the window and gently dropped the spider onto his lawn and closed it because it was cold out and rain was just starting to fall, you could smell it in the air. We decided not to confront him out of fear he would produce a pistol and start shooting but we had enough evidence to send him to prison for the rest of his life but felt that wasn't good enough for such a wealthy man that lived in such a nice neighborhood. After ten minutes we started to receive a basic floor plan of the upstairs of his house on our glasses. Sometimes we never knew for sure how they got inside but a common route was the sewer line roof vent or beside the power lines or rooftop HVAC equipment. There's always holes in houses, cars, and buildings. With the spider in surveil mode it made a quick map of the 2nd floor and located all the electronics and the alarm systems. We discovered he was alone in a small bed in his office, based on the booze bottles on his desk we theorized he was too drunk to walk to bed. We aborted the surveil and had it return to his small upstairs office. One feature we seldom used on the spiders was called `short burn.' It heated the wire that burnt open the gas pellet capsule for half (or one third) the normal time which made a smaller hole and usually released less gas. We didn't want to risk hurting anyone else that might be in the house, the spider confirmed there was nobody else (on the 2nd floor) and his office door was shut. Using his Batsuit keypad David steered it manually, watching via our glasses. It ran up the bed frame leg and onto the mattress, up to the head of the bed and onto the pillow so it was only a few inches from his face and turned around so the spider's ass-end faced his nose. David asked if I was ready and I told him all lights were green. This guy was asleep on his back snoring horribly so we parked the spider on his chest just below his chin and turned it around we could watch his chest move. After gas appeared on the camera image we watched his chest move. We both saw more wisps of gas appear. After 21 seconds his chest stopped moving and climbed down to the floor. After it parked in the shower and started self destruct mode the spider's video signal disappeared. We quietly drove off (in the rain) and went back into town. On the way back to the hotel we passed the truck accident and saw they pulled her truck onto a rollback and there was a coroner's van at the scene preparing to leave with the corpse. David commented they might have a busy night. ---- Back in our hotel room I readied the third spider but the last guy happened to be in a city jail for a non-related drunk driving arrest. He was in a locked room because he'd been very loud and violent so they shoved him in an isolation cell they kept chilled to around 59 degrees all year long. This guy was the one that managed the violence used to intimidate the migrant workers. He was the one accused by many in town of being responsible for hundreds of missing workers and injuries to others which was often a broken arm or jaw. Locals referred to the goon squad as the Mariners because they used baseball bats to break bones. We hoped some day to find the mass grave where the 204 missing people were buried. We activated another spider that carried a toxic gas pellet and stood on the sidewalk by the secure police car entrance to the jail building. When the next squad car approached with a prisoner we tossed the spider on the roof of the car while they waited for the sally port door to open. It would climb onto the back of someone in the car and ride on their vest inside the jail and then surveil the floor plan. After watching them intake prisoners we quickly located the isolation rooms. Doors had to be entered at the bottom since all those buildings had a one inch gap under their doors for their HVAC systems to work properly. We didn't know what cell he was in so we went room to room checking each one for our target and found him in the third isolation room. He was curled up shivering but looked like he was asleep on the steel bunk. Again we programmed it to fire a one-third load then a self destruct mode after David triggered the gas. The spider sat on the painted steel shelf watching his chest rise and fall with each breath, we also saw him shiver once in a while. His arms were drawn-in trying to stay warm as he slept off the booze. The spider parked inches from his nose and activated the pellet cutter (a heated bare copper wire). After his breathing stopped David moved the spider to the floor in the corner in the darkness, about forty five seconds later the signal vanished from our glasses. The display on our glasses simply said, "Signal Loss," and the status dot turned from green to red. We drove back to the hotel, showered, and went to bed. While I'm sure we didn't stop all crimes against migrant workers in Spokane Valley we certainly cut the head and penis off the beast that night and paid for half of it out of our own pockets, but it was done with the full approval of our boss since we used spiders and pellets. He supported our efforts mostly because it meant he could spend more tax dollars on spiders and pellets, which made it look like we were doing our jobs to the people in the Pentagon. The way he explained it was each spider used represented at least one bad guy arrested of killed. The next day we drove to the newspaper office and paid cash for a personal ad that would run the rest of the week: `If you do it again we'll come back and clean house again. Find another career or risk the same penalty. There is nowhere to hide.' The night three of the sleaziest people in that county died mysteriously was the biggest news event in Washington in years but police had no suspects, no motive, but investigations were on-going. One newspaper writer said it was like the Hand of God came down and smacked the worst of the worst. One of the online news services called it Justice Day. We flew home the next day, Spokane Valley to Las Vegas, and lastly to ELP, we got home at 7:45pm. I ordered more spiders and gas pellets. In the mail we found three past-due reward checks from El Paso for capturing their fugitives, one of them was also an FBI wanted, but we didn't cover the amount we spent in Washington. I estimated we spent nearly $300k of our own money on that operation and would have to capture almost twenty local fugitives to replace that money. Luckily, there were a lot of fugitives around El Paso and Juarez, but not all of them had rewards big enough to attract our attention. Anyone wanted on crimes relating to injuring kids we usually did first. Something useful we learned about using gas on sleeping people was to cut the dosage and expel closer to the face. The less gas the less odor, the less likely they were to wake up coughing and not get enough gas to achieve the desired result. ---- That year in El Paso two kids were killed by stray bullets, kids playing outside caught bullets fired during a criminal act down the street. The person that fired those shots mysteriously disappeared too. David said we should make a flag for our basement that had a white background with the image of vultures circling overhead. Yes, we fed the vultures! We caught seventeen more wanteds around town, all of them had rewards and recouped most of what we spent in Washington State. Some were FBI wanteds and some were state or local. The cops appreciated our help but I thought they were also somewhat jealous since we collected big checks for capturing those people (doing their job but getting paid a lot more tax-free cash). Our defense was the cops wouldn't go after them because they were afraid but we often nabbed them at vulnerable moments with no weapons, just handcuffs and pepper spray. Like David always said, everyone had moments of vulnerability every day and those were the best times to slip on the cuffs. We considered making a logo for our business cards with a surprised-angry felon sitting on the toilet in striped prison uniforms and handcuffs, which was one of our favorite moments to capture people. About five years before we moved to El Paso three cops were killed one month doing warrant service, that's when they started to ignore wanteds unless they caused a lot of trouble. This created a bounty hunter industry when private investigators stepped in to take over the warrant capture business. We nabbed three guys standing at urinals in men's room of small bars around town. A local police informant warned the cops that word was out on the street that a special team was working warrant service in town and people were on edge, some fled to Juarez and others went into hiding. But all of them carried cell phones which was almost as good as a large cowbell around the neck and a bright blinking arrow sign floating above them! Our boss saw police stats that showed a significant downturn in violent crimes around El Paso. Vehicle theft, burglary, robbery, and hired killings were all down, but narcotics were still readily available. We've never dealt with drug sale crimes, the government would not like it if we disrupted the flow of narcs. David liked to tell people, "Can you imagine what would happen all across America if the supply of Heroin, Meth, Marijuana, and Cocaine was 100% cut off for two months?" I always answered that pain clinics would have lines out the door. He always said few Americans had any idea about the tonnage of narcotics consumed every day, or how much physical space all that took up.