Oct 13, 2026 · 2 hr 15 min · 13 segments
Former Air Force Pararescueman Nic McKinley went from small-town Montana to elite personnel recovery missions embedded with Special Forces – the teams called when pilots go down and climbers get…
Steve MurphyHostSo I was the country team leader for my unit, the agency in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, most dangerous place in the world.
And the, uh, this, this JSOC case officer came out and started talking about this, this asset who was, uh, who was giving him information on a child trafficker that was moving kids across the Afghanistan, Pakistan border.
And, uh,
what what to kind of make a long story short happened was he was trying to figure out like who cares about this issue and one of the things i try to help the americans public understand is we have a we have a war on drugs we spend double-digit billions a year on the da right and and all the different hiatus and the task forces and all of that Yet 90% of drugs are legal, right? They're all on a schedule.
And cocaine is used by ophthalmologists, as I understand it, to numb the retina of the eye before they will do retina surgery.
Every time I end up in the hospital with kidney issues, they're usually pushing some pretty high levels of fentanyl on me because of the pain.
Yet we also have a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Last time I checked, all three of those are absolutely legal commodities, one of which is constitutionally protected.
And you probably have all three of them, since you're sitting in Florida, within arm's reach right now.
Yeah, but we spend billions of dollars a year on what is the, what enforcing against the illicit sale of what is these legal commodities.
And we don't have a single law enforcement agency in the United States who's dedicated to that issue.
We've got incredible men and women, primarily in the Department of Homeland Security, NHSI, who are dealing with that.
The major majority of the heavy lifting is being done at the state and local level.
It's your county sheriff's deputy who's a TFO or a task force officer with a federal agency or who's just doing an internal investigation.
So that was really what I learned at the agency was that Nobody really cares about this issue.
When you look at what they do with the limited resources they have to do it, it's actually heroic.
I'm sure a law enforcement officer who did child crimes, maybe just for a very short stint, they usually walk away with psychological issues.
They usually knew that going in, that they would walk away with psychological issues.
So I was the country team leader for my unit, the agency in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, most dangerous place in the world.
And the, uh, this, this JSOC case officer came out and started talking about this, this asset who was, uh, who was giving him information on a child trafficker that was moving kids across the Afghanistan, Pakistan border.
And, uh,
what what to kind of make a long story short happened was he was trying to figure out like who cares about this issue and one of the things i try to help the americans public understand is we have a we have a war on drugs we spend double-digit billions a year on the da right and and all the different hiatus and the task forces and all of that Yet 90% of drugs are legal, right? They're all on a schedule.
And cocaine is used by ophthalmologists, as I understand it, to numb the retina of the eye before they will do retina surgery.
Every time I end up in the hospital with kidney issues, they're usually pushing some pretty high levels of fentanyl on me because of the pain.
Yet we also have a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Last time I checked, all three of those are absolutely legal commodities, one of which is constitutionally protected.
And you probably have all three of them, since you're sitting in Florida, within arm's reach right now.
Yeah, but we spend billions of dollars a year on what is the, what enforcing against the illicit sale of what is these legal commodities.
And we don't have a single law enforcement agency in the United States who's dedicated to that issue.
We've got incredible men and women, primarily in the Department of Homeland Security, NHSI, who are dealing with that.
The major majority of the heavy lifting is being done at the state and local level.
It's your county sheriff's deputy who's a TFO or a task force officer with a federal agency or who's just doing an internal investigation.
So that was really what I learned at the agency was that Nobody really cares about this issue.
When you look at what they do with the limited resources they have to do it, it's actually heroic.
I'm sure a law enforcement officer who did child crimes, maybe just for a very short stint, they usually walk away with psychological issues.
They usually knew that going in, that they would walk away with psychological issues.
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