Hayden Ludwig, Director of Policy Research at Restoration News, said that Chinese state-linked companies facilitate fentanyl trafficking into the United States by supplying chemicals to cartels. This statement was made on the Grand Canyon Times Podcast.
“The chemicals for Fentanyl are manufactured in China by Chinese corporations that are owned in part by the CCP and the People’s Liberation Army,” said Ludwig. “Those chemicals are sold or even donated to the Mexican cartels. That means that the CCP has given tacit approval to the fentanyl trade. They completely ban in their own country, into our country.”
China remains a key source of precursor chemicals used in the production of fentanyl, which is fueling a deadly drug crisis in the United States. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment, Chinese suppliers continue to ship these chemicals primarily to Mexican cartels, who manufacture and traffic fentanyl into the U.S. Despite increased global pressure, China’s role in the fentanyl trade persists, posing a serious national security and public health threat.
According to the DEA, more than 107,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2023, with nearly 70% involving synthetic opioids like fentanyl. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a 14.5% decline in overdose deaths from June 2023 to June 2024, suggesting some progress in addressing the crisis. However, fentanyl remains the leading cause of overdose fatalities, underscoring its continued threat.
While precise export figures are limited, U.S. authorities have identified a steady supply of fentanyl precursor chemicals originating from China over the past five years. As reported in the DEA’s 2024 threat assessment, these chemicals continue to enter Mexico and are used by cartels for synthetic opioid production. Despite international agreements, enforcement and traceability challenges have allowed the trade to persist.
According to the Capital Research Center, Hayden Ludwig is Director of Policy Research at Restoration of America, where he focuses on issues such as tax policy and public education. He previously served as Senior Investigative Researcher at the same organization and holds a Master’s degree in Public Policy from George Mason University. Ludwig’s research emphasizes the influence of progressive networks on civic institutions.
Restoration News is the media platform of Restoration of America, a conservative nonprofit founded to promote traditional American values and civic engagement. According to its official website, the organization focuses on limited government, election integrity, and public accountability. Restoration News publishes articles, commentary, and investigative content aligned with these priorities.
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FULL, UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT
Leyla Gulen: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Grand Canyon Times podcast. I’m your host, Layla Coolen. In this episode, we welcome back our guest, Hayden Ludwig. Hayden is the founder and managing editor of Restoration News, specializing in investigative journalism for the America First Movement. He was formerly senior investigative researcher at Capital Research Center and holds a Master’s in Public Policy from George Mason University.
Hayden, great to have you back.
Hayden Ludwig: It’s a pleasure to be back with you. Thank you.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah, so, so we’re gonna be talking about really important topic. We’re hearing drugs continue to pour over the borders. It seems like we should have beat this thing back when we were saying no to drugs, and it seems like it’s worse than ever.
Restoration News. Very comprehensive news site. Love it. It covers the gamut. Of all the nation’s top stories, so, so the fact that we’re focusing on the impact of drug trafficking here [00:01:00] is really pertinent. So your latest report on the Mexican drug cartels and drugs that continue to spill across the border, even under the Trump administration, that’s surprising because I would’ve thought that with illegal immigration down exponentially, that this would mean the same for the drugs.
Hayden Ludwig: That’s right. You would think that and you know it. It is incredible what President Trump has managed to do to curtail the people coming across the border. For instance, some of the border counties down in Texas, I spoke with number of sheriffs for writing this report. They talked about under Biden just a year ago, they would have 40 to 50 illegal crossings a month in a county with a population of just 3000 people.
That’s Kenny County, Texas. Now they’ve had exactly two arrests, all of 2025 since President Trump took office. That’s obviously a smashing success, but what we’ve noticed is that the number of fentanyl pills and cocaine shipments and methamphetamine and heroin, all the terrible drugs that [00:02:00] are killing our people, they’re still coming over in record numbers.
So we dug into why, where is all this stuff coming from? ’cause most of it’s not manufactured in the us. The thing that we, we discovered that was so shocking and is the centerpiece of the report, the reason we wrote it is that a huge percentage may be the bulk of all these illegal drugs actually come through the most secure ports of entry along the US Mexico border.
So if you’ve ever driven, say from San Diego to Tijuana, and you’ve sat in. Two hours of traffic trying to cross through the customs and border protection patrol route. Those are the points of entry where most drugs are coming into the country, despite all eyes of the federal government being on it, and it’s incredibly astonishing.
Leyla Gulen: That’s just crazy. Well, you mentioned the fact that these drugs are not homegrown. We’ve turned a corner as far as the opioid crisis is concerned, but that obviously is more or less homegrown, but. Why are we [00:03:00] seeing our people, Americans, people in this country still knowing that fentanyl is such a problem?
And it’s not even, people don’t overdose on fentanyl, right? They, they are poisoned by it because it’s laced into so many things. So why, what is, what needs to change with our own culture that we’re not so vulnerable to the drugs that are coming across the border.
Hayden Ludwig: It’s a great question. I think it actually has a very complicated history attached to it.
I’ll give you a couple things that I noticed. One of them is, if you go back to the history of the drug culture in Mexico and the United States, and of course the growth of the cartels, and anybody who’s watched the series Narcos or watching any of these movies about Pablo Escobars, kind of familiar with some of this.
It goes back at least a century, but a century ago, really up until the 1970s or eighties, all of these drug cartels, including Pablo Escobar’s, Medellin cartel in Columbia. They were [00:04:00] basically run by local peasants. Actually, the, the opium industry got its start in the new world by Chinese immigrants to America, who then re-rated down to Mexico and realized that the Northwestern states, which is called the Golden Triangle for all the drugs that come through it, the northwestern states of Mexico are a prime growing territory for Poppy, kind of like they are in Afghanistan or Pakistan, which are other major suppliers of these drugs.
Long story short, a lot of intervention actually created conditions down in Mexico that created these massive, paramilitary armed organizations that are today’s drug cartels. It’s almost like if Amazon or Walmart had a private military and were distributing these lethal drugs, that’s the situation that we have.
That wasn’t true 50 years ago. Now that’s one answer. The other answer I think is a lot closer to home, and that is there is a pill popping culture in the United [00:05:00] States that leaves us very vulnerable to pills that you’re right, most people don’t ingest intentionally. When we’re talking about fentanyl, they’re trying to take something else.
Even something like Vicodin that’s been spiked by a black market drug dealer, and they end up accidentally overdosing because of the incredible lethality of these synthetic opioids. What I found when you go back through this history is. It was really the 1960s that created this drug culture, which when you say it out loud, of course, isn’t really that surprising when you remember the hippies.
Sure. But the hippies got the country interested in marijuana, which was this niche product before the 1960s that hardly anybody north of the Rio Grand was familiar with. And within 20 years. People had graduated to heroin and then cocaine in the 1980s. And from that point on, there was no looking back.
The drug industry became a hundred billion dollar a year industry by the time the Ree administration was cracking down in the 1980s. Unfortunately, we’re [00:06:00] still living in a lot of that realities, despite their great work trying to curtail the drugs.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah, yeah. And when you mentioned the 1960s, it wasn’t just marijuana either.
It was LSD, everybody wanted to take a
Hayden Ludwig: trip. That’s right and some of the manufacturing processes are very different. I mentioned Amazon or Walmart. It’s actually a really good analogy when you think how sophisticated these manufacturing and distribution networks are. Lemme give you an example. So before the 1980s and nineties, methamphetamine overwhelmingly was manufactured inside up.
Oh yeah. ’cause you could get a hold of pseudoephedrine or pseudo, well, that was curtailed by Congress, essentially outlying most over the counter sales of pseudoephedrine. You can still get it, but in tiny quantities, which makes the the meth labs unsustainable on a domestic front. So the Mexican cartels stepped in to fill that void, and then the technology got better instead of using all of the pseudoephedrine that we would get normally 50 [00:07:00] years ago.
They realized they could create new chemical compounds that are entirely synthetic and a lot cheaper and a lot more potent, and you look across all the major drugs up to and including fentanyl and a similar form of synthetic opioid called aine, which is even more lethal than fentanyl, if you can imagine that.
I can’t. It’s similar technological sophistication and progress.
Leyla Gulen: So what is that last drug that you mentioned?
Hayden Ludwig: Ezines. So a lot of these drugs go back to the 1940s, fifties, and sixties where they were created by pharmaceutical industries. With good intentions. There were alternatives to the opium that was given to World War II patients and the like very strong things like Vicodin, and they realized they could create synthetic versions of these, which is where fentanyl comes from.
It originally had a pharmaceutical drug application before people realized it was so easy to overdose on. That it was essentially outlawed by the scheduling process. There’s a whole [00:08:00] bunch of synthetic opioids people aren’t familiar with. Ezine is one of them. Interestingly enough, the ezine epidemic is starting to spread in America, but it’s already taken off in Europe, especially Britain.
And what we’re finding is a lot of these ezines are coming in through the northern border over Canada, where there’s. Comparatively fewer eyes, obviously. ’cause we haven’t had a lot of drug trafficking there compared with the southern border.
Leyla Gulen: Oh God. So we’re just getting attacked from all sides. So really the culture here in this country has to change.
It has to shift that. I think that’s a topic all unto its itself. But I definitely wanna touch on just. The, the technology now being used to smuggle these drugs in, so, so we’re getting it from the south, we’re getting it from the north. And these cartels and drug traffickers, they’ve gotten very crafty.
I’m always amazed whenever I see these. [00:09:00] Major multimillion or even billion dollar drug busts, and you see how the drugs are hidden inside. Certain things disguised as certain things, but they’re getting really crafty using. Completely unsuspecting mules.
Hayden Ludwig: That’s right. So really it comes down to scale. So the amount of different individual shipments, which might individually be worth maybe a thousand or $2,000.
Right. As opposed to putting everything in one or two trucks and taking your chances going over the border that way. The cartels have gotten really good at. Realizing that if there’s only so many ways you can truck something across the border into America, especially if you’re literally using a truck going over a road, right?
There’s only 26 land points of entry connecting the countries. Well, if that’s the case, they’ve realized they should distribute all of their product across hundreds or even thousands of individual vehicles, or they’ll pay a mule who [00:10:00] might be 16 years of age, two or three grand for a couple hours of his time.
If you look at the economics of that, everybody living in the northern parts of Mexico, especially within a couple hour drive of the border, realize this is a vastly better way to make money, especially if you’re a young man. I. If you get caught by the American authorities, the courts are likely to go a light on you because you’re underage or a minor.
And our drug, our prisons are so full of drug offenders. We’re trying to avoid overfilling them as is. So you can do that for a couple years until you kind of rise up through the, the ranks, become an enforcer, become a a lieutenant, become a guide. This is actually how El Chapo, the head of the Sinaloa cartel for a long time.
That’s exactly how he got his start. Rising up through the ranks, just doing this kind of mule trafficking. And the problem is, even with all the sophisticated technology that US authorities employ here, there’s such a massive scale of [00:11:00] vehicles to target that we inevitably miss them. The traffic numbers that I found were about 215 million individual crossings of vehicles alone every single year.
You’re talking about three quarters of a million vehicles every single day. The rate of searches seems to be going down. It went from a high of maybe 15 to 20% of vehicles hand search. Down to maybe two to 3% during the COVID years. Clearly we’re regressing in this way, and that’s a massive problem that Trump is trying to solve right now.
Leyla Gulen: Right? Yeah. And and I was gonna say, so across the 2000 mile border between the United States and Mexico, how many ports of entry are these drug cartels sneaking their
Hayden Ludwig: drugs through? 26, and they vary in size. Some of the one are famous, like the one at San Diego crossing into Tijuana or Laredo in Texas, for instance.
Arizona has a whole bunch of big ones, [00:12:00] but then there’s all sorts of very small ones. What’s interesting is most people, and this is again what sparked us to dig into this, most people are very familiar with the picture of an illegal alien. With a backpack crossing over the desert in between these roads, these ports of entry, right?
Leyla Gulen: Yeah. Well, well, we’ve seen the one, what is it on, on the five on the west coast of the family running across the road. Do you remember that?
Hayden Ludwig: Yes.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah, that they took that down, I think. I don’t think that exists anymore.
Hayden Ludwig: Yeah, they wanna encourage them probably. Right? Some drugs do get in there, but you know, by and large, if you’re gonna run a $30 billion a year industry, which is what they think it is these days, yeah.
You can’t rely on backpackers going across every single day. You have to use vehicles going back and forth. And, and you’re right when you mentioned there, sometimes you have people who are mules who don’t even intend to do this. One of the most sinister things that that authorities have discovered along the border that we’ve reported on is what they call [00:13:00] unsuspecting mules.
It’s where you’re sitting in traffic to cross across, going from Mexico North to the United States. A drug trafficker comes and basically like, uh, glues or duct tapes, a packet of fentanyl or other illegal pills or, or drugs under your car with a little GPS chip. And they track you going across the border and if you make it across, they’ll find a way to detach that pill set from you and basically carry on their merry way.
Well imagine getting unbelievable for that. You had nothing to do with it.
Leyla Gulen: That’s unbelievable, but, and then if you should get caught, then. You’ve got some questions to answer, but I, I would imagine that they would just seize the drugs and, and let you go. What would happen if somebody was an unsuspecting mule and did get caught?
Hayden Ludwig: That’s a great question. I wish I knew with President Trump pushing for the death penalty for death. The drug smuggling though, which is a good idea in a lot of ways. I wouldn’t want to be caught in
Leyla Gulen: that situation. Oh no. But, [00:14:00] but a family of four, just taking a day trip into Mexico, I would hopefully that they’d have some discretion, but goodness.
So attaching something to a car and then tracking it down later, that’s, that is so scary. And that is where they’re getting really, really crafty. It also sounds a little bit desperate though.
Hayden Ludwig: It’s interesting you say that. We looked into, and of course there’s no real numbers on a lot of this stuff because it’s, it’s the mafia basically, but people estimate that the drug cartels lose probably about 22% of their stock going north.
So about one fifth of it is seized by authorities. That’s enough where if you add up the number of fentanyl pills confiscated at the border, by the way, it’s the equivalent of like two and a half billion lethal doses. So a huge chunk of the world’s population just dead overnight if they all took this right.
Oh, hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s what’s being seized, but that’s just probably one fifth of the total product coming across. Then you [00:15:00] look at all of the, the distribution networks inside the country, and this is where it gets even more sinister. Back in the 1970s and eighties, the the trafficking world used to basically end at the border.
So Mexicans and Colombians would get their product up across the Rio Grande, or even flying it into Miami back in the 1970s. From there, Americans would take it over and handle all distribution. Started with the hippies who would run it from Miami all the way up to Boston and further north. Well, starting after the collapse of Pablo Escobar’s, Medellin cartel, in the 1990s, the Mexicans moved into the United States and began setting up their own illegal trafficking circles.
We all saw some part of this under the Biden years when the border was totally opened, and we started learning about all of the illegal gangs like MS 13 from El Salvador. Or the trained UA from Venezuela. These are criminal gangs that all [00:16:00] run drug trafficking circles in coordination with a lot of these massive drug cartels operating south of the border.
So they effectively have expanded their turf onto the other side of the Rio Grande and are now running things inside the country.
Leyla Gulen: Gosh. And then speaking of expanding your turf, I mean, we are talking overseas, so. We’re getting a lot of this fentanyl, and this is one of President Trump’s major agenda points is the drugs that are coming in from China, the fentanyl that’s coming in from China, that’s getting processed in Mexico, I gather, and then getting smuggled into the United States.
So you know that. Adding to the paramilitary troops that are working on behalf of the cartels, where are they getting their weaponry from? And maybe you can talk a little bit about sort of the international network that is allowing for all of this to happen.
Hayden Ludwig: Yeah, that’s a [00:17:00] great point. Let’s talk about China.
So in China, drugs are. Incredibly restricted. The Chinese put anybody to death for drug smuggling. They have all of their communist authorities chase down drugs. There’s virtually no drug addiction at the scale of anything like there is in the United States, and yet China is the number one and by a long mile.
It’s the number one source of all of the chemicals. They call them precursors that go into the manufacturing of fentanyl. So even though fentanyl was invented in the United States. It being so heavily restricted and virtually banned in the United States means that all that chemical production went overseas.
And about 15, maybe 20 years ago, the CCP realized they could launch a kind of chemical warfare on the United States by working with the cartels to do something like this. The chemicals for Fentanyl are manufactured in China by Chinese corporations that are [00:18:00] owned in part by the CCP and the People’s Liberation Army.
’cause remember, this is a communist country. Everything’s run by the government. Those chemicals are sold or even donated to the Mexican cartels, including El Chapos. Sinaloa Cartel realized about a decade and a half ago that selling fentanyl with a lot more. It was a lot more profitable than selling marijuana or heroin or something else, even though it kills a lot of people.
So Mexico started actually manufacturing them in labs using pill presses and other pharmaceutical equipment also donated to them by Chinese companies. That means that the CCP has given tacit approval to the fentanyl trade that they completely ban in their own country, into our country. Right there. If you look further though, it gets even creepier.
Chinese companies actually own massive chunks of of Mexico’s major ports that are responsible for importing and exporting a lot of these pharmaceuticals. [00:19:00] So for instance, there’s a major, major port at, I believe it’s Manzania that’s virtually owned by one Chinese company, which means it’s owned by the CCP.
From there, a lot of the fentanyl precursor chemicals enter Mexico. They’re manufactured by the cartels and shipped north along railroads that are in large part owned by Chinese companies into cities like St. Louis and Chicago and thereon. So the Chinese have a way of effectively killing a hundred thousand Americans every single year through Fentanyl production without even directly touching it.
It’s a form of chemical warfare and it’s. It’s more destructive than anything that any terrorist organization has ever come up with. You asked about the military aspect of this. So 1, 1, 1 thing that I realized Amer most Americans aren’t familiar with, including myself before I, I started digging into this.
Is how close Mexico has gotten to becoming a true failed state. It’s like having Somalia at the southern [00:20:00] border of the United States,
Leyla Gulen: right? Right.
Hayden Ludwig: There’s a bit of a story here. So 20 years ago, Mexico launched its own war on drugs. Very similar to our own, just say no war on drugs that President Reagan launched.
And at the time everybody thought that just like the FBI cracking down on Al Capone in the mob a hundred years ago. They thought the same thing would happen with these kind of dinky, fairly small, relatively speaking, somewhat harmless military speaking cartels. Instead, the cartels declared war on the government.
Go fast forward to today. Two decades later, half a million Mexicans have died, been disappeared, and millions more lost their homes in this. All out war between the cartels were fighting each other and the cartels fighting the government. There are whole states in Mexico where the government doesn’t run anything because they’re run by this paramilitary, call it a military [00:21:00] junta run by these Mexican drug cartels.
They have their own laws, they have their own taxes. They even have social welfare programs designed to buy loyalty from people living in towns and villages there that they’re equipped with. Yes, they’re equipped with tanks, Chinese, AK 40 sevens, Soviet rocket launchers. They have night vision goggles.
They even have anti-tank missiles that came from the United States, probably via Kiev and Ukraine from all the stuff that we gave them. That’s the situation on the border.
Leyla Gulen: Oh my God. I mean, what’s to stop anybody from just. Dropping bombs on that golden triangle. I mean, obviously innocent people are there, children are there, they’re everywhere.
And I realize that’s a silly, a silly thing to say, but, but how does one fight back? How does one eradicate, because it is, it requires an eradication of some [00:22:00] sort.
Hayden Ludwig: Well, you’re absolutely right. And I wouldn’t call it silly at all. And President Trump, I think would agree. The situation as it stands right now is very precarious because the Mexican army under the current president, who is a wild-eyed leftist, don’t get me wrong, but nevertheless has restored a policy of going to war with these cartels because when you’re at war, you have to fight back.
They seem to realize this. Where it gets complicated for them and for us is that you can’t, when you simply shoot a cartel thug or launch an an, an offensive against the cartels, and they do this all the time. The cartels play dirty. They’ll respond not just by shooting Army soldiers, but by executing civilians.
I read an account from a few years ago, well, it happened in 2011, but it came back up in court a few years ago. There was a group of Mexican citizens who were taking a bus as tourists up to the United States. Their bus was intercepted by a group of cartel thugs who pulled them all out, re forcibly, recruited the [00:23:00] young men, and then made the rest of the hundred or so people kill each other with sledgehammers and then bury their bodies out in the desert.
That’s the kind of people that they’re battling there. I mean, there’s Army Con. It’s barbaric. They’re barbaric. The savages. It’s a lot like Afghanistan, but the worst parts of it, it’s like insurgent warfare with IEDs and tanks and army convoys being ambushed in the mountains. And that golden triangle area we talked about.
It’s a lot like Sicily or Afghanistan or Pakistan. It’s very mountainous, very rugged, has very little law enforcement, and it’s deeply, deeply corrupt. So the last handful of Mexican presidents before this one shine bomb. Almost all of them accused of taking multimillion dollar bribes by these cartels.
Vicente Fox, who actually is one of the guys who launched the war on drugs two decades ago, supposedly this great reformer today. He’s an advocate for the drug industry, the illegal drug industry. He wants to legalize and decriminalize all scheduled [00:24:00] drugs in America and across Mexico as well.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah. ’cause he doesn’t wanna disappear.
Hayden Ludwig: Yeah. That’s.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah. Right. Wow. So I mean, you, you’ve painted quite a picture, so, so again, I mean, how does one fight back and eradicate these, these savage, barbaric criminals?
Hayden Ludwig: It’s a great question. I think it’s going to be a generations long work in progress that’s gonna take some involvement by the United States and certainly Mexican people.
But I do think we’re about to enter a new era under President Trump. It’s gonna get uglier before it gets better, is what my gut tells me. But President Trump has already made inroads and, and things that suggest that he’s going to increase military involvement by the United States. So here’s a couple things that we know about, and a lot of this is very secretive, so we don’t really know.
We can just guess at it. If you, if you remember his first day in office, one of his executive orders declared a lot of these [00:25:00] Mexican cartels, foreign terrorist organizations, FTOs. That’s a very specific defense and, and overseas foreign policy terminology. And there’s some interesting background here. In Trump’s first term, he declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the IRGC, which is their elite special forces.
He declared that a foreign terrorist organization six months before Trump’s armed forces assassinated Qem Soleimani, who was the head of the IRGC, one of his great accomplishments in the war on terror. Well, certain analysts think that that is Trump’s MO for the drug cartels. In other words, label them foreign terrorist organizations, which frees up all sorts of intelligence and military assets.
To be able to go to war with these guys using special forces, drone strikes and the like.
Leyla Gulen: Makes sense to me because, uh, the next thing we know, these drug cartels, they’re gonna have their own air force.
Hayden Ludwig: That’s right. That is, we don’t that, that C sphere and a Navy [00:26:00] as well. Right. But we know that the CIA has drones that are analyzing all of these convoys and the, and the situations.
So we know where the cartels are operating. They don’t operate in secret. They’re out in the open, acting like a government. As we mentioned earlier before, uh, we know that the Marines are down, training Mexican Marines in drug interdiction. A lot of these signs suggest that we could end up with a sort of military quasi occupation working with the Mexican military to take down these northern golden Triangle operations.
And honestly as complicated and a bloody as it will be, and it will be. I don’t see any other path towards defeating these people. I mean, imagine having Afghanistan or Somalia or some other hostile country that’s falling apart at your southern border, and we have forces overseas in places like Yemen. I give me a break.
We need to be focused on these people here because they are a literal military force at our border, at our soft underbelly. We can’t afford that as a, as a nation.
Leyla Gulen: No, absolutely not. But, but also in [00:27:00] addition to that, the demand has to slow down too. So yeah, I keep going back to our own culture, and so as long as we have this addiction problem and this pill popping problem, our culture has to change to.
Slow the demand. Otherwise they’ll just be encouraged to create more and to traffic more. And it just will be this cyclical, endless thing,
Hayden Ludwig: making our country great again, must include making our people healthy again. And it’s, it is so incredibly refreshing to see what Secretary Kennedy and the Trump administration are doing on that front.
Drug addiction is a massive problem. But have you not noticed in the last, let’s say five years, how many eyeballs, including my own, have been open to the reality of how many of our countrymen are suffering from this drug culture? Oh yeah. And one of the, one of the really sad things that I noticed is right around the time China’s fentanyl strategy we talked about earlier was being unleashed about 10, 15 years ago.[00:28:00]
That is right after about a decade of Oxycontin and Vicodin being pushed by a lot of these outta control big pharma drug companies in places like where I live in Central Virginia. This is one of the earliest grounds that Oxycontin was marketed and it’s, it’s just utterly devastated people. I saw, well, West
Leyla Gulen: Virginia was like round zero for all the opioid abuse.
That’s
Hayden Ludwig: right. There was a small town of. Maybe 4,000 people in West Virginia that over the course of two years was inundated with a few million Oxycontin pills by doctors who were over-prescribing it. Oh yeah. And then we, we set ourselves up for when fentanyl pills show up and people are already addicted and looking for the next hit.
Or it’s people who even have legitimate problems, who they have. They have serious chronic pain and they’re looking for something strong that’s not over the counter, and they end up killing themselves with fentanyl by accident. Yeah, it’s all of the above.
Leyla Gulen: It’s true, and I spent two months in West Virginia, so I saw it.
It’s very [00:29:00] evident. You’ve got a depressed economy there. You’ve got just a lot, just abject poverty, a very marginalized. Part of this nation’s population. So they are the most vulnerable. But like you say with RFK Junior and this, this shift that has to absolutely take place. But the something else I wanted to ask you, so an offensive on Mexico, is that a signal to other parts of the world?
You mentioned China, you mentioned Russia. Do you foresee an offensive on Mexico being an offensive on them and them retaliating in response?
Hayden Ludwig: Hmm. Complicated question. I definitely think there’s a game of 40 chess being played right here, and even the tariffs are a part of this, so I’m not sure how they would respond, but.
Given that the ball is in our court, since these, a lot of these operations were started by hostile countries, I think President Trump is doing, he, he’s [00:30:00] doing his best strike back. Whatever comes after that, I’m not sure. If you look at it this way, I mentioned earlier that a lot of the drugs are now coming through the Canadian border.
Well, one aspect of the tariff battle that was, I didn’t see anybody in the media talking about was President Trump demanding that the Canadians crack down on fentanyl pills, all sorts of different drugs that were making their way through the Canadian mail system, down into the US Postal system. One thing that people don’t realize, for instance, is that USPS, yes, it’s a total failure of an agency, but one thing it does do right is it spends tens of billions of dollars looking for illegal drugs going through the mail all the time.
And a massive aspect of that comes from Canadian pharmaceutical companies that work with the Chinese communists to import a lot of these illegal drugs. And the Chinese government up to now had basically done nothing to stop it. Well, now they are as part of the tariff negotiation. And then I wanna point out something that happened under Trump’s first term, right before he left office.
And it’s [00:31:00] something that he doesn’t get any credit for, but I think laid the groundwork for a lot of what we’re gonna do in the next four years. And that is how Trump realized all of the extent of the Fentanyl addiction problem toward the maybe middle mark of his administration and started taking measures to negotiate with President Xi Jinping of China.
Stop them from importing so many drugs. Now, obviously. She’s playing his own game of chemical warfare here, so he’s only gonna cooperate so much. But one of the things that Trump managed to do is basically get him on the phone. We need to make this fentanyl thing a big deal. Up to that point, China had not even scheduled fentanyl as an illegal drug after the Trump negotiations were done.
They scheduled that, that means they restricted it and they even shut down a number of companies that were involved in promulgating this overseas. Again, didn’t solve the problem because China’s complicit in this, but it does show you that Trump could push back [00:32:00] on something that the Obama administration before him and the Biden administration after him did absolutely nothing to do.
And by the way, the minute that Joe Biden came into office in January, 2021, all that pressure on China. It stopped. He eased off immediately. And Fentanyl spiked once more.
Leyla Gulen: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, it, it was, it was evident just to see what it did to Americans on the street, just walking zombies. It’s gonna be a country of zombies.
Yeah. If something isn’t done about it, gosh. Well, your story is so comprehensive. How long did it take you to put all that together, by the way? Because that was, that was a very comprehensive story.
Hayden Ludwig: I’m almost ashamed to say maybe about a month of. Heavy digging and, and interviews and Wow. Bought a lot, a lot of documents from the federal government.
Leyla Gulen: You accomplished a lot in one month, [00:33:00] Hayden. I’m telling you. That was impressive. Thank you. Truly, truly. But you’ve got some wonderful stories on that site. What are you working on now and are you gonna continue? I mean, I would imagine you’re gonna continue to follow the story, but. Any other insights on this subject and and what are you working on next?
Hayden Ludwig: Well, that’s a really good question. We’re actually kind of looking at a different form of drug and a legal drug here, and that’s Opry Stone, that’s the chemical abortion drug. I, I wear a lot of hats, look at a lot of different topics. One of the ones that my colleagues broke recently. Is the story. You may have seen it a couple weeks ago that the miry stone and misoprostol abortion drugs are 22 times more dangerous to women’s health than the FDA or the abortion industry previously disclosed.
So we’ve been digging into that story and, and trying to report on the shady origins of the company that actually promulgates all this. It’s a Manhattan company called Danco Laboratories. It reveals or discloses [00:34:00] almost nothing about its investors or even its executives, which is highly unusual for a company that’s literally cornered the market on a drug that Planned Parenthood and this multi-billion dollar abortion industry have made a centerpiece of the post Roe V world.
Well, that’s now being called into question by RFK Junior and the Trump administration and all of Congress. So we hope to see some major success. So for the time being, my attention is focused on exposing that pro-death industry and trying to get some information in people’s heads and some facts in Congress’s laps.
So we’ll see what we can do with that. That’s fantastic. Well Godspeed on that one. How do people follow you? Check us out@restorationnews.com. That’s restoration news.com. We’re also on Twitter, Facebook, all the major platforms we publish daily. So if you like this kind of reporting, we do a bunch of. Short form kind of news articles.
We editorialize a lot and we do these kinds of deep dives every couple weeks or so. ’cause they do take us some time to do. But you know, we consider ourselves to be [00:35:00] the investigative journalists for the America First Movement, trying to do the kind of work that the mainstream media is certainly not doing.
So if you like this kind of work, we’re involved in everything from the climate wars to the abortion industry to follow the money, dark money campaigns. We’re also involved in a lot of the biggest elections of the next couple years. Right now we’re doing a lot of work. To expose the Democrats running here in Virginia’s gubernatorial election.
This may seem like a state level issue, but I promise you this is the most important election of the year, and it sets us Republicans up for a 2026 midterm victory or defeat, depending on how things go down in Virginia. So we need your support. We need your eyeballs. So check out restoration news.com.
Okay, wonderful. And you’re across all the social media channels? We absolutely are. Yep. We’re on X, we’re on Facebook. All the above. Same restoration news. Ah,
Leyla Gulen: well, God bless you and and God bless this work. He really truly are doing God’s work. Thank you so much for having me on. Great to talk with you.
Fantastic conversation. We’ll talk to you real [00:36:00] soon.
