I Went To The New Drug Capital Of The United States

before I get started I do Consulting on where you can move I'll work with you to find the perfect place for you to move to there's more information at the end of the video about that now let's get started what in the roads man you think after this many days in California the desert Safari would be over but it is not don't worry I'm going to get back to the coast eventually I'm kind of having fun looking around out here this actually isn't that unusual out this way everywhere you turn in Riverside County you'll see stuff like this it's just how it is a bunch of redneck Americans in these parts we're on the outskirts of Desert Hot Springs a smallish city of 32 000 people just outside of Palm Springs I'm here because this place is no joke mister where we are now is Right smack dab in the middle of the biggest drug Center in the nation that's right today Riverside county is Numero Uno for drugs for California that's like alpha male status [Music] so if you Google drug problems in Riverside County you'll see all kinds of stuff about how bad the problem is out here the only reason I even made The Detour up here from Palm Springs was because I kept hearing from people telling me I needed to pop by haven't you heard they say everybody here is strung out there's meth labs everywhere there's drug houses all over nick man you people really keep pushing my limits don't you where we are is in the Palm Springs Metro most of what's out here are small cities of 20 000 people kind of scattered throughout the desert everything out here is agricultural Wasteland here's Palm Springs right there but there's this sweet spot in North Central Riverside County with the species unlike any other in the state this is the main drag in downtown Desert Hot Springs it really isn't much to look at you don't see dangerous people driving around there's homeless people straggling around and some local Tweakers but it's not scary here at least on the surface I've always kind of liked it up here I've had family that lived in the area a few times the Mexican food is amazing but man the news reports are fierce one quick Google search and the first thing I saw about Riverside County as a government report that calls this the meth capital of the United States okay I guess I don't have to Google anymore but it's fair to say I'm in the right place the whole area up here has a reputation for meth head junkies crackheads attics transients and thieves the local news just said throw a rock in any direction and you'll hit a meth dealer what the hell the report goes on and on about how bad things are here for drug use and production of drugs there's a whole section on all the super meth labs that crank out 10 pounds of dope at a time so I guess driving around you never know when something's gonna blow up Jesus according to this chart you can get 15 000 a pound for the stuff in LA and they can crank out a batch in two days I just learned there's this thing called dirt Labs where they sweep up the ground in the super labs and get all the spilled drugs off the ground and cook it that's desperate but drugs are bad kids very very bad now I don't live on this street and I don't know what it's like to live near attics and dealers but it sounds like a bummer real pretty views in the mountains though I have to say clearly these people don't want to socialize but I'd imagine some of them off-road their vehicles that sounds like fun a lot of Riverside county is either Hispanic or white it's 45 Hispanic and 40 percent white in this County according to the report I talked about a lot of the super Labs out here are run by Mexican drug trafficking organizations is that what a cartel is but today they aren't making drugs here as much as they are smuggling them it's more likely to find a house with a trash bag full of Mexican crank than it would be to find some yahoo cooking in his shed the US has made it a lot harder for crackheads to get the chemicals they need to make drugs at home but in Mexico they can get the chemicals really easily a recent report called Riverside County the drug distribution center of the U.S it says that a quarter of all meth seized in this County came from this area alone the DEA guy in Riverside County said this is basically the Costco warehouse of drug dealers my God just last year they made a bus near here where a truck had 2 600 pounds of coke 66 pounds of heroin and 19 tons of weed but people want to keep the borders open right and apparently this is crazy Riverside county is the most wider tapped place in America and they are doing a lot to try to squash all this God I guess looking back I should be glad I didn't get rolled driving around with the damn camera out the window or at least pulled over it makes sense that this region would be so bad for drugs it's isolated cheap and right off the 10 freeway and it's close to Mexico you can just blend in up here according to the report women are more likely to use meth than men huh interesting Mappy I wonder why that is this says that women get hooked easier but women get used to it so they have to take more well I don't know anything about that I've never tried drugs before do you think it would be easy for me to tell if somebody I knew was on them probably this is also a huge problem in the Morongo Valley which is just over the hill from where we are now from what I hear a lot of the drugs have been pushed up into San Bernardino County it's also bad in other smallish communities outside of Palm Springs places like Sky Valley read the local news anywhere in this desert area and it's all about people strung out or breaking the law they're trying to get this under control there's agencies here that are trying to steer people into rehab I also hear the courts are trading jail time for Rehab and there's some non-profits out here that'll come up to you and try to get you to check in a rehab I guess at the farmers markets they can tell who's on meth and who isn't honestly it's not that hard to spot but it's going to take a lot of motivated caring people to turn this disaster in the other direction the drug abuse out here is all very sad it rips families apart and it can just be heartbreaking to watch most of Riverside county is just folks who want to live cheap and do their own thing the air is clean and they won't hear ambulances all night long you could get lost out here actually I think that's the whole point foreign it's not all tweakerville here there's some really nice areas in this part of the county this neighborhood we're in is only 10 minutes away from where we were earlier these people look like they have normal somewhat successful lives in case you're curious homes on this street are in the nine hundred thousand dollar range from atop this hill they can look down upon the valley floor you can almost see the meth clouds on the horizon is it bad here yes to me it looks like a normal desert community and I think that's why the bad guys are so successful here now I wanted to talk to somebody who has insight into the amount of drug use up here I found somebody who talked to me about how bad the drugs are on this part of Riverside County but he had a lot of other interesting things to talk about too you you live in an area of Riverside County that that has really bad drug use and you brought to my attention another another problem but briefly I wanted to ask you how bad is the drugs out there in your part of Riverside County well they say there's about 1200 gangs from here to LA to San Diego so this is like a triangle and Coachella Valley is there's a lot of problem with crystal meth and uh I as an Uber driver I just tried to avoid these people but it's very rampant here but because it's spread out it's not so noticeable like in a big city like in Skid Row or something here it's very spread out so but uh Coachella Desert Hot Springs can be some very dangerous towns to be walking around at night time yeah and I hear it's getting worse with the they're they're not only manufacturing drugs but they're using it you're part of the county to distribute uh all the drugs coming from Mexico uh it's true I'm totally against meth I've lost a lot of my friends with it uh the truth is there's very few people I even trusted my home down here because so many people seem to have a story and uh I had to come back to America because of covid I was a very successful Entertainer didn't want to move to a city so I took the desert and uh yeah there's a lot going on here but uh it seems like everyone knows each other so it's not so easy to pull off a crime like in a big city the police already know everybody here but yeah there is a lot of Traders going up in fires because they're trying to have meth labs and stuff like that um my concern right now is to get out a message about the environment here it's in more trouble than anybody seems to realize yeah you send me some footage you you live out there you're out there all the time walking around driving around and and there's trash everywhere out in that part of the valley plastic paper Furniture styrofoam it's really bad out there is it to the point that you think it's going to harm the environment yeah it's past that in my view it's a state of emergency uh the other day I saw a coyote walk running across the street with a tin can in his hand and that really uh really got me thinking about it and because I walked every morning through the trails around Palm Springs I see what's behind the city and every single plant or brush or grub is filled with plastic under it there's not a single plant out there without plastic under it not even one it is such a situation I I don't even know how to explain it but I showed you some videos so maybe you maybe could help me get the message out to the people what are they doing to clean up the desert man I've seen the video it looks like [ __ ] nothing and a lot of those aluminum cans out there are rusted like from 10 years ago nobody has ever picked up out there uh there's millions of tons of plastic and trash out there it's it's not just one place all of Coachella Valley is surrounded by plastic it gets very windy so it blows and so one day it doesn't look like it's it looks clean the next day it's covered with plastic it's like magic how a tree can be covered in plastic the wildlife is also suffocating from this and uh there's just not one Corporation or politician or anybody down here talking about it it's it's all they make sure the cities I'm in La Quinto right now one of the most nicest suburbs in the United States so right across the street from here is the peak the Indian Wells Tennis tournament and behind me is the PGA golf and now you go five miles south towards Coachella there it beacons garbage lined up on every street every desert pocket and a lot of illegal dumping I very rarely do I see a sign that says it's illegal to die yeah there's very few finds that say littering is illegal yeah there's just simply no real enforcement here at all about this situation and when you go to North Palm Springs like some of the videos I showed you a lot of people who are are dumping their garbage out there just right in the desert and nobody says anything about it and nobody wants to talk about it I just wanted to let you know because it seems like you are a person who's interested in our environment and I thank you for asking yeah I I do care about uh the environment um what what is it that you think that they can do can they physically comb all of those square miles and pick up all the little pieces of trash I mean it's even possible well I would first bring in the National Guard they would need about two months to even put a dent in this they would need thousands of people to clean this up and then the politicians are going to have to regulate these corporations they can no longer give out plastic cups straws and stirrers to every person so easily there has to be some kind of fast food tax the leader of tax something can stop people from this uh I use my same Cup every time or I drink out of a porcelain cup I don't use garbage myself unless it's an emergency lot of people here corporations you walk in any supermarket and there's someone there giving you a plastic bag before you can say yes or no in Europe everyone carries their own bags into the supermarkets they have dumpsters in front of those supermarkets to get rid of all the extra packing so you don't have to take it home uh here corporations have to be regulated very strictly and also our schools need to teach our children about the environment and what plastic does and what it's doing to our country uh I'm afraid in the next couple years we're not going to have any Riley I mean it's that serious I'm I'm walking four miles a day through the vessel and when it's windy I get hit in the head by cake by plastic cups and all of them seem to be the same McDonald's are called Pilot truck stop Coca-Cola 7-Eleven Wendy's Jack in a box it's their garbage out there in a desert and all they do is keep their lock clean but they don't they don't care about outside of the lot they don't there's no funding to clean up these areas and somehow you can't blame them because not it's not all their garbage but still they don't need to be selling this to people and people could start using their own cups and less plastic and plastic bags should be illegal like in Europe well I hope that this draws awareness to it and you get some people that are motivated to go out and try to find a solution to it because that's really pretty desert there's Wildlife everywhere it's one of the last places in California that's not ruined but man they need to figure that out because um yeah and what's sad is because nobody's talking about it so if you have garbage and you don't want to pay to dump it you can just dump it out here for free there's nobody going to enforce any laws are you looking to move and need advice I do Consulting that's right I'll sit down and talk about where the next perfect place for you and your family should be I do it all the time together let's find you a new home that's safe and checks all your boxes and I can also help you find your new house too email me and I'll work with you on not just helping you figure out where to move but I can help you find your perfect home too that's right I know awesome reliable agents all over the country and I'd love to connect you to somebody who can help you search for that perfect home hey guys if you learned something new about America or what it's like to live in America great you should think about subscribing and turning on your notifications you can also click one of these videos or playlists for more this

Channel: Nick Johnson

Views: 1,001,424

Keywords: desert hot springs, palm springs, california, riverside county, moving to california, desert, california travel, california hotel, california real estate, california mortgage loan, los angeles, san francisco, san diego, homelessness, mexico, worst part of california

Id: PkG_2aGCgDo

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2022