National Geographic - Narco Wars 3: Chasing the Dragon (2022)

Explore how opportunistic smuggling networks in Latin America turned into powerful and ruthless drug cartels with unprecedented power.

Part 1: How Sgt. Smack Hooked Up Harlem
Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, an army veteran Ike Atkinson and a Country Boy dealer Frank Lucas flood Harlem with super strength high quality heroin known as China White. Atkinson smuggles more than S400 million worth of cocaine via US military transports, while Lucas uses his product to target the thousands of addicted soldiers returning from war. In the end, both commit two mistakes that cause the authorities to catch their attention.

Part 2: Prince of Death
From his remote mountain hideaway in the Golden Triangle, Khun Sa, rebel leader and one of the world's most powerful drug lords, floods New York with super-potent, highly addictive China White. This is the beginning of America's heroin epidemic. Since the mid-1970s, Khun Sa has funded his fight against the Burmese military by smuggling heroin into the United States. This also makes him powerful enemies. For nearly three decades, the "Prince of Death" seems almost unreachable - until a group of agents hatches a bold plan to strike right at the heart of his heroin empire.

Part 3: The Mob and the Mujahideen
From 1979 to 1984 Sicilian Mafia and Southeast Asian heroin producers imported and distributed S1.65 billion worth of heroin across the Northeast and Midwestern states of America. The war in Afghanistan provides perfect conditions for the world's most ambitious drug smuggling operation. An exiled mob boss contacts an Afghan drug smuggler to create a 1,200-mile pipeline pumping high-quality heroin into the United States. Over a billion dollars in profit is generated before an FBI/DEA operation puts an end to the "Pizza Connection".

Part 4: Narco Jihad
DEA agent Jeff Higgins sets out to avenge 9/11 by taking on an Afghan heroin kingpin and proving the close link between narcotics and terrorism. After helping in WTC during the September 11 attacks on New York, Higgins goes to Afghanistan where his primary target is heroin baron Haji Bagcho, who is responsible for a fifth of the world's heroin production. Bagcho manufactured heroin in his secret laboratories on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, supplying it to more than 20 countries around the world. Higgins is determined to bring the drug trafficker to justice in the United States.

Part 5: Pain Pill Nation
Not only pharmaceutical companies are making money from the opioid crisis in the USA. In addition, criminals set up "pill mills" disguised as pain clinics to sell the prescription drugs. Party bro and convicted felon Chris George runs the largest pill factory in the United States after taking advantage of Florida's lax drug licensing laws to create a multi-million dollar business. Over the course of two years, his company, American Pain, delivers more than 20 million doses of opioids to thousands of people addicted to these drugs after they travel from across the United States to the Sunshine State. Then the FBI hatches a plan to take him down.

Part 6: Opioid Apocalypse
How rogue chemists and street gangs brought fentanyl to America - and the vicious Mexican cartel that controls this deadly opioid today - the CJNG. In 2021, synthetic opioids killed more than 50,000 Americans — and in many cases, it was a specific, lethal form, fentanyl. It was first brought to the United States by a chemist on the wrong side of the law and a Chicago street gang, and today its largest supplier is one of the most bloodthirsty and militarily powerful cartels in Mexican history: the CJNG cartel, led by the elusive drug lord "El Mencho." The opioid crisis in the US is a lucrative business for the CJNG. The highly armed criminal organization controls the trade in the synthetic opioid fentanyl.