photo: Reuters - poppy plantations in Sierra de Culiacan, Sinaloa
If anyone though that the US heroin epidemic was a transitory trend, the new direction taken by the Mexican cartels will soon dispel that notion.
As the US moves to slowly legalize the use of marijuana or decriminalize possession of small quantities of the drug, the price of pot in the streets is plummeting. If the current campaign to legalize marijuana spreads to the lower 48, the cartel would suffer a great blow to their traffic and revenues.
But the innumerable new addicts to opiates, in great part created by the medical dispensation of the medications for even minor pain management, who are turning to heroin, have paved the way for a new and lucrative future by the Sinaloa cartel.
The cartel has begun mass cultivation of poppy to make up for the loss in revenue from the pot market. In the Sierra de Culiacan, a soldier shows the poppy crop discovered recently, as evidenced by the photo above. Sierra de Culiacan is in Sinaloa province, Mexico.
Mexican farmers working for the cartel have switched to the poppy crop when their previous marijuana product barely earned them enough to make a living. The heroin that is now ubiquitous on US soil is, in the majority, derived from Mexico. And its price is also becoming cheaper, while its purity has generally soared. All this spells trouble for the Drug Enforcement Authorities and health authorities in the US. With cheaper, purer heroin come more drug overdoses and a greater number of addicts.
Farmers interviewed on the ground curse the US's new effort to legalize marijuana. The price of a kilo of pot has gone from 100$ to 25$.
Poppy plantations are now sprouting up all over Central America. The police and armed forces are finding them in the most unusual places. When Mexico switches to heroin, and therefore poppy cultivation, so does the rest of central America. Poppy cultivation in the American continent is not new. In fact, so far, most of the poppy growing occurred in Colombia.
This new trend is already showing up at the US border in a big way: the catch of heroin caught at border checkpoints between Mexico and the US has netted 2,162 kilos in 2013. That is a 500% increase in the past 5 years. Heroin
is also more difficult to detect than pot or other drugs, because it is
not as fragrant. It is also differently concealed than pot, usually
inside metal frames or containers.
What is more worrisome is that heroin, usually an urban problem, is now easily available in places where before it was not found. That is because the couriers who used to ferry 'pills' - opiates and painkillers - are now ferrying heroin to rural provinces and the American hinterland for those people to whom the pills are no longer available or whose price has grown too high. A single Oxycontin pill can fetch 80 dollars on the market, and most of the pills are now no longer crushable. One of these places is Appalachia, the other is St. Louis. Portland which saw its own heroin crisis almost 20 years ago, is now becoming an significant heroin hub.
In the 1990's heroin made a comeback as a snortable drug. However, for people who have crossed over from pills such as Oxycontin, the high from snorting heroin is not enough. That is why injecting heroin has become the dangerous trend that is killing so many in the US east and in the midwest.
The marketing assault on addicts by the cartels has pushed the price of a heroin dose as low as 4$. That is a price that makes it available to anyone, and can fit any budget.
Although the head of the Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin Guzman, has just recently been apprehended, the cartel will survive his arrest, making heroin a foremost danger to American society. Together with the US, Mexico is also looking to Europe and other places to widen its market reach.
The Mexican authorities have stepped up surveillance and crop destruction, which is made easier by the poppy cultivations' bright inflorescences, but the problem is that Mexico cannot by itself effectively curtail or terminate the cultivation of poppy.
Op_ed
Partial data: D.E.A. : 4.7.14
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