They’ve built up vast distribution networks all across the country. You can get them in Kentucky, you can get them in Los Angeles, you can get them in Oregon. That’s what the Mexican trafficking world has achieved with these two drugs in particular - fentanyl and methamphetamine.
SLOW CRACK BACK METH CRACKER
It doesn’t matter where you are - you can find the Applebees, the Cracker Barrel, the same Hampton Inns and Motel 6s and Shell gas stations. Think about this: If you drive coast to coast on the freeways, you will see that corporate America has provided almost identical offerings all across the country. Geographically speaking, if that’s where the products are coming from, where are they going? As we look at the overdose data from the past year, it seems to be touching almost every corner of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of California) The shift was away from China to Mexico, where the chemicals are coming in in huge numbers. That quantity is due to the fact that it’s now the Mexican trafficking world making it, with those unlimited chemicals from ports on the Pacific coast of Mexico, and funneling it through border crossings among the millions of cars and trucks that cross back and forth to the United States every year. But it’s highly unlikely we’d ever be able to hit the supply of fentanyl we’re seeing now with mailed packages from China. At first, it was Chinese companies sending fentanyl over right in the mail - you buy it on the dark web, and they send you a kilo. But with fentanyl, there’s another issue. Now it’s $2.25.įirst of all, the amount that you need to make a huge, huge profit is actually relatively small. In the Nashville area, for example, methamphetamine was $12.50 for an ounce. There’s many ways of making this stuff.Īs a result, the price drop for methamphetamine in many regions is 80% or more. Of course, most of them are very toxic - but there’s lye, cyanide, hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid. The chemicals are different, but they’re all easily available, they’re all industrial, they’re legal. You can make ghastly quantities with many different chemical procedures or hacks, right? You can make it this way, you can make it that way. With methamphetamine, it’s no longer limited by one precursor that’s difficult to replicate. And if you have the chemicals, you can make those 50 kilos over and over and over and over. Those synthetic drugs don’t need seasons: You don’t need four months to make 50 kilos of methamphetamine, you need about a week. You can make these year-round, provided that you have access to the chemicals. As people get hooked, it seems like the synthetic nature of these products mitigates the barriers to mass-production. Let me ask you about that, because, when it comes to something so addicting, I often wonder about the cyclical relationship between supply and demand. It just so happened that we went into isolation at the very moment when these drugs hit their apex. It had been building for years towards that. The problem was, it was at this very moment that the Mexican trafficking world had achieved something that no other traffickers had achieved in the history of our country: covering the country with the most deadly and mind-mangling drugs we’ve ever seen. Attention to the crisis was really growing until February 2020, and then all the focus shifted - I’m not saying wrongly - to the pandemic. But there seems to be a bit of a paradox here: a crisis that was exacerbated by COVID-19, but also obscured by it.
It’s easy to imagine how the pandemic played a role in this surge - driving up anxiety and depression, cutting off access to treatment. Sam, this is the first time we’ve seen the number of overdose deaths in one year exceed 100,000. This interview has been edited for clarity. How did that happen? The Times spoke to Sam Quinones, who chronicled the drug trade in the 2015 book “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic,” and most recently explored the evolution of the epidemic in his new book “The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth.” That startling figure exceeds the number of traffic and gun fatalities combined. More than 100,000 Americans died of overdoses in the one-year period leading up to April, an almost 30% jump from the prior year, according to data released this week by the National Center for Health Statistics. for years hit a milestone during the pandemic. The drug crisis that has gripped the U.S.