Drug smuggling

Opioids and Mexican Drug Cartels: Worse Living through Chemistry

On February 12, Joaquin Guzman Loera, a.k.a. “El Chapo,” was convicted of multiple crimes related to running the Sinaloa drug cartel, Mexico’s largest. Thirteen days before his conviction, authorities seized enough of the synthetic opioid called fentanyl for 100 million lethal doses. It was hidden in a truck carrying cucumbers through the port of legal entry in Nogales, Ariz. On February 28, authorities at the port of Newark inspecting a container ship that had arrived from Colombia found inside a container supposedly filled with dried fruit 3,200 pounds of cocaine, worth $77 million on U.S streets. This was two days after Don Winslow published The Border, the final volume in his 1,900-page trilogy of novels (The Power of the Dog and The Cartel) about the cartels and the U.S. “war on drugs.” He could hardly have arranged a better launch for his book, which is already on best-seller lists.

His thesis is that the war on drugs resembles the Vietnam War in its futility and its collateral damage to Mexicans, more than 250,000 of whom have died, and another 40,000 have disappeared, according to the Financial Times, in the past dozen years from violence associated with rivalrous cartels and law-enforcement measures. Those endless photos of confiscated sacks of drugs do resemble old photos of dead Vietcong — body counts of replaceable bodies. El Chapo, 61, will die in a U.S. “supermax” prison, and his incarceration — he has been in custody since 2016 — will make no difference regarding drug flows.