Why were the nine Americans killed in an ambush south of the border this week, including three mothers and their children, casualties of the opioid crisis in America too? wapo.st/2JVsZTh
No one's sure why they were killed by Mexican organized crime gangsters, but authorities -- and @realDonaldTrump -- say they were caught in the crossfire of two warring drug cartels, one linked to the biggest, the Sinaloa cartel.
What Mexico's increasingly powerful transnational criminal organizations are battling over — and why gang warfare has reached record heights — is the opportunity to make huge amounts of money trafficking fentanyl and other synthetic opioids into the U.S.
We tend to see the current opioid crisis primarily as the result of lapses in the public health safety net — the outcome of a push by Big Pharma, which created the market for these killer designer drugs by hooking millions of Americans on prescription pain pills...
... and the failure of Congress and successive administrations to stop it and provide adequate prevention and treatment programs.
That's true.
That's true.
But the current supply of fentanyl pushing the broader opioid crisis to unprecedented heights is increasingly being smuggled into the country by Mexican cartels, making it fastest-growing and most lethal drug in America -- far surpassing even heroin and prescription narcotics.
The surge has been so rapid— from roughly 3,000 deaths in 2013 to more than 30,000 five years later that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention even has a name for it now: the “third wave” of the opioid crisis.
The cartels quickly realized they could make previously unimaginable profits, with much less risk, from a drug that can be cooked up fast in clandestine labs, and in unlimited quantities, than from heroin, which requires cultivating and processing poppy plants.
Now, confidential U.S. intelligence indicates that Mexico’s two most powerful cartels, Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation, are moving to dramatically expand their fentanyl trafficking empires in America, in part by locally manufacturing the drug instead of buying it from China.
And that has the feds worried that America could soon be swamped by a tsunami of cheaper, more potent fentanyl as cartels fight over turf and U.S. market share. They fear gang violence, like that which killed the dual citizen Americans is somehow another harbinger of that...
Just like Mexico's recent arrest and release of convicted Sinaloa drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman after his hitmen laid siege to Culiacan. It's all related ... and it doesn't bode well for a U.S. already dealing w/ a massive death toll from fentanyl ...
... especially as Mexico's president insists he won't "go to war" with the cartels, but instead spend a year or more dealing with the societal problems that gave rise to them. But what does that mean for the flood of U.S.-bound fentanyl in the meantime?
Read more about that here: washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/1…
