Heroin is causing big problems in the windy city. According to a recent study, Chicago has one of the largest problems with heroin and the problems associated with its use. Taking into account every other metropolitan region in the country, Chicago ranks at the top.
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It would stand to reason that drug smugglers and dealers would not want to sell customers a product that can kill swiftly as living customers are much more profitable. According to a recent Google News piece, however, a form of ultra-potent heroin is being pushed for as little as $10 a bag.
A senior at Vermont’s Danville High School is about to be a published writer at 17 years old. Her book “Mother Where Art Thou?” chronicles her experience with her mother’s addiction to heroin.
Read more about High School Senior Writes Book About Mother’s Heroin Addiction
Imagine heroin addicts ordering their daily fix by cell phone, just as easily as calling for a home-delivery pizza. That’s the ingenious business model employed by the enterprising immigrant boys from Xalisco, Mexico to not only introduce U.S. customers to Mexican black tar heroin but also to get them hooked. Black tar heroin is inexpensive, readily available, and highly addictive – three ingredients to a business model guaranteed to supply long-term customers.
How did this all come to pass? Let’s take a look.
Xalisco Boys – The Origins of the Network
The story of how Mexican black tar heroin made its way to the United States has been well documented by L. A. Time’s reporter Sam Quinones in The Heroin Road, a three-part series. Sugar cane farm boys from Xalisco, in the Pacific state of Nayarit, Mexico, flocked to the U.S., lured by the opportunity to make money to send home to their families. They would become dealers, of sorts, working for Xalisco drug bosses, purveyors of Mexican black tar heroin. But that’s more toward the end of the story. How the network came to be didn’t just happen overnight.
The idea was cooked up in the early 1990s by two men serving time in the Northern Nevada Correctional Center. The crimes for which they were incarcerated – drug offenses. One of the men, who called himself Max, knew about heroin trade in the U.S., and said his partner, a native of Xalisco, had access to both workers and black tar back in his hometown. Xalisco County (the town of Xalisco and a number of other villages) is made up of a lot of ranchos and small villages, each ferociously independent. Thus, there could be no single person controlling a cartel.
Once the system was in place, the two partners got down to serious work. They paid money to the Arellano-Felix cartel for permission to bring the black tar heroin across the border in Tijuana. They then set up a business model and a heroin ring in Reno, Nevada.
Max and his partner disdained the old way of selling heroin out of houses, which were easy targets for police and Drug Enforcement Agency raids. Instead, they devised a unique selling and delivery method. Customers would call a number, and the dealers would get a page, and then deliver the agreed-upon drugs via car – directly to the customer. The dealers would only carry the black tar heroin in tiny uninflated balloons they held in their mouths. If they got arrested, the charges would be less severe due to the small amount. And, they didn’t drive expensive drug trafficking organization (DTO) makes like Cadillac Escalades. They drove beaters or inexpensive sedans, clean but not too flashy. They dressed modestly and never carried guns, didn’t engage in violence of any kind. All this was designed not to draw attention.
Another part of the Xalisco boys unique business model involves selling to white middle-class, working clientele – and not to African Americans or Latinos. In cities, especially, where there are plenty of young white people, there is no shortage of black tar heroin customers. In addition, Mexican black tar heroin is marketed as a cheap and easy substitute for OxyContin, Percocet and other prescription painkillers. This strategy has been particularly successful in parts of the country where there are high addiction rates to these painkillers, in such areas as California, the nation’s Rust Belt, and Appalachia.
Max and his partner are not the only Xalisco boys starting up their own networks for Mexican black tar heroin in the U.S. Once the word spread, systems began cropping up all over the place. Immigrants told friends and family back in Xalisco and soon other farm boys got in on the bandwagon, all eager to make a little money and climb out of poverty. It wasn’t about flashy cars and big homes and all the material things – at least, not at first. It did, however, help lift families hard hit and maybe put in a new TV, fix the plumbing, pay for children’s schooling and a few modest pleasures. The Xalisco boys began as drivers, earning up to $1,000 a week, putting in their time to learn the business, to see how things were done. Then, back home in Xalisco, they’d assemble their own supplies of black tar before returning to the states as crew chiefs.
In the Mexican black tar heroin business, it’s all about who gets the customers. Price wars are not uncommon, either, as one outfit seeks to undercut another – and secure the most clientele. In the push to get new users, dealers offered addicts rewards for referrals – 8 to 10 free balloons for every $1,000 of business they brought in.
Staging Places: Southern California and Phoenix
Nothing if not ingenious, the Xalisco drug bosses steered clear of established heroin organizations in the big cities of the U.S., opting instead to use Southern California and Phoenix, Arizona as their staging base of operations. Networks have sprung up in, among other places, Boise, Idaho; Indianapolis, Indiana; Nashville, Tennessee; Reno, Nevada; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. From there, the sticky stuff (black tar heroin is dark and sticky, hence the name) wends its way into the suburbs and small towns of America.
Until the late 1990s, Mexican black tar heroin was generally confined to the Western part of the country (West of the Mississippi). To the East, Columbian powder heroin reigned. That all changed within the last decade, due, in part, to U.S.-funded efforts to eradicate Columbian poppy fields. The 2009 National Drug Threat Assessment issued by the U.S. Justice Department says Mexican heroin production reached an estimated 18 metric tons in 2007. It is estimated that black tar heroin now accounts for two-thirds of the heroin market in this country. According to the Assessment, Mexican DTOs are the greatest drug trafficking threat to the U.S. They maintain drug distribution networks or supply drugs to distributors in more than 230 U.S. cities and generate billions of dollars in illicit proceeds annually.
A heroin addiction was fueling the crimes committed by one James A. McDougal. He was sentenced last week, according to a piece in the Register Citizen. Before leaving the courtroom, McDougal apologized and blamed his crimes on his addiction.