It is no doubt shocking to people how seemingly brazen was the kidnapping in broad daylight of four Americans during rush hour traffic, fully recorded by a camera that the kidnappers no doubt were aware of and didn’t care, in the notoriously violent border city of Matamoros controlled by the Gulf Cartel. People who live there every day rarely leave their homes unless they have to, and never at night, but somehow they have just become "used" to living this way. There is no one—meaning the government or local law enforcement—who is much help to them, with corruption rampant and a tendency for cartel militias to hold an entire city hostage when the occasional drug lord is arrested.
We are told that the Americans traveled all the way from the Carolinas so that one woman could have a “belly-tuck” procedure, but the kidnappers apparently believed they were "Haitians" who had stiffed them on a drug deal. Like the Mormon family that was killed in a shootout in 2019, they were not targeted (two were shot to death) because they were Americans, but because of a “mix-up”—apparently due to the fact that the SUVs both parties were driving are rival drug cartels’ rides of “choice.”
Visitors to popular tourist sites in Mexico are told by local business owners not to interact with anyone trying to sell them drugs, because it only keeps them around. But many do anyways (perhaps the reason why some are even there), and if there is a "market" to be had, rival gangs compete for the action, violence ensues, and then we see scenes like this where soldiers are forced to patrol the beaches to keep the tourists “safe” from the predilections of a few of them:
Meanwhile, I've discovered that the alley door of the office building I currently work in (and usually the only person left after "business" hours), seems to be a popular hangout for people conducting certain forms of “business”—including “natural”—since it is situated in such a way that one is unlikely to encounter interference if they are looking for privacy. The alley generally has less riff-raff hanging around than in front of the building (on Third Avenue, just a few blocks from Pine Street where there has been four homicides since 2018, including the one in 2020 where eight innocent bystanders were shot in crossfire by rival gang members. As pointed out in a recent post, one of the shooters was acquitted (he acted in “self-defense”), while it is being reported that one of the shooters still awaiting trial has been released to the “care” of his grandmother, despite the objections of prosecutors that he had already proven himself to be a flight risk.
Thus the alley door seems the “safer” bet to enter or exit the building, but as indicated that doesn’t mean that it is ignored as a “safe” place to conduct illicit activity. The other day I encountered two vagrants who were apparently inspecting their haul of “found” items for anything worth keeping. I told them that they were interfering with my work, and that I would call the police unless they removed themselves and their loot.
A half-hour later they appeared to be gone, but I observed that the outside light that is motion-detection activated was still on; further investigation discovered two apparently teenage boys—one black, one white—crouched behind the door inspecting little green pills laid out on the pavement. When the black individual saw me looking through the door window, he quickly gathered-up the pills, and the white individual tried to “explain” that they were just trying to stay out of the “rain,” which it wasn’t doing at that time. I gave them 10 minutes to vacate before I would call the police, and they didn't waste time obliging my request.
This was obviously a drug transaction taking place; I’ve never tried anything “harder” than pot (I didn't "inhale" so it didn't do anything for me), and that was 40 years ago, so I can only "guess" at what they were dealing. Maybe it was “rainbow” fentanyl, but that isn’t supposed to have made its way to this state, let alone Seattle, right? Well, let’s just for argument’s sake say that they were dealing in rainbow fentanyl, which is “faked” to appear "legit," and is in multiple colors made to look like those kiddie vitamin pills. So let’s be “real”: “kids” know exactly what this stuff is and what it is supposed to do; they just don't know their "limits."
What's the point of all of this? That age old question, what came first, the chicken or the egg? It isn’t as simple as it sounds. In the world of illegal drugs, it all started out that people felt pain and wanted something to make it less painful short of being dead, so medical science sought out some method to do this. Once prayer didn't work, it almost always involved a substance taken internally, and if it worked, it was exploited.
If these miracle medicines (those opium-based, for example) also created a sense of “pleasure” as a “side effect,” then some people used it for “non-medical” reasons. As far as “recreational” drugs are concerned, the Greek philosopher Aristotle would tell us the actuality of physical pain or pleasure (i.e. the “chicken”), would come before the potentiality (i.e, the “egg”) of the drugs used for the effect.
And so we can deduce that without the insatiable "need" for controlled substances—even if only to “experiment” with them because it is “cool”—in this country, and the fact that the vast majority of both users and dealers manage to operate without the notice of the law—there seems little that can be done to stop it. David Bier of the CATO Institute noted the futility of U.S. efforts to stop the drug trade, especially of fentanyl, and that tightened U.S. border control policy in fact only makes it worse. During Prohibition, for example, both the consumption of and the violence related to the trade of alcohol increased dramatically.
Bier noted that despite what Republicans specifically and Americans generally believe, 99 percent of fentanyl is brought into the country not by unauthorized immigrants, but by U.S. citizens who are rarely stopped at legal entry points. In 2021, 86 percent of arrests for fentanyl trafficking inside the country were U.S. citizens, and this may be an understatement if law enforcement tried to target non-citizen immigrants.
Bier also observed that only 0.02 percent of illegal immigrants (not enough to be measured on a graph) detained at the border possessed any fentanyl at all. He also pointed out that fentanyl became the drug of choice to bring across the border because it has much more potency that other drugs (heroin, pot, cocaine) even when packed in small, easily-concealed sizes. Despite border policies that banned even asylum seekers, fentanyl's presence in the U.S. not only increased dramatically, but so did fentanyl-related deaths, doubling during the Trump years.
Bier goes on
It is monstrous that tens of thousands of people are dying unnecessarily every year from fentanyl. But banning asylum and limiting travel backfired. Reducing deaths requires figuring out the cause, not jumping to blame a group that is not responsible. Instead of attacking immigrants, policymakers should focus on effective solutions that help people at risk of a fentanyl overdose.
He also observes that during the pandemic, “consumers” of hard drugs like heroin were finding it difficult to find a “supply,” and switched to fentanyl since it is more potent in smaller quantities, and was easier to find. But despite the fact that fentanyl is much more potent-per-pound than other drugs and death by overdose is well-known, that hasn't stopped its use from increasing exponentially.
Further, “designer” offshoots like cyclopropyl fentanyl are “homegrown,” while “legal” offshoots like carfentanil—which is used to “knock-out” large mammals like elephants and is 100 times more potent that "regular" fentanyl—has only recently become a “controlled” substance.
And it isn’t just from Mexico that China-originating fentanyl is coming from, since in that county fentanyl is not a “controlled” substance even when it is put on such a list by the U.S., and China predictably has little incentive to want to “help” the U.S. control it, especially given its role in the “production” and spread of Covid-19. The 2020 DEA report notes that
Asian TCOs (transnational criminal organizations) specialize in the trafficking of marijuana and 4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine (MDMA), and, to a lesser extent, cocaine and methamphetamine. They are also heavily involved in international money laundering activities, working with Colombian and Mexican TCOs. Asian TCOs actively conduct drug trafficking activities on both U.S. coasts and have distribution networks stretching across the country. U.S.-based Asian TCOs work in concert with Asian TCOs in Canada, Asia, and other international locations to import and export illicit drugs to and from the United States. Asian TCOs are mostly small, independent groups. Some operate with investment from Asia-based crime bosses in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. Asian TCOs use their contacts in Asian diaspora communities in the United States and around the world to co-opt or establish businesses to facilitate drug trafficking and money laundering. Businesses concentrated in California and New York facilitate the transshipment and importation of drug loads orchestrated by Asian TCOs. Asian TCOs also recruit diaspora community members to act as couriers for money and drugs.
It also notes that fentanyl is not just smuggled across the border, but through “international mail and express consignment shipping services, primarily in powder and counterfeit pill form, indicating clandestinely produced fentanyl as opposed to pharmaceutical fentanyl.” The focus on fentanyl coming across the border (and we can assume most of it does), very likely leads to a lack of real knowledge about how much of it simply arrives through the mail as “legal” pharmaceuticals. As I noted in a previous post, Chinese fentanyl producers do not feel that what they are doing is “illegal”—not “surprisingly” Wuhan is supposedly the epicenter of fentanyl production—and freely advertise their wares for online selling, albeit under “creative” brand-naming to fool U.S. inspectors.
Nevertheless, with the focus primarily on the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco cartels as the “easiest” targets of fentanyl villainy for PR purposes, Bier suggests that this focus on the “dealer” instead of the "consumer" who is driving all of this (who in the U.S. is now conveniently seen as a "victim" and not committing a crime, much like prostitutes) "success" only means one of two things: the creation of alternative sources (as what happened during the “war” against the Colombian cartels)—or the “switch” to new, perhaps even more dangerous, drugs. Count on Americans to throw common sense out the window in search of the "next big thing."
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