Mexican authorities seized two packages sent by mail from the synthetic opioid fentanyl on Monday. The Federal Police found almost a kilo in the packages sent by regular mail through the International Airport of Mexico City. The shipments were addressed to addresses in Culiacán, capital of the state of Sinaloa, and in the municipality of Ecatepec, in the State of Mexico.
The finding of fentanyl processing facilities in these sites suggests that the shipments were intended to be diluted and compressed into pills. Three days earlier, Mexican soldiers found about one-third of a kilo of fentanyl pills in a courier shipment at an airport in the city of Querétaro, north of Mexico City. These pills were sent from Culiacán to a city on the border with the United States.
The fentanyl map has spread throughout the country as the consumption epidemic grows in the US …
The use of fentanyl is booming in the United States. With support from the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Academics, InSight Crime traced the distribution chain, and the role of Mexican criminal organizations in the business, in our series on fentanyl. Below you will find the graphs with which we illustrate the reality of this segment.
The alarming increase in deaths due to overdoses of synthetic opioids and the parallel increase in the presence of fentanyl shows how quickly an offer and demand for consolidated drugs can be overcome in the market. In a crude application of free market theory, fentanyl is the newest product, with the lowest price and the easiest to manufacture. Demand has overflowed, and consumers pay the price by thousands.
Fentanyl and its precursors are produced in numerous chemical plants in China, trafficked through Mexican ports and transported to the border and entered into the United States using consolidated Mexican groups, by land, sea and air. But they also pass directly from China to the United States through the postal service, which threatens to take Mexican groups out of business definitively.
The majority of fentanyl seizures in Mexico between 2013 and 2018 occurred in the vicinity of the border crossings of Tijuana and Nogales or in the states of Baja California and Sonora. That same corridor is traditionally under the control of some of the largest criminal organizations in Mexico.
Although they seem to play an important role in the business, large criminal groups such as the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel (CJNG) are not monolithic operators. Rather, they depend on specialized subcontractors throughout the distribution chain.
Data from public access seizures of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Internal Security Investigations (HSI), and local authorities show significant increases in fentanyl seizures in the United States and along the border with Mexico, indicating an increase in the role played by criminal groups in the business.
The consumption of fentanyl is strongest in the northeastern United States, where Dominican gangs have traditionally controlled the merado of white powder heroin that mixes well with fentanyl. These criminal groups have moved their operations to smaller populations and are transforming their sales to concentrate on substances with fentanyl only, which little by little is completely removing the heroin.
The versatility of fentanyl and the addictive nature of its nature have contributed to its popularity among drug trafficking groups, which are increasingly mixing fentanyl with a number of legacy drugs to increase their sales. The final consumers, in many cases, do not know that they are consuming fentanyl.
This article is part of a series on the growing demand for fentanyl and its fateful consequences, carried out with the support of the Institute of Mexico at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. See the whole series here .
Source: sinembargo, insightcrime
The Mazatlan Post
