As Americans Favor Domestic Pot, Mexican Cartels Switch to Heroin and Meth Nick Miroff - The Washington Post | |
go to original January 15, 2015 |
Mexico's drug cartels make billions of dollars a year - but what's the human cost of this dangerous business? (Sky News)
Mexican traffickers are sending a flood of cheap heroin and methamphetamine across the U.S. border, the latest drug seizure statistics show, in a new sign that America’s marijuana decriminalization trend is upending the North American narcotics trade.
The amount of cannabis seized by U.S. federal, state and local officers along the boundary with Mexico has fallen 37 percent since 2011, a period during which American marijuana consumers have increasingly turned to the more potent, higher-grade domestic varieties cultivated under legal and quasi-legal protections in more than two dozen U.S. states.
Made-in-the-USA marijuana is quickly displacing the cheap, seedy, hard-packed version harvested by the bushel in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains. That has prompted Mexican drug farmers to plant more opium poppies, and the sticky brown and black “tar” heroin they produce is channeled by traffickers into the U.S. communities hit hardest by prescription painkiller abuse, offering addicts a $10 alternative to $80-a-pill oxycodone.
...U.S. law enforcement agents seized 2,181 kilograms of heroin last year coming from Mexico, nearly three times the amount confiscated in 2009.
Methamphetamine, too, has surged. Last year, 15,803 kilograms of the drug was seized along the border, up from 3,076 kilos in 2009.
Read the rest at The Washington Post
We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!
From activities like hiking, swimming, bike riding and yoga, to restaurants offering healthy menus, Vallarta-Nayarit is the ideal place to continue - or start - your healthy lifestyle routine.