Pubdate: Tue, 03 Feb 2015
Source: Honolulu Star-Advertiser (HI)
Copyright: 2015 Associated Press
Contact: 
http://www.staradvertiser.com/info/Star-Advertiser_Letter_to_the_Editor.html
Website: http://www.staradvertiser.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/5154
Author: Mark Stevenson, Associated Press

MEXICAN FARMERS FEED U.S. HEROIN BOOM

SIERRA MADRE DEL SUR, MEXICO (AP) - Red and purple blossoms with fat, 
opium-filled bulbs blanket the remote creek sides and gorges of the 
Filo Mayor mountains in the southern state of Guerrero.

The multibillion-dollar Mexican opium trade starts here, with poppy 
farmers so poor they live in woodplank, tin-roofed shacks with no 
indoor plumbing.

Mexican farmers from three villages interviewed by the Associated 
Press are feeding a growing addiction in the U.S., where heroin use 
has spread from back alleys to the cul-de-sacs of suburbia.

The heroin trade is a losing prospect for everyone except the Mexican 
cartels, who have found a new way to make money in the face of 
falling cocaine consumption and marijuana legalization in the United 
States. Once smaller-scale producers of low-grade black tar, Mexican 
drug traffickers are now refining opium paste into high-grade white 
heroin and flooding the world's largest market for illegal drugs, 
using the distribution routes they built for marijuana and cocaine.

It is a business that even the farmers don't like. In a rare 
interview with reporters, the villagers said that it's too difficult 
to ship farm products on roads so rough and close to the sky that 
cars are in constant danger of tumbling off the single-lane dirt 
roads that zigzag up to the fields. They say the small 
plastic-wrapped bricks of gummy opium paste are the only thing that 
will guarantee them a cash income.

"Almost everyone thinks the people in these mountains are bad people, 
and that's not true," said Humberto Nava Reyna, head of the Supreme 
Council of the Towns of the Filo Mayor, a group that promotes 
development projects in the mountains. "They can't stop planting 
poppies as long as there is demand, and the government doesn't 
provide any help."

Villagers granted access to their farms and agreed to interviews only 
if they were not identified, fearing it could draw attention from 
government drug eradicators or vengeful traffickers.

Residents say there are no local users. They hate the taste of the 
bitter paste, which they sometimes rub into their gums to sooth an 
aching tooth.

It all goes for export, a lucrative business mostly run by the Sinaloa Cartel.

According to the DEA's 2014 National Drug Threat Assessment, Mexico 
produces nearly half of the heroin found in the United States, up 
from 39 percent in 2008. While Afghanistan is by far the world's 
largest producer, it largely sends to markets in Europe and Asia.

Mexican government seizures of opium and eradication of poppy 
plantations have skyrocketed in recent years. The trends are 
consistent: Opium paste seizures in Mexico were up 500 percent 
between 2013 and 2014; poppy field eradications were up 47 percent; 
and seizures of the processed drug increased 42 percent. Along the 
U.S. border they are three times what they were in 2009.

MEXICAN HEROIN has become cheaper and more powerful at a time when 
Americans hooked on pharmaceutical opiates are looking for an 
affordable alternative. Combined with dangerous additives like 
fentanyl, a synthetic opiate also produced in Mexico, it is blamed 
for a wave of new addictions and overdoses in the U.S. Heroin deaths 
doubled from 2011 to 2013, while deaths from cocaine and prescription 
opiates remained steady, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

It used to be that Mexican cartels shipped brown heroin from Colombia 
along with their homegrown black tar. But all producers are making 
the high-grade white now, and Mexican criminal gangs have learned 
that they can increase their profits exponentially if they manage the 
whole production chain, as with methamphetamines, which they also 
control from precursor to user.

THE PRICE for the relatively low-quality marijuana the farmers used 
to grow at lower elevations has fallen, possibly because of the 
legalization and medical use of higher-quality U.S. marijuana. Most 
law enforcement officials say it's still too early to document an 
impact. But the farmers see a change. They only get about 250 pesos 
(about $17) per dried, pressed kilogram (2.2 pounds) of marijuana, 
compared with 13,000 pesos (nearly $900) per kilo of opium paste.

Many farmers say they would like to give up poppy cultivation and 
plant legitimate crops, in part because of the bloodshed the trade has brought.

Some growers have tried planting avocados, a crop that can bring cash 
income at similar altitudes in the neighboring state of Michoacan.

But avocados take at least seven years before they yield a viable 
amount of green, shiny fruit, and cultivation is expensive.

One farmer showed off young avocado trees before walking farther down 
his plot, into a narrow creek valley, where his "flower garden" grows.

"This," he said, pointing to the poppy bulb he has just scribed with 
a cutting tool to let the sap leak out, "is what finances that," he 
said, pointing uphill to the avocado trees.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom