Ever-more-potent chemicals frustrate U.S. ‘war on drugs’

On Feb. 12, Joaquin Guzman Loera, aka “El Chapo,” was convicted of multiple crimes related to running the Sinaloa drug cartel, Mexico’s largest. Thirteen days before his conviction, authorities seized enough of the synthetic opioid called fentanyl for 100 million lethal doses. It was hidden in a truck carrying cucumbers through the Nogales port of legal entry. On Feb. 28, authorities at the port of Newark inspecting a container ship that had arrived from Colombia found inside a container supposedly filled with dried fruit 3,200 pounds of cocaine, worth $77 million on U.S. streets. This was two days after Don Winslow published “The Border,” the final volume in his 1,900-page trilogy of novels (“The Power of the Dog” and “The Cartel”) about the cartels and the U.S. “war on drugs.” He could hardly have arranged a better launch for his book, which is already on best-seller lists.

His thesis is that the war on drugs resembles the Vietnam War in its futility and its collateral damage to Mexicans, more than 250,000 of whom have died and an additional 40,000 have disappeared, according to the Financial Times, in the past dozen years from violence associated with rivalrous cartels and law-enforcement measures. Those endless photos of confiscated sacks of drugs do resemble old photos of dead Viet Cong: body counts of replaceable bodies. El Chapo, 61, will die in a U.S. “supermax” prison, and his incarceration — he has been in custody since 2016 — will make no difference regarding drug flows.

Wonder what the Central Americans who trek through Mexico to the U.S. border are fleeing? Read Winslow’s description of a 10-year-old Guatemalan living off a garbage dump, alert for trucks bringing garbage from the better neighborhoods.

Winslow might be right about sinister involvements of some U.S. financial institutions in handling the cartels’ billions. He could, however, have omitted the very thinly disguised President Donald Trump, and his son-in-law who knowingly uses cartel money to rescue himself from a bad Manhattan real estate bet. One reason to read fiction is to avoid reading about those people.

Every day 4,500 trucks pass, necessarily with usually minimal inspection, through three legal entry points along the U.S.-Mexico border. Any wall would be irrelevant to interrupting drug shipments. As is the strategy of bringing down cartel kingpins. The New York Times reports that in 2016 and 2017, when El Chapo was in custody, “Mexican heroin production increased by 37 percent and seizures of fentanyl in places like Nogales more than doubled.”

The “supply side” attack on drugs is frustrated by, among other things, geography and the torrent of south-north commerce. The “demand side” is frustrated by declining prices (the supply-side failure) for increasingly potent products, such as fentanyl, which has passed prescription opioids and heroin in overdose deaths. Says New York University’s Mark A.R. Kleiman: In 1979, a milligram of pure heroin sold for about $9 in today’s prices; today it costs less than 25 cents. “Fifty grams of fentanyl — just over an ounce and a half — has the punch of a kilogram of heroin, and it’s way, way cheaper.” And “the fentanyls aren’t going to be the last class of purely synthetic and super-potent recreational chemicals; they’re just the first,” said Kleiman. Worse living through chemistry, even if it disadvantages the crop-growing cartels of Winslow’s epic.