Mexican Cartels Try to Create a Market for Meth in New York City

Newsweek ^ | 4/21/15 | VICTORIA BEKIEMPIS

[nickcarraway]

Law enforcement agencies have long wondered why methamphetamine, which ravaged so many American communities from the 1990s until the mid-2000s, didn’t take hold in New York City.

Because the New York City metropolitan area is the largest illegal drug market in the country, and because demand has been so high elsewhere in the U.S., the city’s law enforcement for decades “has always been anticipating a meth outbreak,” explains James Hunt, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s New York Division.

“We’ve just never seen it take off to the same degree,” Hunt tells Newsweek.

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Heroin, cocaine and marijuana remain the mainstays of the city’s illicit drug economy, while meth has stayed on the fringes of the club scene.

When there have been arrests for distribution of meth, they have mainly peaked at one or several pounds, and often occur in the city’s West Village neighborhood, officials say. Moreover, the rate at which meth has flowed into the city has been more of a trickle than a steady stream, given that it’s historically arrived in small quantities through the mail or occasionally via individuals traveling from the West Coast on airplanes.

So it was notable that authorities earlier this month collared near the Holland Tunnel a driver who, they allege, had 25 kilos of meth in his trunk. Officials believe the meth to be of Mexican origin, they tell Newsweek. Of course, one big bust does not a trend make, let alone serve as evidence of a potential drug “epidemic.”

It’s worth pointing out, though, that the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) meth seizures in New York have surged since fiscal year 2012. The DEA seized six kilos that year, but the total shot up to 44, 55 and 66 kilos in fiscal

[yldstrk]

I hate this stuff, it destroys families.

[Hot Tabasco]

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No thanks, I'll stick with meth.......

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

Much of the incentive to addict people will be removed. If you want to make the counter argument you might point to cigarettes and argue that tobacco companies gave free samples of cigarettes to soldiers etc. in an effort to addict them. But there is a whole different dynamic involved.

Cigarettes are legal and advertising is highly restricted. That's the approach that makes the most sense to me.

With regard to mind-altering substances, I would also support drug tax revenue paying for anti-drug advertising campaigns.

I think decriminalization is preferable to criminalization. More vice results from the latter than the former, as with alcohol prohibition.

Right now, anybody can walk into a hardware store and purchase spray paint or turpentine, and get high on it. But we don't see an army of huffing zombies walking the streets.

There will always be a certain percentage of the population that will take mind-altering drugs. But if we can't keep these drugs out of prisons, how can we keep them out of society? And moreover, as you say, when the price for these drugs drops, there is no financial incentive to "push" drugs. How many alcohol "pushers" do we see today? Anyway, this is for the people to decide. The current incremental approach to legalization seems prudent. And if this gradualist effort doesn't work, we can always revert to our current policy.

[ronnie raygun]

This along with illegal immigration is the governments friend, it erodes our existing society into anarchy and then they can crush and control

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

--- You want me to work hard so I can pay for meth addicts lives. ---

You're talking about welfare, or tax-funded treatment, right?

If so, that's a separate issue.

I don't support tax-funded drug treatment.

_____________________________________________________

If the use of mind-altering substances only affected the user, I think de-criminalization would be fairly easy to justify.

The toughest part of this issue is the externalities, i.e., the effect of drug use on families.

Clearly, families pay a heavy price when a family member becomes addicted to drugs. And those effects spill over to the rest of society.

Decriminalization probably won't result in a decrease in drug use, but it probably won't result in an increase, either. Currently, anyone who wants mind-altering drugs can get them.

What will change under a drug decriminalization regime is a reduction in gang warfare. Prohibition is the perfect analog.

_____________________________________________________

'This Is Working': Portugal, 12 Years after Decriminalizing Drugs

"We haven't found some miracle cure," Goulão says. Still, taking stock after nearly 12 years, his conclusion is, "Decriminalization hasn't made the problem worse."

At the moment, Goulão's greatest concern is the Portuguese government's austerity policies in the wake of the euro crisis. Decriminalization is pointless, he says, without being accompanied by prevention programs, drug clinics and social work conducted directly on the streets. Before the euro crisis, Portugal spent €75 million ($98 million) annually on its anti-drug programs. So far, Goulão has only seen a couple million cut from his programs, but if the crisis in the country grows worse, at some point there may no longer be enough money. It is simply by chance that the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) has its headquarters in Lisbon. Frank Zobel works here, analyzing various approaches to combating drugs, and he says he can observe "the greatest innovation in this field" right outside his office door.

No drug policy, Zobel says, can genuinely prevent people from taking drugs -- at least, he is not familiar with any model that works this way. As for Portugal, Zobel says, "This is working. Drug consumption has not increased severely. There is no mass chaos. For me as an evaluator, that's a very good outcome."

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

A comment from the Spiegel article:

daniel.oliveira.313 11/06/2014

Drug quantities,your comment is of a very ignorant person. First let me start by saying i dont do drugs and im from Portugal. Our economic recession is no different than the one that hit the Usa in 2008 or the one that is plaguing Europe right now, hitting countries like ours,Spain,Greece,Italy or Ireland hard. I dont see how you put one and the other together.

Second,let me say that i lived in the Us,10 years,and here we dont have the same gang violence and gang problems the Usa have. In fact we are a very peacefull nation despite this law.

I do remember as a kid seing a lot more junkies everywhere,it was an epidemic, you could see them everywhere, on the side of the roads,laying in front o bars, walking around town, and now its all changed for the better,much better.

[RC one]

It destroys people, families, and societies. People trafficking in it represent a clear and present danger to the country and the constitution.

[lowbridge]

“Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week”

You gotta pay me more than that ;-)

[Patton@Bastogne]

“Opium Wars” ...

[AnonymousConservative]

Meth addicts aren’t victims anymore than Darwin Award winners are. A victim tries to do the right thing and stuff drops on them out of the sky. A cancer patient is a victim. There was a cop in Jersey with two daughters he supported with two jobs who stopped to pick up a pizza and caught a stray bullet in the head from a driveby - that’s a victim.

Some gay dude at a party who wants to get high and have fun so he tries meth, despite all the problems it causes, and the laws regarding it is an idiot.

What nobody seems to grasp is the drug war is a proxy for building up the police state. We aren’t supposed to deploy the Army on American citizens. We aren’t supposed to deploy our intelligence agencies to spy on citizens. Yet we have created a civilian military just for use on our citizens. We have built up an intelligence apparatus that rivals our foreign agencies,, complete with technical surveillance skills to rival the CIA, spies who infiltrate wherever the intel is just like the CIA, and files on citizens which are just like the CIA gathers on enemies overseas, and its sole purpose is to spy on Americans within our borders. I’d rather they used the CIA - at least the CIA would have other stuff on its plate to distract it. I’m talking a CIA devoted to American citizens.

And I’m not talking pulling phone meta data. I’m talking phase interference microphones on telephone poles that listen in to the conversations in houses without a warrant, on the premise the soundwaves are harvested at the poles. I’m talking a few thousand vehicle surveillance units around every major metropolitan area, constantly loitering and watching until control assigns their sector a target. I’m talking thousands of trained infiltrators, just like foreign spies, who are backstopped daily to get hired on in banks, hospitals, wherever intel is, so they can grab it without waiting for a warrant, and pass it back to the intelligence division of their agency for analysis, to do a parallel construction. Look up the term - taking a cue form the foreign intel agencies, they don’t even abide by the laws now, and then lie in court about how they got the info - they actually developed an official term for the procedure. This is a dangerous path, fueled in large part by the drug war.

Its one thing when it yields a stop with a few hundred pounds of meth, but the procedure is, every drug dealer put under surveillance coverage drags in all houses with contiguous property lines, in the event those neighbors are couriering messages/money/packages for him. LE doesn’t want to find out, six months in, they were getting played all along, so everyone gets coverage. You want them listening to your private conversations with your wife, at night, for this drug war, just because your neighbor is an idiot? Pulling your trash so they can catalog your wife’s menstrual cycle, and trying to see if you have any tax issues they could use to pressure you if they had to? They do that.

And all of that assumes we won’t end up with a socialist who decides to drop a totalitarian hammer someday. Believe me, if that happens, he already has the secret police machinery and the military force to take out whoever he wants, and I’ll bet they have files on a ton of innocent citizens already.

This is a square example of sacrificing liberty for security, made worse by the fact we are sacrificing freedom to an ever more powerful government to save people who don’t want to be saved, and who don’t care enough about us to not take that first hit of drugs, or bear the consequences of their own actions if they do.

I say screw-em. Legalize it, and let their actions have consequences. If the consequences get bad enough they’ll get help, and if not, sayonara. I’m sick of people telling me I’m responsible for every selfish idiot who can’t think about anyone but themselves.

[nathanbedford]

It is difficult to improve in any respect on your post.

Our loss of privacy, the corruption of our courts, the corruption of our law enforcement, the assaults overall on the Constitution, the cynicism, and the utter, hopeless of the war on drugs, the pointlessness of it all begs the question, why?

It is a war we have lost and cannot win because more we succeed the more we fail. The more we interdict the trade in drugs the more we drive up the price and the more attractive we make the gamble. We contrive in spite of ourselves to lose.

The more we strive, the more we raise the stakes, the fewer our precious individual rights, the more we degrade ourselves and sacrifice our dignity, and, as you so eloquently point out, the more we engross government and imperil our precious liberty.

In playing God, in trying to save the addict from the consequences of his folly, we victimize all society, we transfer the pain to the innocent and we make it all unspeakably profitable for the very worst among us.

[ConservingFreedom]

It destroys people, families, and societies.

Yes, the War on Drugs is doing all that, as was Prohibition before it.

[AnonymousConservative]

You’re preaching to the choir.

The most ridiculous aspect is, it would be one thing if any of these efforts have helped, and it looked like we were stopping it, or even slowing it down. But it isn’t even having an effect. We’ve deployed more money than our nation can afford (and we’ll probably collapse at some point because of it), to launch the most sophisticated operations any nation ever could, for decades, and nothing has changed. You can still buy whatever you want, dirt cheap, on almost any street corner in some neighborhoods - and it is clear you always will be able to.

Indeed, things are getting worse. More Heroin, more meth, all cheaper than ever, and we have articles where the LE fighting the war actually say, “We’re all just waiting for it to get really bad now. We think that will begin any day. We’re actually surprised it hasn’t started already. We sit around looking at each other saying, it doesn’t make sense, why isn’t it happening?”

All this money, all the dangers to our liberty, all the intrusiveness, a collapsed state even (though admittedly, that has a lot of over-spending causes) all to “save” people who are screwing us with their own selfishness, and nothing even changes. What is the point again?

[ConservingFreedom]

What is the point again?

It's interesting to ponder the hypothesis that from the government's perspective the War on Drugs is going exactly as planned. But how anyone who doesn't directly benefit in power or money from the War on Drugs can still be supporting it is an abiding mystery.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

I remember when cocaine was a”fringe” drug. Marijuana, Heroin and LSD were the “in” drugs.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

A friend of mine got hooked on meth years ago. Lost his wife, family, job, and is now in prison for stealing to support his habit.

We had a neighbor near here who got busted for making meth. The cleanup required the ground around his trailer house to be scraped and hauled off. The trailer was so contaminated that after scrapping half of it, the rest was left to air out for two years before the scrappers removed the rest.

[dinodino]

You have some twisted, effed up logic. Why don’t you read the Constitution sometime?

[RC one]

Alcohol, now legalized, has ruined countless lives. There's no way you can say that society was improved once it was legalized. I'm not saying alcohol should be made illegal again however. I'm saying that the destruction wrought from legalizing alcohol pales in comparison to the destruction that would surely ensue after legalizing hard drugs like meth and opiates. There are some mistakes that a nation simply can not recover from. This would be one of those.

I'm also saying that the war on drugs has failed because it was never fought as an actual war with the intent of winning. Waged properly, the war on drugs could be won in a decade. We should wage it properly before we throw up our hands and call it futile.

I'm also saying that we will eventually give up every shred of our national sovereignty once we legalize these substances.

[nickcarraway]

Where in the Constitution does it say I have to work to support people made poor choices?

[ConservingFreedom]

Alcohol, now legalized, has ruined countless lives. There's no way you can say that society was improved once it was legalized.

Sure I can - society was improved by an end to alcohol's enrichment of criminals, with all the ills that sprang from that, and from those who chose to drink no longer having a Prohibition-created incentive to drink liquor rather than beer or wine.

I'm not saying alcohol should be made illegal again however.

Why not, given everything you've said about alcohol?

I'm saying that the destruction wrought from legalizing alcohol pales in comparison to the destruction that would surely ensue after legalizing hard drugs like meth and opiates.

Legalization certainly shouldn't start there - and it's possible that legalizing pot might leave us with a War on Drugs we can actually win, which is not the case now.

I'm also saying that the war on drugs has failed because it was never fought as an actual war with the intent of winning. Waged properly, the war on drugs could be won in a decade. We should wage it properly before we throw up our hands and call it futile.

How would a properly waged War on Drugs differ from its current implementation?