Cartels are scrambling: Coronavirus snarls global drug trade
NEW YORK — The coronavirus is dealing a gut punch to the illegal drug trade, authorities say, paralyzing economies, closing borders and severing supply chains in China that traffickers rely on for the chemicals to make such profitable drugs as methamphetamine and the powerful opioid fentanyl.
One of the main suppliers that shut down is in Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the global outbreak.
Interviews with nearly two dozen law enforcement officials and trafficking experts found that Mexican and Colombian cartels are still plying their trade, as evidenced by a bust last month in which nearly $30 million worth of street drugs was seized in a new smuggling tunnel connecting a warehouse in Tijuana to southern San Diego. But the stay-home orders that have turned cities into ghost towns are disrupting steps including production, transport and sales.
Along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, through which the vast majority of illegal drugs cross, the normally bustling vehicle traffic that smugglers use for cover has slowed to a trickle. Bars, nightclubs and motels across the country that are ordinarily fertile marketplaces for drug dealers have shuttered. And prices for drugs in short supply have soared to gouging levels.
“They are facing a supply problem and a demand problem,” said Alejandro Hope, a security analyst and former official with CISEN, the Mexican intelligence agency. “Once you get them to the market, who are you going to sell to?”
But the COVID-19 pandemic also has limited law enforcement’s effectiveness, as departments cope with drug investigators working remotely, falling ill and navigating a new landscape in which their own activities have become more conspicuous. In Los Angeles County, half of the narcotics detectives have been put on patrol duty, potentially imperiling long-term investigations.
For sellers, virtually every illicit drug has been affected, with supply-chain disruptions at both the wholesale and retail level. Traffickers are stockpiling narcotics and cash along the border, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration even reports a decrease in money-laundering and online drug sales on the so-called dark web.
“The godfathers of the cartels are scrambling,” said Phil Jordan, a former director of the DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center.
Cocaine prices are up 20% or more in some cities. Heroin has become harder to find in Denver and Chicago, while supplies of fentanyl are falling in Houston and Philadelphia. In Los Angeles, the price of methamphetamine has more than doubled in recent weeks to $1,800 per pound.
“You have shortages but also some greedy bastards who see an opportunity to make more money,” said Jack Riley, the former deputy administrator of the DEA. “The bad guys frequently use situations that affect the national conscience to raise prices.”
Synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine and fentanyl have been among the most affected, in large part because they rely on precursor chemicals that Mexican cartels import from China, cook into drugs on an industrial scale and then ship to the U.S.
“This is something we would use as a lesson learned for us,” the head of the DEA, Uttam Dhillon, told AP. “If the disruption is that significant, we need to continue to work with our global partners to ensure that, once we come out of the pandemic, those precursor chemicals are not available to these drug-trafficking organizations.”
Cartels are increasingly shifting away from drugs that require planting and growing seasons, such as heroin and marijuana, in favor of synthetic opioids such as fentanyl. These can be cooked continuously through the year, are up to 50 times more powerful than heroin and produce a greater profit margin.
Though some clandestine labs that make fentanyl from scratch have popped up sporadically in Mexico, cartels are still very much reliant upon Chinese companies to get the precursor drugs.
Huge amounts of these mail-order components can be traced to a single, state-subsidized company in Wuhan that shut down after the outbreak earlier this year, said Louise Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center at George Mason University, which monitors Chinese websites selling fentanyl.
“The quarantine of Wuhan and all the chaos there definitely affected the fentanyl trade, particularly between China and Mexico,” said Ben Westhoff, author of “Fentanyl, Inc.”
“The main reason China has been the main supplier is the main reason China is the supplier of everything — it does it so cheaply,” Westhoff said. “There was really no cost incentive for the cartels to develop this themselves.”
But costs have been rising and, as in many legitimate industries, the coronavirus is bringing about changes.
Advertised prices across China for precursors of fentanyl, methamphetamine and cutting agents have risen between 25% and 400% since late February, said Logan Pauley, an analyst at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a Washington-based security research nonprofit. So even as drug-precursor plants in China are slowly reopening after the worst of the coronavirus crisis there, some cartels have been taking steps to decrease their reliance on overseas suppliers by enlisting scientists to make their own precursor chemicals.
Some Chinese companies that once pushed precursors are now advertising drugs such as hydroxychloroquine, which President Trump has promoted as potential treatment for COVID-19 despite a lack of scientific evidence of its efficacy, as well as personal protective gear such as face masks and hand sanitizers.
Meanwhile, the gummed-up situation on the U.S.-Mexico border resembles a stalled chess match where nobody, especially the traffickers, wants to make a wrong move, said Kyle Williamson, special agent in charge of the DEA’s El Paso field division.
“They’re in a pause right now,” Williamson said. “They don’t want to get sloppy and take a lot of risks.”
Some Mexican drug rings are even holding back existing methamphetamine supplies to manipulate the market, recognizing that “no good crisis should be wasted,” said Joseph Brown, the U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Texas.
“Some cartels have given direct orders to members of their organization that anyone caught selling methamphetamine during this time will be killed,” said Brown, whose sprawling jurisdiction stretches from the suburbs of Dallas to Beaumont.
To be sure, narcotics are still making their way into the U.S. Shelley said that the seizure of drugs in the newly discovered Tijuana-San Diego tunnel was notable in that only about two pounds of fentanyl was recovered, “much lower than usual shipments.”
Trump announced earlier this month that Navy ships were being moved toward Venezuela as part of a bid to beef up counter-narcotics operations in the Caribbean following a U.S. drug indictment against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Capt. Chris Sandoval, who oversees special investigations for the Houston-based Harris County Sheriff’s Office, said there’s a new saying among his detectives: “Not even the dope dealers can hide from the coronavirus.”
Coronavirus effects on global drug traffic, Mexican cartels - Los Angeles Times
Trump is making America an obstacle in the global fight against Covid-19
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The president’s deadly mishandling of the pandemic threatens to make the world’s most powerful country a pariah
President Donald Trump’s incompetent handling of the Covid-19 pandemic is not only exacerbating the death and destruction caused by the virus in the US. It is also crippling the global response to the crisis, and the costs could be even deadlier.
When global crises hit, American leadership is essential. Whether it was launching the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) or marshaling efforts to respond to the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the US has played a central role in tackling many of the world’s deadliest health crises. American leadership is far from perfect, but it is necessary to tackle threats of a global magnitude.
This pandemic is one of the greatest challenges the world has faced since the second world war. America has lost more people to Covid-19 than it has lost in all of its military conflicts since the beginning of the Vietnam war. The outbreak has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives around the world, and the crisis has just begun. As the death toll rises and the path out of the pandemic remains uncertain, the economic catastrophe will be enormous.
A successful global effort to defeat the pandemic will require a robust American response. Instead, Trump is making it harder for the world to address the crisis.
Trump does not seem to recognize that the only effective solution to the pandemic is to counter it everywhere. Without a universally administered vaccine, the virus could continue to cycle through country after country. And as desperate as the situation is in the US, other countries could fare far worse. The UN recently tripled its assessment of the immediate need for aid to the most vulnerable and said trillions of dollars in rescue packages would be necessary for developing economies. In addition to the unimaginable number of people who could die from the virus itself, the pandemic could cause famines of “biblical proportions”, according to the World Food Programme, and an economic collapse that could cost countless more lives.
While the US would normally be leading calls for assistance to developing countries to help them deal with the pandemic, the Trump administration is barely noticing the desperate need around the world. In past crises, the US would gather allies and partners to develop common solutions; this time, the Trump administration blocked the G20 from taking action.
Trump has stood in the way of efforts to aid those who could be devastated by the pandemic
Trump has attacked the primary international governmental organization dedicated to responding to pandemics. Early in the outbreak, long before Trump claimed that the virus would “disappear”, the World Health Organization (WHO) was sounding the alarm and warning countries to prepare. But instead of working with the WHO, the Trump administration has turned the organization into a battleground with China and halted US funding.
Trump has stood in the way of efforts to aid those who could be devastated by the pandemic. When the UN secretary general pushed for a global ceasefire during the pandemic – which numerous groups involved in armed conflicts indicated they would support – the US held up efforts because of squabbling with China over language referring to the WHO. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has continued to pressure Iran and Venezuela with sanctions despite how vulnerable their people are.
Trump seems to view the race for a vaccine as a zero-sum game. In March, he reportedly tried to buy a German company that had made progress in developing a vaccine, with the intent of securing credit and access for the US. On 4 May, leaders from around the world convened to raise funds to find a vaccine and treatments and clear the way for mass production and distribution. But the US was missing in action – not only did Trump fail to attend, but the US didn’t even send an official or any funds.
One of the threads running through all this is a deadly US-China blame game. Since the Chinese Communist party (CCP) initially responded to the outbreak by trying to censor those speaking out about it, many in the US blame China for allowing the pandemic to spread. Whatever culpability China deserves, no one gains right now from a US-China feud over the pandemic at the expense of collective efforts to beat the disease. Yet that’s exactly what the Trump administration and the CCP are doing.
Trump’s deadly mishandling of the pandemic at home also threatens to make the world’s most powerful country an international pariah. With more cases and deaths than any other country, and with a president who seems uninterested in doing what it takes to safely reopen the economy, the rest of the world is unlikely to take American policies for addressing the pandemic seriously. Even worse, as other countries begin to safely reopen their economies, the US may become the target of travel bans, as China was early in the pandemic.
In moments of global crisis, America is still the indispensable nation. But in today’s moment of need, Trump is making America an obstacle to success.
Trump is making America an obstacle in the global fight against Covid-19 | Michael H Fuchs | Opinion | The Guardian