How cheap (inexpensive) is heroin?....

[Ten Thousan Marbles]

We've had various threads on that. And, some of us have pointed out that it costs next to nothing. It is not like the old days where it was an ultra expensive habit.

Big bust out our way. This story breaks it down:
http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/04/huge_pa_heroin_bust_topples_ac.html#incart_river_home

"Authorities allege he headed the organization, overseeing the sale of approximately 25 bricks per day, primarily in the Johnstown area of Cambria County, TribLive.com writes, adding:

A brick contains 50 bags of heroin, and investigators said by charging $200 to $300 per brick, Harper earned between $150,000 and $225,000 per month."

.....
Think of that. Add to that the fact that the product is fronted to the street level dealers. There is no initial financial investment to become a dealer. None.

Arresting people just opens up jobs. Sadly.

 

[Sproul]

Take a guy with no job or skills and tell him he can sling heroin and make $10,000 a week and pretty much sky is the limit...what would society expect him to do? The demand is there, so the product will be also. But this guy making $3 million a year selling bricks is just incredible.

 

[sluggo72]

Man you selling Cocaine and Heroin in Baltimore and you aint got $1,000,000 you doing something wrong.

 

[Marshall30]

We've had various threads on that. And, some of us have pointed out that it costs next to nothing. It is not like the old days where it was an ultra expensive habit.

Big bust out our way. This story breaks it down:
http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/04/huge_pa_heroin_bust_topples_ac.html#incart_river_home

"Authorities allege he headed the organization, overseeing the sale of approximately 25 bricks per day, primarily in the Johnstown area of Cambria County, TribLive.com writes, adding:

A brick contains 50 bags of heroin, and investigators said by charging $200 to $300 per brick, Harper earned between $150,000 and $225,000 per month."

.....
Think of that. Add to that the fact that the product is fronted to the street level dealers. There is no initial financial investment to become a dealer. None.

Arresting people just opens up jobs. Sadly.

Ten bucks a bag for the Ohmypudheroin that will kill you on the first try.

 

[Mace54]

I just had this discussion with my brother in law last week. Our county is seeing a rash of 20-somethings who make the obituary page every day. 98% of them are due to heroin overdoses. I had no idea how much the drug was but I was shocked when he told me there were certain locations where people were buying it for $5 a bag.

 

[BBrown]

We've had various threads on that. And, some of us have pointed out that it costs next to nothing. It is not like the old days where it was an ultra expensive habit.

Big bust out our way. This story breaks it down:
http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/04/huge_pa_heroin_bust_topples_ac.html#incart_river_home

"Authorities allege he headed the organization, overseeing the sale of approximately 25 bricks per day, primarily in the Johnstown area of Cambria County, TribLive.com writes, adding:

A brick contains 50 bags of heroin, and investigators said by charging $200 to $300 per brick, Harper earned between $150,000 and $225,000 per month."

.....
Think of that. Add to that the fact that the product is fronted to the street level dealers. There is no initial financial investment to become a dealer. None.

Arresting people just opens up jobs. Sadly.

Somerset, PA and surrounding areas have a big Heroin and Meth problem.
They call the turnpike through that area the "Heroin Highway".
Heroin has a been a HUGE problem here in Balto. for 20+ years now that its cheaper
its worse than ever.
I'll give you a figure. I work in Harford county and have to pass the
Police Station every day to work. There is a sign they put out front in January that lists
The # of OD's and deaths. as of today there have been 69 OD's and 8 deaths and thats
just Harford county. My guess is Balto. county and city is 3x as bad.

 

[BBrown]

Man you selling Cocaine and Heroin in Baltimore and you aint got $1,000,000 you doing something wrong.

I was going to hit the like button on that but not sure thats appropriate but yea you got that right.

 

[Ten Thousan Marbles]

I just had this discussion with my brother in law last week. Our county is seeing a rash of 20-somethings who make the obituary page every day. 98% of them are due to heroin overdoses. I had no idea how much the drug was but I was shocked when he told me there were certain locations where people were buying it for $5 a bag.

Will be like The Walking Dead if/when the price goes up.

Well, on second thought, maybe not.....because methadone clinics.

 

[sluggo72]

I was going to hit the like button on that but not sure thats appropriate but yea you got that right.

pretty sure it was a line from the 'wire', when the drug dealers were trying to buy Avon Barksdale connection, so Avon could get out.

 

[BBrown]

pretty sure it was a line from the 'wire', when the drug dealers were trying to buy Avon Barksdale connection, so Avon could get out.

I think you are correct on the quote. Its art imitating life.

 

[Steve G]

We've had various threads on that. And, some of us have pointed out that it costs next to nothing. It is not like the old days where it was an ultra expensive habit.

Big bust out our way. This story breaks it down:
http://www.pennlive.com/news/2016/04/huge_pa_heroin_bust_topples_ac.html#incart_river_home

"Authorities allege he headed the organization, overseeing the sale of approximately 25 bricks per day, primarily in the Johnstown area of Cambria County, TribLive.com writes, adding:

A brick contains 50 bags of heroin, and investigators said by charging $200 to $300 per brick, Harper earned between $150,000 and $225,000 per month."

.....
Think of that. Add to that the fact that the product is fronted to the street level dealers. There is no initial financial investment to become a dealer. None.

Arresting people just opens up jobs. Sadly.

many of the small towns in southern Wisconsin are over run with heroin and heroin addicts. In 20 years practice in Atlanta , 10 in the Psychiatric Emergency Service at Grady hospital I saw a handful of heroin addicts. Unlimited supply of crack addicts and pill addicts and rising tide meth addicts but almost no heroin addicts. In 6 months in Madison WI I have treated 30-40 heroin addicts, from surrounding small towns, all in low 20s to early 30s. Most started with opioid pain pills as teenagers, but now shoot junk regularly. Its scary.....

 

[tboyer]

Actually a brilliant economist -- one of the authors of Freakanomics -- did a famous study in Chicago where he hung out with a drug gang that gave him access to the gang's financials. What he concluded is that drug dealing is just like very other business -- only people at the top of the pyramid make a lot of money. He said the drug dealer pay scale was comparable to a bank. I.e. street dealers made roughly the same amount per hour as tellers, next level up assistant bank managers, the local kingpin makes as much as a regional bank manager.

Considering the level of risk, it doesn't pay all that wall. On the other hand you don't need a college education...

 

[phantom]

Take a guy with no job or skills and tell him he can sling heroin and make $10,000 a week and pretty much sky is the limit...what would society expect him to do? The demand is there, so the product will be also. But this guy making $3 million a year selling bricks is just incredible.

The severance plan is kind of rough.

 

[AvalonJohn]

You can get it as cheap as $10 for the good stuff. That's why it's an epidemic, Rx drugs are $$$ compared to heroin. I know a doctor and a successful business woman who were hooked on it for a while. The doctor lost everything before he got help. The woman was lucky in that her company recognized her addiction and sent her to rehab which worked. It was a German Pharmaceutical, not sure an American company would have done that?

 

[jrd23psu]

You can get it as cheap as $10 for the good stuff. That's why it's an epidemic, Rx drugs are $$$ compared to heroin. I know a doctor and a successful business woman who were hooked on it for a while. The doctor lost everything before he got help. The woman was lucky in that her company recognized her addiction and sent her to rehab which worked. It was a German Pharmaceutical, not sure an American company would have done that?

Prescription drugs are the problem. People are prescribed them for legit reasons and become addicted. It becomes too expensive and too hard to get those pills so what do they do? They get the cheap stuff off the streets.

 

[JoeHomsey]

What most people, including many of the posters responding to this thread, don't realize that is the vast majority of street level dealers are full fledged addicts themselves and are often using up 200, 300, 400 dollars a day for their own habit. Because their addiction is so intense, they make bad errors in judgement and are often arrested. County prisons around this state and around the country are filled with small time street heroin dealers. They typically spend a few months to a year in jail, then end up in a drug rehab for a month because the county judge wants to give them a chance. 90% end up in the same predicament within 6 months back on the street. Saw this scenario repeated hundreds of times in my time working for a Drug Rehab.

 

[demlion]

What most people, including many of the posters responding to this thread, don't realize that is the vast majority of street level dealers are full fledged addicts themselves and are often using up 200, 300, 400 dollars a day for their own habit. Because their addiction is so intense, they make bad errors in judgement and are often arrested. County prisons around this state and around the country are filled with small time street heroin dealers. They typically spend a few months to a year in jail, then end up in a drug rehab for a month because the county judge wants to give them a chance. 90% end up in the same predicament within 6 months back on the street. Saw this scenario repeated hundreds of times in my time working for a Drug Rehab.

I have heard tales of police with wiretaps intercepting calls from users on their way home from jail setting up a buy. Literally calling from the car on their way home to find out where they can meet a guy.

Jail does not cure addiction, and soon there will not be enough space to jail them anyway. It is everywhere now. The most rural places imaginable have OD deaths in shocking numbers. Wealthy white suburbs have huge numbers. The sort of untold story is that when this was poor black guys, jail was the only solution. Now that white HS students in AP classes are dying in their wealthy towns, it is a crisis and jail CAN'T BE the answer.

 

[demlion]

Prescription drugs are the problem. People are prescribed them for legit reasons and become addicted. It becomes too expensive and too hard to get those pills so what do they do? They get the cheap stuff off the streets.

Big Pharma had made a huge amount of money from opiates, and even "improved" on them, eg, OxyContin. The result is a huge toll of suffering as people medicate their depression with, first, prescribed opiates and then, cheap heroin. What is left in the wake of Pharma's hugely profitable opiate trade is a massive amount of human wreckage. WE pay for that, not Big Pharma

This is directly analogous to the coal industry in WV. Most of the largest firms are in bankruptcy or headed there. They have poisoned streams and rivers for over a hundred years, and now, as they shut down it will get much worse. Who will pay? We taxpayers will. The amount of money taxpayers have spent and will spend to clean up the mess caused by Pharma and the coal industry dwarfs all subsidies to poor people.

Why wouldn't young people vote for a guy who promises them free college and free medical care for life? Big Pharma and Big Coal get their messes cleaned up for free.

 

[bwifan]

it's a pure epidemic. And is only going to get worse. Next door neighbors kid was hooked took her several times to get clean. She is the daughter of a police officer and e.r. nurse. Parents scheduled their shifts so someone was always home with the kids and she still was hooked. She told me the first time she tried it she woke up the next morning and all she could think about all day was going out with her friends and doing it again the next night. After 2nd night trying it she said is basically rewired her brain and it's all she could focus on. She was just out of high school. She went away several times for rehab only to fall off the wagon. She took the drug to curb the heroin appetit and now smokes like a chimney but has been clean for several years. Says the yearning and urge for heroin gets a tiny bit easier each year but when she has the urge for heroin multiple times a day she goes outside and lights a cigarette. Basically trading a illegal habit for a legal one. My kids have told me the amount of kids experimenting with heroin is staggering. This is in the suburb schools all around philadelphia in bucks county in central bucks and the surrounding areas. It has really not hit the south yet when it does look out. It is focused more up north. This country is going to have to wake up to deal with this and I am not sure what is the best way. Because these people when hooked will do anything for their next high.... crime rates will continue to soar. It is a scary time indeed. Anyone who thinks their kids are exempt and won't try this in a moment of weakness better wake up and take your head out of the sand. We have very open discussions about with our kids. We have seen neighbors and my kids friends families bury their own and create havoc and heartache....

 

[tboyer]

Prescription drugs are the problem. People are prescribed them for legit reasons and become addicted. It becomes too expensive and too hard to get those pills so what do they do? They get the cheap stuff off the streets.

Everybody wants a simple thing to blame but it just doesn't lend itself to easy blame.

Some people want to blame prescription opiates, but the heroin epidemic didn't really happen until the government started making prescription opiates hard to get. If anything it was the LACK of prescription opiates that got people with pain issues into heroin.

Some people blame the legalization of marijuana, which is pretty funny becuase marijuana is still illegal in 47 states and I'm pretty sure there are a lot of heroin addicts in those states.

I actually think technology should shoulder a lot of the blame. The internet and smart phones have made it a lot easier for heroin gangs to organize their distribution and market their product and avoid cops. And smuggling heroin across borders is going to be easier than ever with little drones and robot vehicles that can follow GPS. We're now in an age where you can smuggle drugs without actually putting a member of your gang at risk.

But I don't hear anybody saying -- to stop heroin overdoses, let's abolish the Internet, let's blow up the GPS satellites.

It's just not a simple problem and it doesn't lend itself to simple solutions.

Meanwhile, there are other much bigger problems that are not getting media attention because they're not new. Like alcoholism -- which kills 1000 times the number of people who die of heroin addiction. Nobody is even trying to stop people from killing themselves with alcohol, yet it happens every day.

Every fall weekend in State College, there are probably 100 or 1000 new alcoholics created. People who get their first exposure to large quantities of alcohol in an uncontrolled clandestine environment. People who will spend the rest of their lives battling a drinking problem, people who will die early of cirrhosis.

Instead of talking about heroin in isolation, we should be talking about substance addiction in general and how to help people who need help. And, frankly, people who WANT help.

Until an addict really wants to be an ex-addict, there is a very low likelihood of success from AA-style rehab programs. They just don't work. So -- this is so obvious, and yet it's the last thing anybody talks about -- our policy should be -- how to do we keep addicts alive long enough so that they survive to the point in their lives that they want to be ex-addicts.

A certain number of people (not all, maybe most) who die of heroin overdoses would beat the addiction and go on to lead wonderful lives if someone had just managed to keep them alive another 6 months. Nobody thinks about that. Everybody just wants to call out the police to arrest a bunch of people.

 

[demlion]

Everybody wants a simple thing to blame but it just doesn't lend itself to easy blame.

Some people want to blame prescription opiates, but the heroin epidemic didn't really happen until the government started making prescription opiates hard to get. If anything it was the LACK of prescription opiates that got people with pain issues into heroin.

Some people blame the legalization of marijuana, which is pretty funny becuase marijuana is still illegal in 47 states and I'm pretty sure there are a lot of heroin addicts in those states.

I actually think technology should shoulder a lot of the blame. The internet and smart phones have made it a lot easier for heroin gangs to organize their distribution and market their product and avoid cops. And smuggling heroin across borders is going to be easier than ever with little drones and robot vehicles that can follow GPS. We're now in an age where you can smuggle drugs without actually putting a member of your gang at risk.

But I don't hear anybody saying -- to stop heroin overdoses, let's abolish the Internet, let's blow up the GPS satellites.

It's just not a simple problem and it doesn't lend itself to simple solutions.

Meanwhile, there are other much bigger problems that are not getting media attention because they're not new. Like alcoholism -- which kills 1000 times the number of people who die of heroin addiction. Nobody is even trying to stop people from killing themselves with alcohol, yet it happens every day.

Every fall weekend in State College, there are probably 100 or 1000 new alcoholics created. People who get their first exposure to large quantities of alcohol in an uncontrolled clandestine environment. People who will spend the rest of their lives battling a drinking problem, people who will die early of cirrhosis.

Instead of talking about heroin in isolation, we should be talking about substance addiction in general and how to help people who need help. And, frankly, people who WANT help.

Until an addict really wants to be an ex-addict, there is a very low likelihood of success from AA-style rehab programs. They just don't work. So -- this is so obvious, and yet it's the last thing anybody talks about -- our policy should be -- how to do we keep addicts alive long enough so that they survive to the point in their lives that they want to be ex-addicts.

A certain number of people (not all, maybe most) who die of heroin overdoses would beat the addiction and go on to lead wonderful lives if someone had just managed to keep them alive another 6 months. Nobody thinks about that. Everybody just wants to call out the police to arrest a bunch of people.

There is a lot of truth in what you say, but lets be honest about the difference between death from chronic alcoholism, which kills a lot of people in their 50s and 60s, and H overdose, which kills quite a few in their 20s. It will always be the case that the latter will be seen as the greater tragedy. Some young folks OD and die from alcohol, and that is treated as a much greater tragedy as well. It is the nature of things.

You are right that NARCAN is keeping people who were dead for all intents and purposes, alive. Sometimes, given the lack of treatment facilities, they are just being kept alive so they can die of an OD another day.

 

[Tweedbear]

Thboyer
"Every fall weekend 100 to 1000 new alcoholics are created.". By Christmas the freshman class must all be alcoholics.
Unverifiable statistics while dramatic do not help solve problems.

 

[tboyer]

There is a lot of truth in what you say, but lets be honest about the difference between death from chronic alcoholism, which kills a lot of people in their 50s and 60s, and H overdose, which kills quite a few in their 20s. It will always be the case that the latter will be seen as the greater tragedy. Some young folks OD and die from alcohol, and that is treated as a much greater tragedy as well. It is the nature of things.

You are right that NARCAN is keeping people who were dead for all intents and purposes, alive. Sometimes, given the lack of treatment facilities, they are just being kept alive so they can die of an OD another day.

Don't get me wrong, heroin is an awful thing and is killing a lot of young people. But the simplistic answers -- usually promoted by people who have a paycheck in maintaining the current War on Drugs -- are not going to save the lives of those people.

If we were REALLY serious about preventing heroin overdoses, we would be looking at Vancouver, we would be looking at Amsterdam, or Denmark or France -- we would be looking at societies where they actually have had success in preventing people from dying of heroin ODs.

But we're not. Which tells me that the Drug Warriors are a lot more interested in preserving their own paychecks than they are in actually saving anybody's life.

The other thing that really pisses me off is the implicit racism in all of this.

When a teenager from Central Bucks (and I'm not picking on Central Bucks -- our kids went to high school there) -- dies of a heroin overdose, we acknowledge the loss, we sympathize with the family, we feel the pain.

But when a black teenager from Philadelphia gets arrested for selling heroin and gets sentenced to spend a chunk of their adult life in prison (and a lifetime of poverty after that), we don't feel sympathy, we don't have any sense of the terrible cost to that young person's family.

And yet they are similar. They are young people who made mistakes -- as almost all young people do. In the first case, the drug took the life away. In the second case, it's our criminal justice system that effectively throws the person's life away, or at very least their years as a young adult.

We feel bad about the first case but we barely even give the second case any thought.

We talk of 20,000 people dying of heroin overdoses like it's a huge crisis, but we don't have any thought about the 8 MILLION black men (in some cities, it is close to HALF of the black male population) who have been sentenced to prison and had their lives destroyed as part of the War on Drugs.

And that is racism.

 

[tboyer]

Thboyer
"Every fall weekend 100 to 1000 new alcoholics are created.". By Christmas the freshman class must all be alcoholics.
Unverifiable statistics while dramatic do not help solve problems.

Denial doesn't either. Penn State is basically a factory that produces alcoholics in HUGE numbers. And interestingly, the more draconian the legal/police environment, the more the problem just gets worse.

We go to Italy a lot, often to big college towns like Bologna and Pavia and Piacenza. And I am always just amazed by the near TOTAL absence of drunk college students. And in a society that has almost NO discernible police enforcement of laws about alcohol. The drinking age is 16 and nobody even enforces THAT.

Kids drink but they generally don't get drunk -- because they have learned to drink from their parents out in the open, where social norms against drunkenness come in to play. The Italians will tell you, their biggest problem with drunk college students is Americans on exchange programs.

Raising the drinking age to 21, and driving alcohol use underground, was the worst possible thing that could ever happen to college campuses. The alcohol problem is going to get worse until we reverse some of these well intentioned but hopelessly mistaken policies.

 

[ThePennsyOracle]

This is a documentary exploring the war on drugs with an emphasis on marijuana but nevertheless a segment of the doc deals with the political constituency and economics of continuing the war on drugs....

http://www.theculturehigh.com/

I don't have answers and the heroin epidemic scares the living sh!t out of me. Not for me but rather for the younger generation, my daughter and friends, who can so innocently and unwittingly get sucked into opioid addiction.

^^^Great recommendation^^^

 

[demlion]

I recently read stats suggesting about 20% of US soldiers in Vietnam used heroin. When they came back, the vast majority of them put it down and never used again. I think for a long time we have been told that there is some chemical "hook" in heroin that makes it impossible to stop once you use a few times.

I am sure there are people reading these threads who work in this area. No doubt those who have already posted know more about it than me, but it seems the addiction is in the user, not the drug.

 

[bwifan]

I recently read stats suggesting about 20% of US soldiers in Vietnam used heroin. When they came back, the vast majority of them put it down and never used again. I think for a long time we have been told that there is some chemical "hook" in heroin that makes it impossible to stop once you use a few times.

I am sure there are people reading these threads who work in this area. No doubt those who have already posted know more about it than me, but it seems the addiction is in the user, not the drug.

I went to several meetings with police/DA's/People who work in rehab's about the drug problem. Someone in those fields can verify but if my memory serves me correct they explained it as the heroin from the 1960s/70s was 60-70% pure(your parents generation/vietnam era). Today's heroin can be over 90% pure also factor in the other types like the horse tranquiler fentanyl and thus why you are seeing so many more addicts and OD's. Plus some of the other things mixed in have highly addictive qualities.

 

[cyrizzle]

Johnstown/Cambria County is getting REALLY bad with heroin. One of the star football players from the early 2000s who went to Bishop Carroll in Ebensburg when they were a football power just overdosed on it and died; 32 years old. He was one of the best running backs to ever come out of the Johnstown/Cambria County area. The problem was he didn't try at all with his school work in high school, and his grades were so bad he couldn't even get into a smaller D2 college. The kid refused to go the junior college route because he felt he was above that, so he joined the coal mines. He hurt his back while working in the mines, and started taking prescription pills. These got too expensive and the pain persisted, so he went to heroin, and several years later OD'd on it. Just a sad, sad state of affairs with how much of a problem and how easily accessible this drug is in many parts of the Johnstown area. I don't think I will ever even consider raising a family in Johnstown at this point, and don't plan on ever moving back.

 

[tboyer]

The suicide rate in the U.S. is skyrocketing. A good number of heroin deaths are essentially suicides.

There just seem to be a lot of people in the U.S. with really awful lives, a lot of communities that have kind of disintegrated when the plants closed and the jobs disappeared

When people can't find work, that is the root of so much of this IMHO. The War on Drugs should really become a war on unemployment. As a society we should be doing every single possible thing we can to get everybody working -- even if it's make work WPA-style jobs.

But instead we have this huge criminal justice industry out there every day grabbing people and putting them in prison for using drugs.

 

[mathprof]

I recently read stats suggesting about 20% of US soldiers in Vietnam used heroin. When they came back, the vast majority of them put it down and never used again. I think for a long time we have been told that there is some chemical "hook" in heroin that makes it impossible to stop once you use a few times.

I'm not an expert but found this very interesting ...

Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong

 

[manweiser]

Mexico is the largest provider of heroin to the states and can do so at a much cheaper cost than the far east/traditional opium producing countries-odd bit of history; during WW2 we recognized Mexico's climate would be fantastic for growing opium to deal with injuries sustained in combat. So we went down and taught Mexico how to cultivate and grow opium. Now, given the resource and knowledge we provided, vastly cheap heroin has been flooding into the states through the border via the cartels. Before the Cartels caught up, a kilo of heroin from Thailand, Laos, Cambodia ran anywhere from 115k-150k. When the cartels caught up they would sell a kilo for as little as 13k to get it into the market.

Same thing is happening with Meth. Nationally, the amount of meth labs raided/discovered has reached a peak around 2012 and has actually been in decline. The reason? It's cheaper and safer to buy mass produced mexican cartel produced meth than to make it on your own.

I've just sat through three weeks of training for work about this shit. It's crazy. The amount coming over is astounding.

 

[Ten Thousan Marbles]

Mexican is the largest provider of heroin to the states and can do so at a much cheaper cost than the far east/traditional opium producing countries-odd bit of history; during WW2 we recognized Mexico's climate would be fantastic for growing opium to deal with injuries sustained in combat. So we went down and taught Mexico how to cultivate and grow opium. Now, given the resource and knowledge we provided, vastly cheap heroin has been flooding into the states through the border via the cartels. Before the Cartels caught up, a kilo of heroin from Thailand, Laos, Cambodia ran anywhere from 115k-150k. When the cartels caught up they would sell a kilo for as little as 13k to get it into the market.

Same thing is happening with Meth. Nationally, the amount of meth labs raided/discovered has reached a peak around 2012 and has actually been in decline. The reason? It's cheaper and safer to buy mass produced mexican cartel produced meth than to make it on your own.

I've just sat through three weeks of training for work about this shit. It's crazy. The amount coming over is astounding.

The arrest always seem to stop at the level just above street dealer though, and it is treated as a big PR opportunity, particulary just prior to elections....as was the case here.

 

[BBrown]

Mexican is the largest provider of heroin to the states and can do so at a much cheaper cost than the far east/traditional opium producing countries-odd bit of history; during WW2 we recognized Mexico's climate would be fantastic for growing opium to deal with injuries sustained in combat. So we went down and taught Mexico how to cultivate and grow opium. Now, given the resource and knowledge we provided, vastly cheap heroin has been flooding into the states through the border via the cartels. Before the Cartels caught up, a kilo of heroin from Thailand, Laos, Cambodia ran anywhere from 115k-150k. When the cartels caught up they would sell a kilo for as little as 13k to get it into the market.

Same thing is happening with Meth. Nationally, the amount of meth labs raided/discovered has reached a peak around 2012 and has actually been in decline. The reason? It's cheaper and safer to buy mass produced mexican cartel produced meth than to make it on your own.

I've just sat through three weeks of training for work about this shit. It's crazy. The amount coming over is astounding.

Wow that is interesting. I never knew that. Thanks for the info.