Mexican opium farmers expand plots to supply US heroin boom

More Jobs Lost To Mexico

• I am a bit tongue in cheek here, but the drug "war" is a phony as a three dollar bill.  
• It is legal for giant pharmaceutical corporations (that give campaign cash to politicians) to sell addictive opiate based drugs to the public, but illegal for other smaller and less connected "businessmen" to sell addictive opiate based drugs to the public.

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 wood-plank, 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 told The Associated Press 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 zig-zag 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.

Making the world safe for drugs
A funny thing happened on the way to Afghanistan, the US

and NATO protected poppy producers from the anti-drug Taliban.

"Almost everyone thinks the people in these mountains are bad people, and that's not true," said Humberto Nava Reyna, the 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 the AP 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.

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.

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