A positive side effect of the coronavirus: drug deals dry up
If anyone is inclined to seek a silver lining in the global coronavirus, look no further than the drug cartels. You can’t deal massive quantities of drugs if you don’t have them, and you won’t have them if your supply chains dry up. And dry up they will if transportation — by air, land or sea — is down, way down. Which it is.
For vacations not taken or cargo deliveries not made because the requisite vehicles are not in operation, this is also true for drug deliveries. They are not made.
The Associated Press reports that drug prices for cocaine and other substances are way up — a sign that supply is way down. Neither Trump nor his opponents have altered the illegal drug traffic across the US-Mexico border nearly as much as the coronavirus. Drug smuggling has nosedived. Far fewer vehicles cross the border or fly over it. Motels and nightclubs are shuttered, reducing drug deals there.
“The godfathers of the cartels are scrambling,” the AP quotes Phil Jordan, a former director of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s El Paso intelligence center as saying.
If you’re one of those godfathers, and even if you do get your hands on some drugs, who do you sell them to? With widespread lockdowns, not so many people are patrolling the normal shadowy areas of exchange.
It’s not just drug traffic per se that is curtailed. Just as there are “supply chains” for auto parts and countless other manufacturing needs, there are supply chains for drugs. That is, there are “precursor chemicals” that Mexican cartels import from China, out of which they manufacture drugs on an industrial scale. Well, we know what has happened to the normal course of supply chains from China.
This is not a small matter, since the manufacture of synthetic opioids, which depend on precursor drugs and their supply chains, is not dependent on growing seasons. These synthetic drugs, such as fentanyl, can be manufactured 12 months a year. They are not dependent on planting and rain and harvest. Which means that the disruption in the supply chains for these precursor drugs is an especially big hit. It is mass drug production that suffers (if that’s the right word).
Says the head of the DEA, Uttam Dhillon: “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.”
Amen.
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