Drug cartels ‘scrambling as coronavirus shuts borders and cuts supply chains around the world’
CORONAVIRUS has been hammering drug cartels by halting supply chains in China of chemicals needed to concoct meths and fentanyl.
It has emerged one of the main suppliers that has shut down is in Wuhan — the epicenter of the global outbreak.
Law enforcement experts say Mexican and Colombian cartels are still plying their trade as evidenced by recent drug seizures.
But the coronavirus lockdowns have transformed cities into ghost towns and have disrupted everything from production to transport to sales.
Along the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border via which the vast majority of illegal drugs cross, the normally bustling road traffic that smugglers use for cover has slowed to a trickle — making them stick out like a sore thumb.
Meanwhile 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 rocketed.
Cocaine prices are up 20 percent 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.
The godfathers of the cartels are scrambling
DEA’s El Paso Intelligence Center
Jack Riley, the former deputy administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said: “You have shortages but also some greedy bastards who see an opportunity to make more money.
“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.
Largely this is because they rely on precursor chemicals that Mexican cartels import from China, cook into drugs on an industrial scale and then ship to the US.
Alejandro Hope, a security analyst and former official with CISEN, the Mexican intelligence agency, said unaffordable drugs prices was bad news for cartels.
He said: “Once you get them to the market, who are you going to sell to?”
Virtually every illicit drug has been impacted, with supply chain disruptions at both the wholesale and retail level.
Traffickers are now stockpiling narcotics and cash along the border.
And the US 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.
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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 such as decoupling their reliance on the Chinese.
Advertised prices in China precursors of fentanyl, methamphetamine and cutting agents have risen between 25 per cent and 400 per cent since late February.
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