A soldier stands guard in front of “chemical reactors” used in the manufacturing of the meth confiscated in yesterday’s bust. Tlajomulco de Zuniga, Mexico.
15 tons of pure methamphetamine worth $4 billion were seized yesterday at a ranch outside of Guadalajara in the Mexican state of Jalisco.
The superlabs in Mexico are operating on a scale that is mindboggling. This haul alone was enough meth to get 13 million people wired to the gills.
The size of the Jalisco bust stunned Steve Preisler, an industrial chemist who wrote the book “Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture” and is sometimes called the father of modern meth-making.
“I have never seen quantity in that range,” Preisler wrote. But he added: “The amounts of precursors they were importing would produce multi-tons of product.”
Preisler was referring to the dramatic increase in seizures in Mexico of chemicals used to make methamphetamine, usually imported from countries such as China.
In December alone, Mexican authorities seized 675 tons of a key precursor chemical, methylamine, that can yield its weight in uncut meth. All of the shipments were headed for Guatemala, where the Sinaloa cartel is also active. Officials in Guatemala, meanwhile, seized 7,847 barrels of precursors in 2011, equivalent to about 1,600 tons.”
Guadalajara is the capital of the western state of Jalisco and has until recently been spared the horrible violence that plague other areas of Mexico. But in the past few years drug-related murders in Jalisco are an epidemic, with more than half of them in Guadalajara. Six gangs are fighting for control of Jalisco: the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (CJNG, for its initials in Spanish), the Resistance, the Caballeros Templarios, the Familia Michoacana, and the Beltran Leyva Organization.
Guadalajara, the vibrant cultural and economic heart of Mexico, is under assault and the “Pearl of the West” could literally be destroyed in the drug turf wars. With an economy built on the tech industry, Guadalajara is rapidly losing ground to China in the tech wars while China is the source for most of the methylamine that is used in the Mexican meth labs. As above ground industry falters and fades, business goes underground. This is what happens when crime does pay. Diabolical.
My gums are receding and turning black just looking at this photo. This is to Breaking Bad what the Titanic is to the rubber ducky in my bathtub.
As is pointed out in the video below, the drug cartels are ramping up the production of meth because of the crackdown on marijuana farming in Mexico, which is another strong argument for the decriminalization of marijuana. What’s healthier, an economy built on primitive and toxic forms of meth production or one built on the ecologically sound and scientific cultivation of marijuana? And unlike computer chips and hard drives, China won’t be competitive in the ganja trade. Let China have the silicon, we’ll take the sativa.
The best way to get the motherfucking gangsters out of the picture is to legalize all drugs, including methamphetamine, heroin and cocaine. Make it pure, make it available like alcohol and make it affordable. I know the notion of providing legal over-the-counter pharmaceutical quality meth for adults sounds potentially dicey but could things really get any worse? By making methamphetamine legal, we eliminate the gangster trade. By making it clinically pure, we eliminate the toxic bathtub variety flooding the drug marketplace and significantly minimize the health risks. What do you think? Can society handle a culture of meth heads who buy pure crystal at the Tweak Boutique at Walgreens?