MEXICO CITY
(By Chris Hawley,
Arizona Republic) February 4, 2007 Four guards
lay dead in pools of blood, their hands and feet bound with gray
duct tape, as dawn broke over the Medix pharmaceutical plant in
Mexico City. The gate was open, the security system dismantled.
It looked as well-planned as a bank heist. Except these robbers
made off with a far bigger treasure: more than one ton of the
chemical pseudoephedrine, enough to make 4 million hits of
crystal methamphetamine, the hottest drug in America. The
finished product could fetch $120 million on U.S. street
corners.
The robbery at the Medix lab in July is part of a boom in
Mexican meth as "superlabs" controlled by Mexican cartels take
over what was once a mom-and-pop business in the United States.
The cartels' labs in Mexico and California now produce about 80 percent of the meth in the United States, according to a November report by the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center. And the cartels are far more organized than previous meth rings.
In August, Arizona prosecutors filed indictments against 69 people suspected of working with a meth and cocaine ring in Mexico's Sinaloa state. Police seized 50 pounds of meth and $2.5 million in cash.
"These were very sophisticated criminal operations," Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said. "They had lots of foot soldiers, they were very well armed, they were incredibly well financed. They are a very, very serious opponent."
A new business
Ice, crank, crystal, tweak, chalk, glass or speed: Methamphetamine goes by a lot of names. It's one of the most addictive drugs around and is as dangerous to make as it is to consume. The "cooking" process creates toxic chemicals, and labs often catch fire or explode.For decades, homemade meth was a small-time drug. Meth "cooks" worked in home kitchens, making a few ounces for themselves or to sell through motorcycle gangs. A typical dose is one-quarter of a gram and costs $30, though price and purity vary widely.
The most popular meth recipe uses ephedrine, an ingredient in some asthma medications, or its chemical cousin pseudoephedrine, which is widely used in cold remedies.
But since the late 1990s, U.S. states have been passing laws limiting the sale of those drugs. Arizona passed a law in 2006 limiting purchases to 9 grams. Phoenix, Tucson, and 44 other Arizona cities and towns adopted even tougher rules, and President Bush signed a similar federal law in March.
As the raw materials become harder to get, small-time cooks are being put out of business. The Mexican cartels have rushed to fill the demand with California-based superlabs, which can produce more than 10 pounds of meth a day.
Less sophisticated cooks are usually caught when neighbors notice chemical smells or suspicious people hanging around at odd hours. But the Mexican cartels have built their superlabs shacks in remote areas of California's Central Valley.
Many of the labs have ventilation systems to combat the smells, and smugglers visit only a few times a week to pick up meth or drop off supplies. That makes the labs hard to find.
"We still have what we call the Beavis and Butthead labs . . . but the ones that we really have problems with are the large labs, the superlabs or even megalabs," said Kent Shaw, assistant chief of California's Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement. "Those are run by organized-crime groups, and almost exclusively those are Mexican-operated drug cartels."
To augment their labs in California, the Mexican cartels began building labs in Mexico, where, until a recent crackdown, it was easy to import tons of raw pseudoephedrine from Asia.
In 2004, a Mexican government study found Mexico was importing four times the pseudoephedrine needed to treat the country's respiratory illnesses.
As the labs in Mexico ramp up production, meth seizures at border ports along the drug's main smuggling routes - California, Arizona, New Mexico and western Texas - have risen from 1,130 pounds in the 2002 fiscal year to 3,648 pounds in fiscal 2006.
"Most of the meth on the street right now is crystal meth from Mexico, I have no doubt about that," Goddard said. "It has created a national phenomenon, where a few years ago it was a regional phenomenon."
Butterflies and ice
For eons the towering fir trees of Michoacan state have sheltered clouds of monarch butterflies that migrate from across North America during the winter. They used to be the western state's only claim to international fame.But now Michoacan is known for something else: cheap, high-quality meth.
Michoacan is ideally located between two big sources of raw materials: pharmaceutical plants in Mexico City, increasingly a target for looters, and the Pacific seaports where shipments of pseudoephedrine arrive from factories in Asia. Couriers take finished meth to Arizona and California along Mexico's Highway 15. Of the 31 major meth labs dismantled in Mexico in the past two years, 12 were in Michoacan, a Republic analysis shows.
During the same period, the state has become one of the bloodiest battlefields between warring cartels. Gangs have taken to decapitating their rivals: In one case in September, gunmen barged into a nightclub and threw five severed heads onto the dance floor.
In December, incoming President Felipe Calderσn ordered 7,000 soldiers and federal police into Michoacan to stop the violence. During one raid, they seized 21 tons of Chinese pseudoephedrine at the port of Lazaro Cardenas. It was the biggest such bust in Mexican history.
Cracking down
Despite the boom, many experts believe the Mexican meth labs may have peaked.
"Further production increases are unlikely in the near term," the National Drug Intelligence Center said in its report.
It cited new rules the Mexican government has imposed on importers of pseudoephedrine and ephedrine. Authorities slashed the number of import permits from 246 tons in 2004 to 77 tons in 2006. Companies can import only 6,600 pounds of raw ephedrine or pseudoephedrine at a time, and they can get import permits only if the government determines there are enough patients to warrant more drug production.
To keep feeding the drug labs, gangs have begun looting pharmaceutical factories and hijacking medicine shipments. In August, shortly after the Medix heist, robbers stole a truck full of cold medicine from the Diprofar plant in Mexico City but were quickly caught.
In November, another gang killed a police officer and stole a truck full of cold medicine from the Marsan plant on the outskirts of the city.
The supply problem is acute because there are no producers of raw pseudoephedrine or ephedrine in Latin America.
"These (gangs) are facing serious difficulties in switching to the trafficking of pseudoephedrine," Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina told lawmakers in January.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has started training Mexican police to find meth labs. In September, 49 agents and six prosecutors graduated from the DEA's new anti-meth school in Quantico, Va. The U.S. government plans to train 1,000 more officers and is providing them hazardous-materials trucks.
"Whatever our differences in language, culture and, at times, opinion, we are united partners in our desire to drive the drug traffickers out of business and into jail," U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said at a binational conference on meth last year.
