Mexican and American authorities captured Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán yesterday in a resort hotel in Mazatlan. Guzmán is considered to be the largest drug trafficker in the world, with a fortune worth at least a billion dollars. His criminal enterprise, the Sinaloa Cartel, has overrun this country, littering the bodies of our kids in morgues from one coast to the other. He is a major supplier of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin.
This is personal, because the opioid problem in the Philadelphia has become an epidemic that is ravaging our communities.
“Mexican [organizations] are the dominant wholesale suppliers of cocaine and heroin to drug-distribution groups in Philadelphia and Reading and in surrounding areas, such as Norristown, Montgomery County, and southern Chester County,” it said.
Montgomery County District Attorney Risa Vetri Ferman said Norristown was “a place where we are vigilant” about removing opportunities for the illegal drug trade – whether they are homegrown, as most are, or come from Mexico.
I’ve written a lot about this lately, but if you read my local papers, you would understand why. In my home county (Chester), there were 31 deaths from prescription opioids and 21 deaths from heroin overdoses in 2013. The numbers would be far, far worse if not for the paramedic teams that are saving kids and young adults every day by employing Narcan to reverse the effects of overdose before death occurs. That some conservatives are resisting making Narcan more readily available is one more sign that their stupidity can be lethal.
Read this, and consider the implications of the conservative argument:
Officer Greg Hartnett patrols Quincy, Mass., armed with a life-saving weapon. It’s a heroin antidote called Narcan that’s sprayed into an overdose victim’s nose.
Last fall, Hartnett used it to revive a young woman.
Hartnett said administering Narcan can — in one sense — bring a person back to life.
“In many cases you get there — sometimes blood coming out of their nose, they’ve already started to turn blue and stop breathing,” he said.
A heroin overdose blocks signals from the brain to the lungs — and stops breathing. Narcan restores that signal. But the effect is temporary. Immediate medical treatment is still required.
Nineteen other police departments across the country have also started using Narcan, which costs $20 a dose.
It saved Nicole Gaudet, a former high school athlete who got hooked on heroin. Asked how bad it became for her, Gaudet said, “It led me to prison. It just ripped apart my whole entire life and those around me.”
Gaudet overdosed 10 times – and 10 times Narcan saved her life.
And that’s the primary complaint of critics who say Narcan enables some addicts to keep overdosing.
Gaudet said of Narcan, “It gives you another chance at life. I mean, it essentially gives you a chance to recover.”
Gaudet has been clean since April, and is building a life for herself and her daughter.
Imagine. Which one of those ten times that Narcan saved Ms. Gaudet’s life should she have been left to die? The sixth? The eighth?
The treatment may have enabled her to overdose again, but it also enabled her to live. Now she has been clean for a good period of time, and she’s trying to keep things together so she can be a decent mother to her daughter. There’s a decent chance she will relapse again. Heroin is a notoriously difficult drug to kick. In fact, the problem is opioids. There is nothing particularly unique about heroin other than its strength and the fact that it is illegal. As I noted, more people died from prescription opioid overdoses in Chester County than from heroin overdoses last year. And they died the same way and for the same reason. In any case, Ms. Gaudet is alive today for one reason, and one reason only. Narcan.
And the Mexican kingpin most responsible for trying to kill her is now in custody. That won’t stop the deadly pipeline or fix our flawed policies for dealing with the crisis, but it could bring a small measure of justice.
And the sociopathic douche-canoe Governor in Maine refuses to allow first-responders to carry Narcan.
How do raging assholes like him get elected?
Oh yeah, SATSQ – “Divide, and conquer.”
Just to emphasize the last statement…
Osiel Cárdenas Guillén
Marlo Stanfield
Frosting on the cake largest oxycodone ring bust also just took place on east coast.
From what I’ve read and seen first hand, the ones who are able to shake the opioid addiction – it’s not that they give up the opioids it’s that they are somehow able to choose something else, in Ms Gaudet’s case she’s choosing a life with her daughter. That’s what ppl need help with and that’s why it may take 10 or more relapses. it’s not something she can just “pull herself out of”.
This guy’s just one in a long, long chain of “kingpins” who should…and will not, bet on it…bear the guilt and punishment for this latest heroin epidemic plus all of the other drug epidemics that have preceded and will no doubt follow it. You cannot gloat over his capture when there are people in highly respected positions in this government and society …respected by most U.S. citizens, themselves victims of a totally disinformational mainstream media system…PermaGov hustlers who are directly supporting the actual drug trade (At a handsome profit.) and many, many more who are guilty of so poisoning the societal system that people like this woman lose all hope of a successful life and descend into the hell of addiction.
Never, ever forget the Iran-Contra affair, a drugs-for-guns-for-economic imperialist, Blood-For-Oil war scandal which briefly…before the media cooperated in covering the stink up…lifted the rock of silence that protects this situation and let us see and smell the maggots breeding beneath it.
Realpolitik at its most execrable.
This guy is just one of a long line of criminals who provide the U.S. power structure with the drugs it needs to help keep the poor where they belong as far as the controllers are concerned…at the very bottom of the wage scale. There’ll be others just like him to take his place. Bet on that as well. Until the real villains are rooted out and…preferably, in my opinion…publicly hung on the National Mall in front of every TV camera in Washington, DC. there will be no real change in this situation.
Until then?
Business as usual.
And business is still very, very good for the 1%.
Yes it is.
If and when it finally goes bad? They have their offshore stashes, their villas and their private jets to rescue them.
Watch.
It can’t last forever.
The chickens always come home to roost.
Watch.
It’s just a matter of time.
Watch.
And where will your precious PermaGov controllers be then?
Partying on a beach somewhere that doesn’t have a mutual extradition treaty with the U.S., that’s where.
Watch.
Just like in Egypt.
Only bigger.
Much bigger.
Watch.
AG
Guzman’s arrest merely creates a job or jobs opening. The illegal drugs industry is a prime example of how capitalism operates.
Electricy price spike in NJ
Eric Jung switched to a third party electricity supplier last June and saved $20/month (15%). Then along came the “polar vortex.” (Could as well have been a Goldman Sucks energy trader.)
Can’t beat well regulated power and water monopolies for price and service — but American too often can’t seem to wrap their minds around such a simple concept and think that a monthly savings equal to a a couple of glasses of good wine is worth the risk.
I got calls about switching. figured it must be a strategy to separate me from more $$. thanks for posting this
probably like the schools system scam. get everyone to switch to charter schools then gut the public school system. same w. utilities
An important question I have not seen posed is this: would cheap marijuana make teenagers more or less likely to play with pilfered prescription opioids? A few decades ago, marijuana was pretty cheap and was the going choice for youth who wanted to get high. Most did not progress to harder drugs. Opioids are free if you’re taking them from granma’s medicine cabinet, but are very addictive and very closely related to heroin, so that is where they easily lead. Legal marijuana should soon become much cheaper marijuana. So will it compete with or complement opioids? Proof in the pudding, but here’s to hope.
heroin and other opioids…other drugs w/widespread serious bad effects like cocaine as well…travel in alternate generations. One generation gets totally fucked up behind it; then the following generation takes one look at their predecessors and says “No way am I going down that particular rathole!!!” (Of course they often find another rathole in which to suffer but that’s a whole ‘nother story.)
But then another generation shows up. They didn’t really see the suffering first-hand, they just heard about it, and often it has been thoroughly cleansed and romanticized in the process.
“Oh man!!! Let’s try some ‘a that shit!!!”
And on and on and on and on and on it goes…
I lived through one example of that syndrome as a young jazz musician. The previous generation…the bebop pioneers…were about 98% hooked on heroin. My own generation? Maybe 2%. (We fucked up other ways.) The following generation?
Once again…”Oh man!!! Bird did it and he sounded great. Let’s try some ‘a that shit!!!”
On and on and on and on and on it goes…
Where it stops?
Everybody’s too stoned to know.
Or care.
AG
A few decades ago, there wasn’t much in Grandma’s or Dad’s medicine cabinet. Marijuana served as a rejection of the drug of choice of parents, alcohol, and a high percentage of pot dealers didn’t trade in much else. At least not until cocaine became fashionable.
Codeine and morphine have been around forever. There are newer variants, but the newer variants are not fundamentally different. Vicodin is very similar to (and is an altered form of) codeine, for example. It is much stronger per miligram, but not necessarily per pill. Likewise, oxymorphone and morphine.
Also, in my experience, most teenage pot smokers also drank, though perhaps less than they would have otherwise.
The have different effects, appeal for different reasons. my guess: it will have no impact whatsoever.
What’s crazy to me is that so much of the problem is with users who illegally obtained legally manufactured prescription opioids. There’s no way that has happened without the pharmaceutical companies knowing full well that the amount of these drugs they’re manufacturing and distributing is surplus to actual requirements. And yet . . . they keep doing it, with little danger of being held accountable. As far as they’re concerned, none of the abuse is in any way their fault. It’s some over-prescribing (or just downright crooked) doctor’s fault! Or the (ab)user’s fault– after all, the dangers are listed, and no one forced them to become addicts! And what about all those people who really do have severe pain? Any attempt to curb the “excesses” of the industry would have an adverse effect on the legitimate users (in the same way that gun control would unfairly punish “responsible” gun owners)!
All I know is that there’s now a methadone(!) clinic in the small rural Eastern Kentucky town that I lived in when I was younger. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that an area with fewer than 10,000 residents would need such a thing. That’s not– not primarily, anyway– the result of some South or Central American drug cartel (unless we agree to think of the likes of Phizer and Squibb, etc. as drug cartels).
Knock it off. Comparing people who need drugs because they are in severe pain to people who want guns because they enjoy them or have excessive fears is ridiculous. People do need pain killers. It is not some kind of myth created by drug companies.
You neglected to mention how and why heroin has become so cheap that the levels of addiction have skyrocketed in countries such as Russia, Iran, and the US. Those Americans that never tire of bashing Russia and Iran must be pleased by this, but dare we ask if this is a planned assault by the MIC? And new US addicts are merely “collateral damage?”
The most effective and easiest way to shrink the heroin retail market it to establish harm reduction clinics that also supply the junk. A business model with high new customer costs doesn’t work when that customer can’t be turned into a repeat customer. It also significantly reduces all the crime associated with addicts and the incidence of overdoses and the associated medical costs of those overdoses. And had the advantage of being a point of contact for those addicts that want to become clean and sober.
But is there anything positive we can do for those poor Afghan farmers that have become dependent on poppy production?
A small point – or not – but I call bullshit on this from your excerpted article:
A friend of mine is director of the People’s Harm Reduction Alliance, which runs needle exchanges throughout Puget Sound (they’re a big deal here – WA state has about 30 percent of all given-out syringes in the country, and PHRA is a major reason why.)
They give out Narcan to whomever wants it – users, their family and friends, paramedics, law enforcement. My friend says it costs them about three dollars each time.
Not twenty dollars. Three dollars.
There’s two possibilities as to why it’s supposedly costing nearly seven times as much in suburban Boston. Either somebody is profiteering over a life-saving drug (in America? Say it isn’t so!); or somebody treated as credible a number invented by some conservative to argue that Narcan was too expensive to waste money on saving the lives of junkies.
Either possibility is depressingly plausible.
Narcan is many things. But it is not expensive, especially weighed against the established fact that it saves a lot of lives. And it would already be available to every first responder in the country were it not for generations of toxic War on Drugs propaganda, the kind that treats drug users – other than people who use alcohol or nicotine or caffeine or processed sugar, I mean – as subhuman and disposable.
Price varies, variables also include a single dose vs. the kit, and whether you’re talking injectable or nasal spray.
Overall, it probably costs between $15-25 a pop.
Maybe El Chapo was sending his cut to Langley.
Anyone notice how the price of heroin has dropped since we invaded Afghanistan?
Booman–I recommend Carl Hart’s book High Price on this and related questions. He’s a psychologist at Columbia U. who specializes in neuro-pharmacology, and has done substantial drug research with human subjects. He’s also got an interesting background and perspective, in that he grew up mostly poor in projects in south Florida.
Phrases like “an epidemic that is ravaging our community” . . . really type themselves and are one more small contribution to hysteria and obfuscation.
As everyone knows, economic opportunity and good education are the ticket to a much better show. Also some such slogan as “No boozin’ while usin’ ” might also keep a lot of people safer . . .
The Mexican authorities didn’t have to call in missile strikes to “get” El Chapo? Isn’t he terribly dangerous? And they’re apparently going to give him a criminal trial and everything – aren’t they wet-your-pants scared that some of his followers might bomb the courthouse or rig an earthquake or make a volcano explode?
Gosh, it’s almost like they trust the forms and procedures in place to deal with even an infamous criminal like El Chapo. Haven’t they learned anything from us in the last decade or more about how to deal with the most heinous, worst of the worst criminals?
Being a beacon of freedom, liberty and justice isn’t what it used to be . . .