Amid Heroin Epidemic in US, Mexican Gov’t Doesn’t Know the Extent of Opium Cultivation at Home
Mexico City (CNSNews.com) – As cheap Mexican heroin fuels an increase in addiction in the U.S., the Mexican government does not know how much opium is cultivated within the country’s borders even as production surges, according to investigators and a U.N. official.
Illicit opium production in the mountains of the state of Guerrero “tripled in the last eight years”, according to Carlos Zamudio, an investigator with the citizen’s group CUPIHD, which lobbies to reduce the risks and harm associated with drugs.
Poppies, cultivated for heroin, have traditionally been grown in the states of Durango, Chihuahua and Sinaloa in northern Mexico but cultivation has expanded further south into Oaxaca, Michoacán, and Guerrero, he said.
Mexico’s military discovered almost an acre of opium poppies growing in the township of Ensenada just 60 miles from the U.S. border earlier this month. The Associated Press reported [1] that the crop was destroyed along with smaller marijuana plots found in the area.
Half of the heroin consumed in the U.S. originates in Mexico, an increase of 14 percent over 2009, Bloomberg News reported last year, citing the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
According to the U.N.’s 2014 World Drug Report, an upswing in heroin availability in the U.S. in 2012 was “likely due to high levels of heroin production in Mexico and Mexican traffickers expanding into ‘white heroin’ markets.”
Yet heroin seizures actually declined in Mexico by 58 percent that same year – 2012 – the report said.
The government, meanwhile, has no hard data on the extent of the opium cultivation in Mexico, according to Antonio Mazzitelli, U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) representative in Mexico.
A three-year study undertaken by military and justice officials in agreement with the U.N. is due to wrap up this year and could produce the first statistics in a century on the amount of cultivation in Mexico, he said from his office in Mexico City.
But the results may never be known if the government decides to keep them private, Mazzitelli added.
Noting that authorities are unsure how much opium is being produced, Lisa Sanchez of the NGO Mexico Against Crime commented, “It’s kind of the biggest question mark we have in Mexico at the moment.”
Cultivated by poor farmers, opium is snapped up by drug cartels who produce white heroin in mountainous territory of Guerrero largely inaccessible by roads. The same cartels show the farmers how to improve poppy yields and provide fertilizer, according to Sanchez.
Just three roads crisscross the mountainous state where 30 percent of all residents live in “extreme poverty,” according to 2010 government data. Farmers, Sanchez said, “want to grow something else but the alternatives are either too expensive or not available at all.”
The government’s effort to attack the supply of opium by destroying crops “hasn’t been effective, she said.
“It just moves somewhere else. It’s called the balloon effect. We need a different approach because if you really want to solve the drug issue, you need to have a more comprehensive strategy. The drug phenomenon has a lot of different dimensions – social, health, economic. It’s not just about security and fighting organized crime.”
The legalization of marijuana in some parts of the U.S. is also causing Mexicans to question whether “repression” is the correct way to fight the production of drugs like opium in their country, Sanchez said.
“Using the military to go against the cartels hasn’t solved the problem of drug availability or consumption and has created more negative consequences, namely violence and human rights abuses.”
Mazzitelli of UNODC said the government is taking no action to stop cultivation beyond destroying detected crops and going after the cartels involved in heroin production and distribution.
Alternative measures, such as improving infrastructure and promoting the cultivation of alternative crops are “non-existent” in Guerrero. He said he hopes the government will adopt an “alternative response” there.
Mazzitelli recalled that state governments in Guerrero, Michoacán and Oaxaca implemented programs to promote alternatives to growing opium in the 1990s. But five years later “the entire investment was lost,” he said, due to a lack of political support.
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