James Gibney: Philip Seymour Hoffman, the Suburbs, and Mexico's Drug Trade James Gibney - Bloomberg
go to original February 6, 2014

I don't know if Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto has seen many movies by Philip Seymour Hoffman, but I'm betting he's not a fan of Hoffman's last act. By dying with a needle in his arm, the star kindled news media interest in the growing popularity in the U.S. of heroin, about half of which comes from Mexico. That's off-message for Pena Nieto, who has tried hard during his first year in office to shift the spotlight from drugs and violence to Mexico's enormous economic potential and the promise of closer North American integration. A more smoothly functioning cross-border heroin trade probably wasn't what he had in mind.

Yet that seems to be what's developing. Quantifying Mexican heroin production is understandably difficult: Not long before it was disbanded, the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center implausibly put Mexican production at about 50 tons, more than double U.S. annual consumption of 20 tons. Go figure. Yet the 232 percent jump in U.S. seizures of heroin at the southwestern border from 2008 to 2012 reflects an expanding population of users. And as Bloomberg News reported last fall, Mexican gangs have stepped up their efforts to meet rising demand.

Read the rest at Bloomberg

Photograph by Julio Cesar Aguilar/AFP/Getty Images

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