Topic: DRUGS - on August 11, 2016 at 5:54:00 PM CEST
El Chapo and the Secret History of the Heroin Crisis
If you wonder why America is in the grips of a heroin epidemic that kills two hundred people a week, take a hard look at the legalization of pot, which destroyed the profits of the Mexican cartels. How did they respond to a major loss in revenue? Like any company, they created an irresistible new product and flooded the market. The scariest part: this might not have happened with El Chapo in charge.
The phone rang. It was July 2014, and I was in a motel room in Tucumcari, New Mexico, about to step into the shower. My wife and I were two days into a cross-country drive from our home in California, and I wanted to clean up before we went to a sports bar across the parking lot to grab something to eat. Looking at the phone, I recognized the number and felt my heart drop. The woman was a close friend. Her twenty-three-year-old son had struggled with heroin addiction for several years. I knew the young man. He was smart, talented, funny—and charming when he wasn't high or jonesing. He was supposed to have called me that day to discuss getting back into school. I didn't get that call. It was his mother on the phone, sobbing, barely able to stammer out the words that I already knew she was going to say. "He's gone." That afternoon, she told me, he was walking to a treatment center that finally had a bed for him, but he stopped for one last "get well" fix. He died on the sidewalk.
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