Whack-a-mole: Do Mexico Cartels Control the US Heroin Trade?

Do Mexico Cartels Control the US Heroin Trade?: "Much of this heroin is sourced directly from the Pacific Coast state of Nayarit, long a center for the opium trade. Poppies are grown and processed there, then smuggled to the border, where a fee is most likely paid to one of the "Big Brother" cartels -- the Sinaloans, the Juarez or Gulf Cartel -- for the right to use the corridor. The Nayarit heroin smugglers likely pay another fee to these cartels, in return for using some of the market space in cities like Columbus, where Sinaloa operatives like Pineda are reportedly deployed to handle the cocaine trade.

But, as noted in a report published last year by the Woodrow Wilson Center, such payments may be the only real connection between some of these heroin distribution cells and monolithic DTOs like the Sinaloa Cartel. And it may have been the tenuousness of these links to larger DTOs that allowed the spread of these smaller, more nimble cells across the U.S."