Drug Trafficking: 'Southbound smuggling': drugs go from U.S. to Mexico and back

Now here's a twist - or two or three - on drug trafficking. A Los Angeles physician sells prescriptions for Vicodin and Xanax at $60 each. The trafficking ring leader pays people to buy the prescriptions and then have them filled at an LA pharmacy that was in cahoots with the ring. The ring leader then transports the pills to San Diego where he has couriers take the pills across the border to Tiajuana. There they are sold in bulk to a contact who in turn sells them to pharmacies. The pharmacies sell the pills without obtaining the required Mexican physician prescription for controlled substances. The clients are U.S. citizens who, by this scheme, can get the drugs more easily in Mexico than in the black market in California.

'Southbound smuggling': drugs go from U.S. to Mexico and back - SignOnSanDiego.com: In an unusual twist, federal authorities say they have busted a ring in which prescription drugs were smuggled out of Southern California and into Mexico, where they were sold at Tijuana pharmacies, mostly to young Americans who then brought them back across the border.

“It was a very unique southbound smuggling operation,” Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Diego, said Friday.

read more