Mexican cartels now have a 'sophisticated farm-to-arm supply chain' for the US heroin trade

Business Insider: The heroin crisis in the US is worsening as the use of heroin surpasses that of cocaine and meth, and we know where a lot of the product is coming from.

Mexican drug cartels have taken over much of the heroin market in the US, smuggling an estimated 225,000 pounds over the border last year, The Washington Post reports.

Drug War: Young people increasingly being used by Mexico’s drug gangs for smuggling and selling

The Washington Post: "Luis Alberto is only 14 but has the wizened gaze of a grown-up hardened by life. He never met his father, worked as a child, was hired by a gang to sell drugs and then got addicted to them.

In October he checked into Cirad, a rehab center west of this border city that handles about 500 drug addicts at a time, a fifth of them younger than 17."

“They brought me here because I was using and selling ‘criloco,’” Luis Alberto said, referring to methamphetamine, the drug of choice for 90 percent of adolescents in detox because of its low cost and easy availability.

Luis Alberto is just one of an increasing number of young people being used as “mules” to ferry drugs across the border into the U.S. or sell them in nearby Mexican towns, said Victor Clark, an anthropologist who studies drug trafficking." read more