Cannabis No Longer Favored By Cartels Dealing Fentanyl

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There’s very little profit in peddling essential medicine to the masses, and Cartels are aware of this. At one time, Cannabis was a cash crop that brought illegal entities millions upon millions as it flooded into America, but the profit has moved into drugs that cause death – and often through deception. The Fentanyl scare is real as so many of the overdoses are accidental – in that the user had no idea that the drug was laced into what they had bought on the illicit market.

Fews days back High Times published about how Cartels are ditching their guns and cannabis for more profitable drugs to create and distribute, namely Fentanyl. As nations around the world face the same type of illicit overdose deaths as America does, albeit nowhere near the exact numbers, the actual war against drugs that are truly deadly seems to be on the right path in going after those who are creating what’s sold on the streets as both pressed pills and mixed into heroin and other illicit substances.

As usual, this is all about money as the profits in cannabis since legalization by states and other nations including Mexico, have been thwarted. As the economy tightens, the street price of illicit drugs has dramatically reduced which has also fueled the overdose epidemic.

Reports evaluating pills and other drugs sold on the street have shown that many contain nothing other than carriers for Fentanyl that’s been illegally produced in micro labs around the globe, especially in America.

What did High Times have to say?

The governments of both Mexico and the U.S. admit that legal cannabis is hurting cartel crops.

As the wholesale price-per-pound of legal cannabis plummets in some states bordering Mexico, cartels in the country are shifting to more lucrative drugs: fentanyl and other synthetic drugs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced this week that fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18-45, thanks in part to criminal involvement in multiple countries.

Texas is the only state bordering Mexico without adult-use cannabis, and it shows in the prices. Mexico’s cartels once relied on organic farms of poppies and cannabis to produce drugs, but the times have changed. Illicit cannabis eradication in Mexico was slashed in half in recent years—aligning with the timeline of pot legalization up north.

Mexico’s Secretary of Defense, General Luis Cresencio Sandoval said that for cartels, cannabis and other organic drugs like opium-rich poppies are out, and fentanyl is in.

The Associated Press reports that according to Sandoval, seizures of fentanyl soared 525 percent during the first three years of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s reign, who took office December 1, 2018, compared to the previous three years.

During that time period, law enforcement agents seized 1,232 pounds (559 kilograms) of fentanyl in 2016-2018 and 7,710 pounds (3,497 kilograms) in 2019-2021.

The reason for the switch is that the bottom line improves when cartel operations shift from organic opiates to synthetic opioids, which are cheaper to produce. “There was a change in consumption, there was a change in drug markets due to the ease of producing synthetic drugs,” Sandoval said. Cartels no longer have to pay for manpower to grow poppies and slowly scrape the opium that oozes from the poppy bulbs. The same could be said about the growing/trimming/curing process for cannabis.

But the synthetic drugs don’t originate from Mexico. Mexican cartels can order fentanyl online from Asia at wholesale value, then cut it up into doses ready for the street. Labs also produce drugs like meth, which is also more profitable than organic cannabis or opium. “The laboratories that have been discovered or seized in this administration have had larger capacities, which has allowed us to seize a larger quantity of methamphetamine products,” Sandoval said.

Meth seizures soared from 120,100 pounds (54,521 kilograms) in 2016-2018 to nearly 275,000 pounds (124,735 kilograms) in the last three years—a 128 percent increase. On November 18, a record-breaking amount of meth and fentanyl was discovered being delivered from a trucker at the Otay Mesa port of entry in San Diego, according to a report by the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of California. Border agents found 17,584 pounds of methamphetamine and 388.93 pounds of fentanyl in the truck.

Mexico’s data matches recent documents updated on October 14, and compiled by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which operates within the Library of Congress, working directly for members of Congress. “Despite early supply chain disruptions, U.S.-bound illicit drug supplies appear to have returned to pre-pandemic levels; illicit fentanyl flows, in particular, appear to be thriving,” CRS reported. Just a year earlier, the CRS admitted that legal cannabis, in particular, is hurting cartels in another document. “Authorities are projecting a continued decline in U.S. demand for Mexican marijuana because drugs ‘other than marijuana’ will likely predominate,” CRS wrote. “This is also the case due to legalized cannabis or medical cannabis in several U.S. states and Canada, reducing its value as part of Mexican trafficking organizations’ portfolio.”

Meanwhile, Mexico’s Senate is on track to endorsing recreational cannabis.

Still, some cartel operations plan on selling cannabis, legal or not. The Daily Beast reports that the Sinaloa cartel is already working on infiltrating the legal pot market in Mexico, according to “cartel operatives.” It’s unclear how the cartel plans to move forward, such as muscling its way into licensing. (Originally printed as “Cartels Ditch Pot and Opium Fields for Synthetic Drugs, Mexico Defense Secretary Says”)

The nonstop fuel of Fentanyl into the streets of America has taken my own family and friends as permanent hostages in a holding cell of chaos and doom, but Cannabis is the answer. There are millions turning to it in order to cease the use of the same type of drugs the Cartels are looking to for their profits and an even bigger crowd that has had their medications discontinued that are looking for alternatives and will not buy from that dangerous market.

Thankfully the cannabis plant, of many types, is being grown all over the world in large crops as it’s truly cornering the top drug peddlers in the world into a spot where their substance of sickness and doom can easily be detected by those that gain access to the testing kits available all over.

As much as this sickening approach to deceive addicts into using something they don’t want maybe a great new revenue stream for those who have no care about human life, it’s very temporary as once patients find a less costly legal route to escape addiction they will if that’s truly what a patient wants. The continued knowledge on THC, CBD, and CBG plant types has allowed many to step away from addictions and excessive pain medication use that was far from medically necessary.

I am one of those people who was able to quit a very substantial 24 years-long pharmaceutical opioid addiction that was not medically necessary. Although the system would have allowed me to continue to use even Fentanyl to this day, the plant allowed me a way out. Not all will find this avenue, but for millions, it will be the path to freedom once it’s affordable and more available.

Since the dawn of mankind humans have sought out what they shouldn’t have, the caveman adorned the Saber Tooth Tigers fangs as a necklace to honor himself after a kill – knowing that going after it could easily cause death.

One could say that using illicit drugs off the streets is a close parallel to that caveman except for the fact that he was looking for food and to survive where the person on the streets is looking for drugs so they can get by as there’s truly no survival as an addict – only an existence.

What’s ironic about this week’s news is the same plant the Cartels have abandoned will also be the one that causes their current profits to dry up as it’s legalized around the world and as access continues to open up in America.