Targeting Middle America

By Lee DeCovnick

The porous southern border has admitted not just hard-working seekers of a better life anxious to join the American middle class, but also vicious drug gangs pushing heroin on middle America. All of this revealed in an exceptional piece of investigative journalism from the LA Times. (Part Two. Part Three.)

Immigrants from Xalisco, Mexico, they have brought an audacious entrepreneurial spirit to the heroin trade. .... using Southern California and Phoenix as staging areas, they have established networks in Salt Lake City; Reno; Boise; Indianapolis; Nashville; and Myrtle Beach, S.C. From those cities, their heroin -- called black tar because it's sticky and dark -- has made its way into suburbs and small towns.

In Ohio, where Xalisco networks arrived around 1998, black tar has contributed to one of the country's worst heroin problems. Since then, deaths from heroin overdoses have risen more than threefold, to 229 in 2008. The number of heroin addicts admitted to state-funded treatment centers has quintupled, to nearly 15,000.

By 2007, black-tar addiction had spread across Columbus, Dayton, Cleveland and other Ohio cities. At Columbus-based Maryhaven, Ohio's largest drug-treatment center, opiate addicts made up 20% of the center's patients in 1997, and many were addicted to prescription painkillers. Today, 70% are black-tar heroin addicts.

So both Republican and Democratic Administrations, through the determined neglect of the Mexican border, have allowed the malignant cancer of heroin addiction to flourish deep inside the heartland of America.

Two pioneers of the Xalisco model met in the early 1990s in the Northern Nevada Correctional Center, where they were serving time for drug offenses.

Soon a system evolved: Addicts dialed a number, as if ordering pizza. The dispatcher would page the driver with a code indicating where to meet the addict.

If drivers were busted, the small amounts of heroin and the absence of paraphernalia reduced the risk of lengthy prison sentences. To avoid attracting attention, they dressed modestly, drove beat-up cars and never carried weapons.

Among the idiosyncrasies of Xalisco dealers is that they generally do not sell to African Americans or Latinos. Instead, they have focused on middle- and working-class whites, believing them to be a safer and more profitable clientele.

This sounds more like a MBA class in marketing, than a plague that kills thousands of American citizens and destroys families and communities.

One can only marvel as to how this syndicate tracked hundreds of drivers, and produced truckloads of fake identities fake driver licenses, and fake car registrations. Also how many serious injuries and traffic deaths were caused by these illegal drug dealers criss- crossing the country distributing black-tar heroin?

We all understand that addicts pay for their fixes by breaking into our homes, committing armed robberies of our citizens and small businesses, and peddling underage girls in prostitution rings. So who ultimately pays for all these crimes, and the subsequent drug treatment rehab centers? We all do, the compassionate taxpayers of America.

Illegal immigration is much more than harvesting our lettuce and cleaning our toilets: it also encompasses sophisticated crime syndicates, heroin addiction, corruption of local law enforcement, and the unwarranted slaughter of our children and their dreams.

We, as a country, must decide if our government is complicit, apathetic or incapable of dealing with these issues. On such answers the fate of this nation rests.