A farmer scatters poppy seed across a field. It is early spring in the mountains of Ipiales, Colombia.
After three months of sun, beautiful white and red flowers bloom. The petals fall off and growers return to the field to start the harvesting process. The seed pod is cut and raw opium oozes from the bulb. Workers skillfully wield knives to gather the sticky white substance. It is then formed into bricks, which are wrapped in plastic and collected in piles.
With the harvest complete, a local black-market merchant arrives at the farm. Money exchanges hands as a crew of men tosses bricks of the raw substance into the back of a truck. The material is then delivered to a nearby refinery. There, the opium is dumped into a large, weathered oil drum and combined with boiling water and lime. The morphine separates and rises to the top. After further processing, it is poured into molds and set out to dry in the sun.
The morphine is then sent to a laboratory for more treatment and purification. The result is a white powder known as heroin, which is packaged in small bags and placed into a larger container. A distributor within a drug cartel is contacted and the heroin is brought to Mexico through an intricate multi-tiered distribution chain. Once the highly addictive drug arrives near the border of the United States, drug couriers, or “mules,” are paid thousands of dollars to hide the packages and transport them.
After entering America undetected, another contact is made and the drugs switch hands again, this time traveling to the distribution hub of New York City—more than 2,700 miles from the small farm in Colombia.
In New York City, a longtime heroin addict rouses herself out of bed with one thing on her mind. She flips open her cellphone and makes a call. Fifteen minutes later she knocks on the door of her dealer, who just received a new shipment. She trades a wad of cash for a tightly rolled plastic bag of heroin. The routine is the same, but this time will be different.
