Underneath a pool table in a house in the Mexican border town of Agua Prieta was once a trapdoor opened by a lever disguised as a water faucet outside. The door led to a tunnel that burrowed beneath the border fence and emerged, 200 feet later, inside a house in Arizona.
Dug in the late 80s on the orders of the now jailed Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman—who back then was known as “El Rapido” because he could get drugs into the United States so quickly—it was the first of many tunnels built by the cartels to successfully smuggle tons of cocaine, heroin, and cannabis underneath the U.S. border and into the world’s single largest drug market.
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The battle between the authorities and drug traffickers is now more of an arms race than a game of cat and mouse. The global war on drugs has enriched organized crime around the globe; efforts to curb the drug business, at huge financial cost, have merely ended with more drug routes, more drugs, and more deaths. It’s no wonder drug trafficking is the lifeblood of organized crime, and that the market in drug trafficking now has an estimated annual global value of between $426 and $652 billion.
Except the whole concept that underpins the global drug trade—authorities tighten the border, traffickers find new ways around it—is being challenged by a new way of doing things. Despite record production levels of plant-based drugs, and a progression in some countries toward legalizing or decriminalizing cannabis a new version of the age-old drug trade, revolving around an increasingly troubling set of substances, is in the ascendancy.
Drug policy experts and law enforcement have all recorded a boom time for synthetic drugs, which are made entirely in labs that often mimic the effects of plant-based drugs, but which are being mass-produced in chemical factories, marketed online, and often smuggled undercover via the global postal system. These man-made highs include well-known banned substances such as methamphetamine, MDMA, LSD, and ketamine; a vast array of new psychoactive substances (NPS) including cathinones and synthetic cannabinoids; black market medicines such as fentanyl and tranquilizers, and dangerous or impure analogues and substitutes of the above.
