SUMMARY: It's not part of Cancun that tourists travel to see, heavily armed police working to stop a soaring homicide rate. The fallout of Mexico's campaign targeting drug cartel leaders is spilling onto the periphery of the famous beach destination, where fractured gangs fight for control. Yet the area's violence has rarely put vacationers in danger. Special correspondent Danny Gold reports.
SUMMARY: Former Los Angeles Times reporter Sam Quinones examines the dramatic surge of heroin use in the U.S. in his new book, "Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic." Quinones paints a graphic portrait of the national problem in a conversation with Jeffrey Brown.
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): Now the latest addition to the NewsHour Bookshelf.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, heroin usage in the U.S. has doubled among young adults in the last decade and deaths have quadrupled.
Former Los Angeles Times reporter Sam Quinones looks at what’s driving that surge in his new book, “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.”
He recently talked with Jeffrey Brown and painted a graphic portrait of a national problem.
SAM QUINONES, Author, “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic”: This is the quietest epidemic, drug epidemic or drug scourge, we have ever had in this country, certainly in the last 50, 60 years.
No public violence is associated, not like crack, where the people were battling for street corners and this kind of thing. People are dying alone in their bedrooms, in a McDonald’s bathroom. And there’s no publicity. Families are stigmatized, horribly mortified that their kids are addicted and then that their kids die of this stuff.
JEFFREY BROWN: So, this came from reporting on the drug trade in Mexico and the U.S. What grabbed your attention?
SAM QUINONES: Well, I discovered in the course of my reporting the story of one small town in Mexico on the Pacific Coast, where everybody in that town had migrated to the United States, had developed a system for selling heroin.
They were master heroin retailers in the United States, selling heroin like pizza, like delivery model. And they had used this system to, first of all, employ hundreds of people in the town and spread across the country, so they were in like half the country.
What I also came to understand, though, was that they had this enormous market for heroin. This one small town became one of the major suppliers of heroin to the United States. That market was due entirely to a whole new supply of addicts who got addicted to prescription painkillers.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): The arrest over the weekend of the head of one of the world’s most sophisticated narcotics networks proved a major victory for both U.S. and Mexican law enforcement.
But both sides now want to prosecute him.
Jeffrey Brown has the story.
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): Mexican marines led Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman away in handcuffs on Saturday, thus ending a 13-year hunt for one of the world’s most dangerous men.
JESUS MURILLO KARAM, Attorney General, Mexico (through interpreter): This arrest is the product of an operation that’s been worked on for several months in coordination with all federal government agencies. And the arrest was impeccably achieved.
JEFFREY BROWN: Only two days earlier, Guzman was surrounded by troops at his ex-wife’s home in the western city of Culiacan, capital of the Mexican state of Sinaloa. He got away through a trapdoor under the bathtub, and managed to escape through a network of tunnels and the city’s sewer system.
U.S. drug agents and Mexican troops, acting on wiretaps and other information, pursued him 135 miles South, to this luxury condominium in the seaside resort of Mazatlan. There, just before dawn Saturday, they stormed into Guzman’s room and captured him without firing a shot.
In Washington today, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney praised the joint effort.
JAY CARNEY, White House Press Secretary: This is a significant achievement in our shared fight against transnational organized crime, violence, and drug trafficking. The U.S. and Mexico have a strong security partnership and we will continue to support Mexico in its efforts to ensure that cartel leaders are put out of business.
JEFFREY BROWN: Guzman was formally charged Sunday with drug trafficking in Mexico. He faces indictments in the U.S. as well, and federal prosecutors in New York and Chicago already are asking for his extradition.
It’s not the first time behind bars for the 56-year-old Guzman, nicknamed El Chapo, or Shorty. In 2001, he escaped from a high-security Mexican prison before he was halfway through a 20-year sentence for drug trafficking and murder.
Over the years, he built the Sinaloa cartel into Mexico’s most powerful drug operation, wiping out rivals in a reign of brutality that killed tens of thousands of people. In Mexico City this weekend, word of his capture brought both hope and skepticism.
FRANCISCO ALCOCER, (through interpreter): I think that it’s something very good. I think it’s an excellent achievement from this government that is giving us results. I think not just for Mexico, but for many countries, it’s an important arrest.
RAMON TORRES, (through interpreter): It’s very difficult. The cartel is quite organized and has a presence in many states in the country, so it’s difficult to say that just with the capture of El Chapo the cartel will fall apart.
JEFFREY BROWN: Guzman now joins Miguel Angel Trevino, who was head of the Zetas, a rival cartel, and was arrested last summer. Those are major gets for President Enrique Pena Nieto, who had said he’d rebalance the all-out war against cartels with a new emphasis on the economy and education.
SUMMARY: Under Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel rose to dominate or destroy rivals on the U.S.-Mexican border. Jeffrey Brown looks at how the arrest affects the drug trade with former Mexican intelligence official Alejandro Hope and Sam Quinones of the Los Angeles Times.
GWEN IFILL (Newshour): Next, Outside of a war zone, this is the most dangerous place on earth, San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras, at the crossroads of drug shipments from South America to the United States.
More than 1,200 people were killed in the city last year, more than 7,000 in the country. Thanks to those ongoing drug wars, it has the highest per capita murder rate in the world.
Our story comes from filmmaker Guillermo Galdos, who spent a week in Honduras on assignment for Britain's Channel 4 News.
A warning: The images and the details in this report are disturbing.
GUILLERMO GALDOS, filmmaker: Friday night at the main hospital in San Pedro Sula, the casualties would in, this man barely alive shot twice in the head. The hospital is so busy that even a dying man has to wait 24 hours for an operation.
SUMMARY: Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, leader of the notorious Zetas drug gang in Mexico, was captured by Mexican armed forces and accused of homicide, torture and money laundering, among other crimes. Morales and his cartel are known for their brutality and the wanton killings of authorities and civilians alike. Jeffrey Brown reports.
SUMMARY: With Miguel Angel Trevino Morales behind bars, who will take over as leader of the Zetas? How does the arrest provoke long-standing rivalries and what does it portend for the long-term fight against drugs? Jeffrey Brown talks to journalist Alfredo Corchado, author of "Midnight in Mexico," about Trevino Morales' legacy.
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): Finally tonight, the Mexican government says it has taken out a major target in its war on drug cartels.
Ray Suarez has our story.
And a warning: Some viewers may find images in his report disturbing.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): It was front-page news in Mexico City today. Mexican Marines had killed the leader of the Zetas drug cartel, Heriberto Lazcano, in a shoot-out Sunday.
The navy announced fingerprints confirmed the identity. Then a bizarre twist: Gunmen stole the body from a funeral home before forensic testing could be completed.
HOMERO RAMOS, Coahuila State attorney general (through translator): The owner of Garcia funeral services said notified local authorities that a heavily armed group of masked men subdued the employees, took the body from the funeral home in a hearse and forced the driver to drive the vehicle.
RAY SUAREZ: And officials released a death photo of the man said to be Lazcano. Still, the state attorney general, overseeing the operation, said authorities are confident they got the right man.
HOMERO RAMOS (through translator): An analysis was done comparing the body and its characteristics with the still pictures of Heriberto Lazcano on file. This comparison resulted in a positive match.
RAY SUAREZ: Lazcano was one of Mexico's most feared drug lords, also known as El Verdugo, the Executioner. He transformed the Zetas from enforcers for the Gulf Cartel into a powerful rival organization.
Since then, the Zetas have been blamed for some of the bloodiest atrocities in Mexico's six-year war on drugs, but in recent months, authorities have arrested a string of high-profile Zeta members.
SUMMARY: For Mexican President Felipe Calderon, the fall of Herbito Lazcano is part of a larger strategy to injure drug cartels' operations by targeting their leaders. Judy Woodruff talks to Reuters News Agency's Simon Gardner for more on how this success plays into the larger goals for curbing drug-related violence in Mexico.
Dickie Sanders was not naturally prone to depression. The 21-year-old BMX rider was known for being sweet spirited and warm -- a hugger not a hand-shaker. The kind of guy who called on holidays. Who helped his father on the family farm. Who spent countless hours perfecting complicated tricks on his bike.
Yet on Nov. 12, 2010, Sanders was found dead on the floor of his childhood bedroom. He had shot himself in the head with a .22 caliber youth rifle.
The suicide was the culmination of five days of strange behavior that began shortly after Sanders snorted a powdery substance he bought from a friend. Instead of the brief high he was seeking, he experienced days of insomnia, along with waves of terror and frightening delusions, including an incident where he “saw” 25 police cars outside his parents' kitchen window and then slit his own throat with a butcher knife. That incident landed Sanders in the hospital with stitches. For a few hours, the hallucinations subsided.
“I don't like the way this is making me feel," Sanders told his stepmother, Julie, as the two awaited his release from the hospital. "I promise I won't do anything again. I'm done.”
But the paranoia flared up with a vengeance that night, and back home, Dickie's father lay in bed with his son, arms wrapped around him, until he finally nodded off. It's unclear when Dickie woke up, made his way downstairs to his bedroom and found the rifle he had won in a shooting contest years before. No one heard the gunshot.
An autopsy revealed a powerful stimulant in his system: methylenedioxypyrovalerone, also known as MDPV.
MDPV is a common ingredient in a street drug known as "bath salts." Sanders' death occurred the month after Mark Ryan, director of the Louisiana Poison Center, began to receive the first string of calls from emergency rooms around the state about patients taking the drug. For such a benign name, the symptoms were dangerous and bizarre. People were showing up just like Sanders had -- paranoid, agitated, violent and hallucinating.
“These guys were seeing things like monsters, demons and aliens, and those were consistent terms,” Ryan said. “We didn't ask, ‘Are you seeing monsters and aliens?' They were telling us that.”
We didn't ask, 'Are you seeing monsters and aliens?' They were telling us that.
Soon after Dickie Sanders died, Ryan teamed with Kentucky's poison control center and began to build a database of every bath salts case recorded in the two states. In the report, they listed behaviors brought on by the drugs. One patient high on the substance repeatedly fired guns out of the house at strangers. Another broke all the windows in a house and then wandered barefoot through the broken glass. A third left her 2-year-old daughter in the middle of a highway because she “had demons.”
“Bath salts” are nothing like the epsom salts often added to bathwater; it's just the most common code name given to a specific type of synthetic drugs made in underground labs and marketed as household items. The drugs have been camouflaged as plant food, stain remover, toilet bowl cleaner and hookah cleaner. They've been sold online and in "head shops," businesses that sell drug paraphernalia. The boxes usually contain a foil wrap or plastic bag of powder, though sometimes they take the form of pills or capsules. The color of the powder ranges from white to yellow to brown, the price from $30 to $50. And nearly every box has a label that says “not for human consumption.”
When bath salts first appeared in 2010, the products were crudely packaged -- a label from an ink-jet printer slapped onto a plastic container, Ryan said. But over time, they began to look increasingly more professional and often specifically tailored to the place. Products in Louisiana donned names like Hurricane Charlie, NOLA Diamond, Bayou Ivory Flower. Bath salts had also surfaced in Illinois, Kentucky and Florida, but Louisiana was hit especially hard.
The product that Sanders snorted was called Cloud 9. At the time of his death, he was in a drug program for marijuana abuse, actively attending group meetings and undergoing frequent drug tests. He was told that the drug was legal, a great high and wouldn't show up on a drug test.
Cathleen Clancy is associate medical director at the National Capital Poison Center in Washington D.C., where they catalog the effects of bath salts on the area's emergency room cases. Users are often hyper-agitated, hot and sweating, she said. Their heart rate is dangerously high, their blood pressure is up, and seizures are common.
Often even high doses of common sedatives don't help them. Doctors instead must turn to antipsychotics or other powerful medications.
Early on, doctors began noticing something else that was strange. Compared with other drugs, bath salts didn't follow a normal dose-response pattern. With cocaine or methamphetamine, the drug entered the bloodstream, and, within hours, began to wear off. Not so for bath salts.
“Some patients were in the hospital for 5 days, 10 days, 14 days,” Ryan said. “In some cases, they were under heavy sedation. As you try to taper off the sedation, the paranoia came back and the delusions."
As Ryan was scrambling to grasp the scope of the problem in Louisiana, scientists 1,000 miles away were beginning to tease out the drug's chemistry. What was it about this substance, they wondered, that could make a man cut his own throat or a mother leave her 2-year-old in the middle of a highway?
THE BACKSTORY
What few people knew was that the chemical components of the drug long predated the Louisiana outbreak. In the 1970s, a medicinal chemist named Richard A. Glennon was studying what it would take to convert a stimulant drug to a hallucinogen and vice versa in order to determine how these substances work in the brain. He knew that small modifications to a drug's molecular structure could result in major changes in its effects. By introducing an oxygen atom to the side chain of amphetamine, he created something called a beta-keto amphetamine. Beta-keto amphetamine was what we now call cathinone, and at the time, in the U.S., it was a new class of stimulant.
“We didn't expect any type of activity from it, but we found out it was an active stimulant,” Glennon said. “And it was at least as potent, if not more potent, than amphetamine.”
Scientists would soon realize, it behaved like no stimulant anyone had ever seen.
Shortly after, a group from the National Institute for Drug Abuse (NIDA) visited Glennon's lab. One of the scientists informed Glennon that his compound was identical to the active ingredient of a plant called Catha edulis, or khat, a plant native to East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula that produces an amphetamine-like high when chewed or brewed as tea.
“He said, ‘Eureka, this is the active constituent of khat,'” Glennon recalled. “So we found ourselves in possession of a lot of the early pharmacological data on this.
Few things make amphetamine more potent than it already is. But add an extra methyl group - a carbon atom bound to three hydrogen atoms - and you get the more potent methamphetamine. Glennon made the same change to his cathinone, and the already powerful stimulant became suddenly even more powerful. In 1987, he published his results in the journal, Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior. The title of the article was "Methcathinone: A New and Potent Amphetamine-like Agent." It was the first time the term "methcathinone" had been used.
Soon after his paper was published, Glennon received a letter in the mail from a scientist at the Lensoviet Technological Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia. What Glennon was calling methcathinone, the scientist told him, already existed in the Soviet Union. Methcathinone had sprung up as a major drug of abuse there in the 1970s and had increased tenfold in the eighties. There, they were calling it ephedrone, or "Jeff" on the streets.
Glennon's 1987 article, the Russian scientist wrote, was the only published reference he could find on methcathinone. He went on to write that despite its popularity in the Soviet Union, the widespread drug problem had been kept quiet by Soviet authorities for "political motives."
In the past four decades, Glennon has published more than two dozen papers and book chapters on cathinone, its effects and how it compares to other drugs.
In 1993, cathinone was classified by the federal government as a Schedule I substance, a category that includes heroin and LSD, and is reserved for drugs with a high potential for abuse and "no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States."
For decades though, synthetic cathinones were less of a real problem in the U.S. and "more like a theoretical, scientific problem," Glennon said. That is, until 2010.
At the same time Mark Ryan was battling the rapid rise of bath salts in the deep South, the mysterious new drug was brought to Glennon's attention. One common ingredient in bath salts was a stimulant called mephedrone. Glennon, who now runs at lab at Virginia Commonwealth University School of Pharmacy, noticed that mephedrone bore a strong resemblance to compounds he had synthesized years earlier. Mephedrone is a synthetic cathinone.
He set out to learn more. In April 2012, his lab and two others at VCU School of Medicine won a joint five-year grant from NIDA to synthesize the ingredients in bath salts and study the drug's effect on brain transporters embedded in frog cells and in lab rats. They were determined to find out what it did to the brain and how, exactly, it produced such powerful effects.
Meanwhile, in Louisiana, lab tests were showing that, in addition to mephedrone, nearly every single blood and urine sample from bath salts users contained another ingredient, the same ingredient found in Dicki Sanders' blood: MDPV. MDPV is also a synthetic cathinone. But, scientists would soon realize, it behaved like no stimulant anyone had ever seen.
AT THE ROOT OF EVERYTHING: DOPAMINE
It's impossible to talk about bath salts without talking about dopamine -- a natural neurotransmitter involved in the basic experience of pleasure. Chocolate, sex, gambling, nicotine, even the buzz of a smartphone in a pocket, all cause a rush of dopamine in the brain's reward center, the nucleus accumbens. Tiny dopamine molecules surge forth from nerve cells in the brain to send a cascade of signals to other nerve cells, and then they retreat back into the cell in a process called reuptake. It's the constant release and retreat of this chemical that causes feelings of pleasure, exhilaration and a sense of well being.
Dopamine also has profound effects on memory, learning, motivation and motor control. When the dopamine balance gets upset, it can wreak havoc on these parts of the brain. Parkinson's disease is an example of dopamine gone wrong.
Except for one thing: MDPV is as much as 10 times stronger than cocaine.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): The gruesome discovery outside Monterrey, Mexico, produced the latest casualties in a brutal war between the country's top two drug cartels.
ADRIAN DE LA GARZA, Nuevo Leon attorney general (through translator): The bodies show signs that they were transported to the site. They carry dirt, dust and those sorts of things.
RAY SUAREZ: The 49 bodies, 43 men and six women, were found without heads, hands or feet, making identification difficult. There was little doubt as to the identity of the murderers. A nearby white stone archway that ordinarily welcomes visitors was spray-painted 100 percent Z, or Zeta, a reference to the Zetas criminal organization.
JAVIER DEL REAL MAGALLANES, Nuevo Leon Security secretary (through translator): There's no doubt in my mind that organized crime aims to grabs people's attention, but most of all the attention from rival gangs.
RAY SUAREZ: The Zetas, based out of the Eastern Gulf Coast of Mexico, were founded by deserters from Mexico's special forces. Just last week, police paraded an assassin linked to the Zetas, a woman named La Tosca, before cameras in Monterrey.
The Zetas are engaged in near constant warfare with the Sinaloa cartel, which largely controls drug smuggling in Western Mexico. Violence has exploded all along the U.S.-Mexico border, with flash points at the (SPEAKING SPANISH) or main entry points into the United States, like Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, which sits on the Rio Grande across from Laredo, Texas.
The grisly find outside Monterrey came just days after 18 dismembered bodies were found in vans near Lake Chapala, a popular resort destination in Jalisco state. On May 4, in Nuevo Laredo, nine badly tortured bodies were discovered hanging from a bridge next to a lengthy, profane banner.
Hours later, 14 dismembered bodies turned up in a van. The heads were found in boxes outside city hall. That atrocity came ahead of a presidential debate last Sunday. Mexicans head to the polls July 1 to elect a replacement for Felipe Calderon, who escalated the war on the cartels in 2006.
Since then, an estimated 50,000 people have died in drug- and gang-related violence.
The United States military has brought lessons from the past decade of conflict to the drug war being fought in the wilderness of Miskito Indian country, constructing this remote base camp with little public notice but with the support of the Honduran government.
It is one of three new forward bases here — one in the rain forest, one on the savanna and one along the coast — each in a crucial location to interdict smugglers moving cocaine toward the United States from South America.
Honduras is the latest focal point in America’s drug war. As Mexico puts the squeeze on narcotics barons using its territory as a transit hub, more than 90 percent of the cocaine from Colombia and Venezuela bound for the United States passes through Central America. More than a third of those narcotics make their way through Honduras, a country with vast ungoverned areas — and one of the highest per capita homicide rates in the world.
This new offensive, emerging just as the United States military winds down its conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and is moving to confront emerging threats, also showcases the nation’s new way of war: small-footprint missions with limited numbers of troops, partnerships with foreign military and police forces that take the lead in security operations, and narrowly defined goals, whether aimed at insurgents, terrorists or criminal groups that threaten American interests.
The effort draws on hard lessons learned from a decade of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Iraq, where troops were moved from giant bases to outposts scattered across remote, hostile areas so they could face off against insurgents.
But the mission here has been adapted to strict rules of engagement prohibiting American combat in Central America, a delicate issue given Washington’s messy history in Honduras, which was the base for the secret operation once run by Oliver North to funnel money and arms to rebels fighting in neighboring Nicaragua. Some skeptics still worry that the American military might accidentally empower thuggish elements of local security forces.
In past drug operations, helicopters ferrying Honduran and American antinarcotics squads took off from the capital, Tegucigalpa, whenever an intelligence task force identified radar tracks of a smuggler’s aircraft. The three-hour flights required to reach cartel rendezvous points did not leave much idle time to spot airplanes as they unloaded tons of cocaine to dugout canoes, which then paddled downriver beneath the jungle canopy to meet fast boats and submersibles at the coast for the trip north.
In creating the new outposts — patterned on the forward bases in Iraq and Afghanistan that gave troops a small, secure home on insurgent turf — spartan but comfortable barracks were built. Giant tanks hold 4,500 gallons of helicopter fuel. Solar panels augment generators. Each site supports two-week rotations for 55 people, all no more than 30 to 45 minutes’ flying time from most smuggling handoff points.
Before his assignment to Central America, Col. Ross A. Brown spent 2005 and 2006 in Iraq as commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment’s Third Squadron, responsible for southern Baghdad. It was a time so violent that President George W. Bush ordered an increase in troop levels to retake the initiative.
Colonel Brown is now commander of Joint Task Force-Bravo, where he and just 600 troops are responsible for the military’s efforts across all of Central America. He is under orders to maintain a discreet footprint, supporting local authorities and the Drug Enforcement Administration, which leads the American counternarcotics mission.
American troops here cannot fire except in self-defense, and they are barred from responding with force even if Honduran or Drug Enforcement Administration agents are in danger. Within these prohibitions, the military marshals personnel, helicopters, surveillance airplanes and logistical support that Honduras and even the State Department and D.E.A. cannot.
“By countering transnational organized crime, we promote stability, which is necessary for external investment, economic growth and minimizing violence,” Colonel Brown said. “We also are disrupting and deterring the potential nexus between transnational organized criminals and terrorists who would do harm to our country.”
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): In Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, drug lords have been paraded to prisons in recent years. And police have stepped up arrests and seizures of illegal drugs, most bound for the large and wealthy U.S. drug market.
Still, drug violence has steadily increased, giving rise to calls for legalization of small quantities of marijuana. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos addressed the topic this week, as he prepared to host the Summit of the Americas this weekend.
FELIPE CALDERON, former Mexican President: We cannot ignore the fact that the challenge to our security has roots on both sides of the border. At the end of the day, its origin is the high demand for drugs here and in other places.
Unprecedented Latin American opposition to U.S. sanctions on communist Cuba left President Barack Obama isolated at the Summit of the Americas on Sunday and illustrated Washington's waning influence in the region.
