Heroin & the SCV

Sad video interview of the parents of one 22 year old heroin abuser who died from an overdose in April. In his car.

I don’t know if you recall, but about a year and a half ago, the LA Times did a series of well-researched stories on how black tar heroin was making inroads into “Middle America” and the suburbs. Here’s an excerpt:

Immigrants from an obscure corner of Mexico are changing heroin use in many parts of America.

Farm boys from a tiny county that once depended on sugar cane have perfected an ingenious business model for selling a semi-processed form of Mexican heroin known as black tar.

Using convenient delivery by car and aggressive marketing, they have moved into cities and small towns across the United States, often creating demand for heroin where there was little or none. In many of those places, authorities report increases in overdoses and deaths.

One of the things that came through he Signal’s story and this video is that parents had no idea heroin was so easily available in the SCV. After all, people move to places like Santa Clarita to get away from those kinds of things which we associate with the inner city or urban areas. I’m guilty too- for a long time I didn’t believe it was a real problem. So how the hell did heroin get into our town to the extent that we have hundreds of overdose cases and 10 deaths?

Let’s step back a bit. First of all, when did it become more profitable for poor Mexican farm boys to cultivate heroin rather than sugar? Billions of people use sugar each day, and millions probably grow it, but how many people use heroin? Were the margins too low on sugar or what? And once these farmers decided it’d be more profitable to produce heroin, how’d they develop the business intelligence to realize that a places like the SCV would become fertile marketplaces for their product? Why not a more dense place like LA, or Chicago or Buffalo? Did they take a look at the competition (other drugs) or the cops and realize it’d be an easy market to conquer?

I guess what I’m saying is that we have to look at this heroin problem as a classic case of supply and demand. Before, there wasn’t too much of a supply in heroin in the SCV, so demand was low or nonexistent. These Mexican farmers decided one day to make heroin instead of sugar, and part of their business plan was to find customers who liked the high they got from the drug. And one day they decided Santa Clarita would be the next market they target. Voila! A marketplace was born.

And now, after creating the demand for their product, the SCV will be just another marketplace for heroin in the eyes of drug producers. They’ll do everything a typical CSUN MBA would do: tally their profits and losses, improve their infrastructure, and get as much margin per unit from their salesforce.

Oh sure, every now and then we’ll read a good tale about our Sheriff’s Deputies busting some 20 something kid who has in his possession a brick or two of heroin. The City will release a blurb about the number of heroin balloons that were seized in Q4. This will make us feel good, but in reality, it will just constrain supply for a little while, and prices of heroin will probably go up in the SCV, enriching dealers even more.

This is basic capitalism and supply and demand. You can’t stop it. Deputies are no match for marketplace forces. We’ll never win this war. All you can try and do is educate people not to get into it in the first place, which is what we’ve started to do.

But that never feels satisfying enough. Especially against a background of increasing and accelerating globalization where normal Americans can never move fast enough or far away enough from the effects of every disruption in the global market, from Greece’s debt ratio to the price of sugar in rural Mexico.