How Do Cartels Get Drugs into the US?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2015
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In November the US Drug Enforcement Administration issued its Drug Threat Assessment. Mexican ‘transnational criminal organisations’, it said, are the primary suppliers of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana to the United States. Drugs – the DEA says – are killing 46,000 Americans a year. But between Mexico’s criminal enterprises, and their clients, is a vast expanse of difficult geography and an international border. So, how do cartels get drugs into the US? The Inquiry hears from serving US law enforcement personnel tasked with intercepting drugs shipments. Their stories – of tunnels, “narco-subs” and complex criminal networks – are astonishing.
(Photo: Narco-Submarines, Credit: Reuters)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC World Service, this is Helena Merriman with the inquiry. |
| 0:05.0 | This week, how are cartels getting drugs into the US? |
| 0:10.0 | On October the 10th this year, paramedics were called to a house in North Carolina. |
| 0:18.0 | A 33 year old woman, Melody, had been found in her bathroom by her mother. Unconscious. |
| 0:28.0 | There were needles all over the floor. |
| 0:30.0 | When the medics arrived, they tried to revive revive her but it was too late. |
| 0:35.0 | Melody died from an overdose of heroin. |
| 0:38.0 | Her death was just one of 40,000 from drug overdoses in the US every year. |
| 0:50.0 | A recent report from the Drug Enforcement Administration found that drug overdoses now kill more people in the US than car accidents or guns. |
| 1:02.0 | Some through prescription drugs, |
| 1:04.0 | others through cocaine, and increasingly heroin. |
| 1:09.0 | Drugs that are being smuggled in large volumes all the way from the fields of South America up to the |
| 1:14.8 | border with the US and past thousands of patrol officers who guard it. |
| 1:20.4 | The question is, how? We've summoned the people on the front lines of this battle, |
| 1:29.0 | drug enforcement agents who hunt down the traffickers on land and at sea to tell us how the cartels are |
| 1:35.6 | getting drugs into the US. As you'll hear, the answers are extraordinary. |
| 1:49.0 | Part one, cat and mouse. Throughout my career it was fascinating being on ships being at the what I would term the |
| 1:56.6 | pointy end of the spear. |
| 1:58.5 | Our first expert witness, Rear Admiral Chris Tomney. |
| 2:02.1 | To me it was always like a Christmas morning waking up each morning on the water not knowing |
| 2:07.5 | what the day would bring, whether or not you would be saving someone's life from a vessel |
| 2:12.0 | sinking to interdicting a narco trafficker. |
... |
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