The World Wide War on Drugs #5 - Het begin van het einde?

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Marseille in ban blind geweld waarbij verkoolde lijken op straat worden gedumpt


Samen met het Slovaakse Kosice is Marseille dit jaar de culturele hoofdstad van Europa. Juist nu kampt de tweede stad van Frankrijk met een plaag van zwaar straatgeweld, dat doet denken aan de meedogenloze Mexicaanse drugsoorlog. Vorig jaar waren er minstens 24 moorden door het gangstergeweld. De voorbije twee weken vielen er weer vijf doden. De moorden dragen vaak dezelfde schrikwekkende stempel: het slachtoffer wordt op straat met kogels doorboord en vervolgens in brand gestoken. Verkoolde lichamen zijn immers lastiger om te identificeren.


Het was gangsterbaas Faris Berrahma die de methode voor het eerst introduceerde in het straatgeweld in Frankrijk. Het leverde hem de bijnaam 'Le Rôtisseur' op ('rôtir' betekent 'braden'). Op 24 april 2006 werd Berrhama zelf vermoord door rivaliserende bendes. In Bar des Marroniers was hij naar de voetbalmatch Lyon-AC Milan aan het kijken toen liefst tien gemaskerde schutters het vuur openden. Berrahma werd dodelijk getroffen door negen kogels. Ook twee van zijn kompanen kwamen om bij de bloedige aanslag.

Neergeschoten voor gevangenis
Hierdoor laaide de gangsteroorlog (die rond drugs, wapentrafiek en invloed draait) alleen maar op. Die wordt nu meer en meer op straat uitgevochten. Vorige week werd een gangster, die nog maar net was vrijgelaten uit de Baumettes-gevangenis, vlak voor de uitgang van de gevangenis neergeschoten. Enkele dagen werden twee jongeren van 21 jaar afgeslacht op de openbare weg. Een andere jongere werd gewond bij de nietsontziende schietpartij in de Cité des Bleuets. Vrijdag werd dan weer een verkoold lijk aangetroffen, wat een drugsrazzia van de politie ontketende. De identificatie van het verkoolde slachtoffer is bijna onmogelijk en daarom deed de politie een oproep om vermiste personen te komen aangeven.

Kalasjnikovs
De lokale autoriteiten stonden lang machteloos tegen het buitensporige geweld. Aanvalswapens als Kalasjnikovs zijn erg geliefd bij de straatbendes. De boeven kunnen ze al voor enkele honderden euro's aanschaffen in het illegale wapencircuit. De laatste tijd boekte de politie dankzij een gerichter antwoord wel enkele successen.

Reactie Hollande
De regering van de erg onpopulaire president François Hollande (volgens de laatste peiling is liefst 70 procent van de Fransen ontevreden over zijn beleid) blijft niet bij de pakken zitten. Vorig jaar besliste Parijs al om extra agenten te sturen naar de gewelddadige havenstad, maar nu Marseille ook nog eens cultruele hoofdstad van Europa wordt en het imago onbesmeurd zou moeten blijven, voert minister van Binnenlandse Zaken Manuel Valls de druk nog op. Er werden nog eens 240 agenten ter versterking naar Marseille gestuurd en de eerste resultaten zijn volgens Valls al zichtbaar gezien de grote hoeveelheden drugs die in beslag werden genomen. Ook het systeem met verklikkers werpt meer en meer vruchten af. Zo hopen de agenten stilaan het op de criminelen verloren terrein weer terug te winnen.

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Russia Looks to Increase Influence in Latin America Drug War

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Russia is to step up multilateral cooperation in counternarcotics operations in Latin America, in what may also be a play to increase its geopolitical influence in the region.

The director of Russia's Federal Narcotics Service, Viktor Ivanov, announced plans to work with several Latin American countries in carrying out joint counternarcotics operations, training law enforcement agencies, improving user rehabilitation facilities, and helping develop common anti-drug policies.

Much of that investment will be in Nicaragua, where Russia is setting up an anti-drug training center, which will see Russian law enforcement experts train agents from seven countries in areas such as tactics and use of technology.

Ivanov also announced plans to increase security cooperation with Peru, and, in the coming year, begin training, information exchange, and joint monitoring of trafficking operations.

Ivanov added that Moscow police had identified trafficking routes into Russia in which cocaine is concealed in plantain shipments leaving Ecuador or in Colombian flowers shipped to Russia from via the Netherlands. He also highlighted West Africa as an increasingly popular transit point.


InSight Crime Analysis

Russia plays a central part in the global drug trade, but primarily as the world's largest consumer of heroin, which is generally trafficked in from Asian countries such as Afghanistan.

Nevertheless, according to European police force Europol, it also has a growing consumer market for cocaine. Europol also identified the former Soviet countries around Russia as possibly the next emerging entry point for cocaine into Europe.

However, the reasons for Russia's attempts to increase its influence in Latin America may also have a geopolitical angle. In an October 2012 tour of the region, Ivanov suggested his intention was to develop an alternative multilateral consensus around tackling drug trafficking that bypasses US dominance both in Latin America and in Asia.

In the past, Ivanov has criticized the US government's "heavy-handed methods of militarizing the region," in tackling drug trafficking. However, his suggested drug control strategies do not stray far from conventional thinking and the policies emanating from Washington and seem more focused on rivaling US influence than changing tack in the drug war.

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Silk Road: the online drug marketplace that officials seem powerless to stop

Authorities around the world know about the website, but closing it is another matter – partly because it uses Bitcoins

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Mark Johnson* rifles through his mail as he gets home from work. Among the usual bills is a small padded envelope. Though it doesn't have his name on, it's the package he's most interested in: inside lie two grams of, he hopes, relatively pure MDMA.

Johnson has no idea who has sent him the envelope: he has never met his dealer, and never will. The delivery was facilitated through a website called Silk Road, an underground eBay-like site which has become the core marketplace for buying and selling drugs online – and despite law enforcement authorities across the world being fully aware of its operation they have, so far, been powerless to stop it.

The site has been shrouded in secrecy even since it was founded in February 2011, but research due to be formally published later this year tracked its growth during six months of last year. Over those months, sales on the site doubled, hitting $1.7m a month.

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Op maandag 25 maart 2013 15:28 schreef BlueRoom het volgende:

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laatste 2 kunnen natuurlijk zelf ook toetreden tot de markt, slecht argument dus

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Politie knoeit met afgeluisterde gesprekken in drugszaak

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Uit het gepubliceerde vonnis blijkt dat verbalisanten verslag maakten van een gesprek waarbij de telefoon niet eens werd beantwoord. “NN man zegt dat ie een half boekje heeft gekregen”, staat er als weergave van een gesprek waarbij de telefoon niet werd opgenomen. In gesprekken waaruit blijkt dat de verdachte koper is van drugs wordt hij opgevoerd als dealer. En als een vrouw de telefoon opneemt, wordt dit in het verbaal toegeschreven aan de mannelijke verdachte.

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De officier van justitie Sylvia Kubicz omschreef de valse processen-verbaal op de zitting als een vergissing en als een vormverzuim van geringe betekenis. De rechters zeggen de officier van justitie absoluut niet te volgen in haar standpunt. Volgens de rechtbank zijn de onjuistheden in de verbalen klaarblijkelijk doelbewust opgesteld.

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Follow the Money: How Former Anti-Drug Officials Ridiculously Still Say Pot Is Dangerous in Order to Make a Lot of Cash

Former DEA agents and cops are lobbying for tougher drug laws that make them rich.

When eight former DEA chiefs signed a letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder earlier this month, demanding that the feds crack down on Washington and Colorado, the states which voted last November to legalize marijuana, there was more than just drug-war ideology at stake. There was money.

Two of the elder drug warriors, Peter Bensinger (DEA chief, 1976–1981) and Robert DuPont (White House drug chief, 1973–1977), run a corporate drug-testing business. Their employee-assistance company, Bensinger, DuPont & Associates, the sixth largest in the nation, holds the pee stick for some 10 million employees around the US. Their clients have included the biggest players in industry and government: Kraft Foods, American Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, the Federal Aviation Administration and even the Justice Department itself.

“These are not just old drug war architects pushing a drug war model they’ve pushed for 40 years,” says Brian Vicente, a Denver lawyer and co-author of Colorado’s Proposition 64, which legalized marijuana for recreational use. “These guys are asking Eric Holder to pursue prohibition policies that line their own pockets.”

Bensinger and DuPont both deny money is their motive. “It’s true we might benefit from keeping marijuana illegal,” says DuPont. But he argues it's equally true that marijuana legalization could benefit his bottom line, putting forth the old drug-war line that legalization would create more users. “The more success legalization has, the better it is for our business because they are creating a problem for employers,” he says. “That would be smart for us.” DuPont also points out that only 15% of their business is made up of training employers to detect the warning signs of drug and alcohol abuse and supplying third-party testing. But both men are involved in industry-controlled lobbying groups like the Drug & Alcohol Industry Testing Association, which backed the Drug Testing Integrity Act of 2008, outlawing products that help people beat drug tests and keeping their business healthy.

By inserting themselves into the legal-pot debate, Bensinger, DuPont and other drug warriors benefit by promoting their own legacies and bolstering their own business, lobbying and consulting interests—even in the face of an increasingly skeptical public. A 2011 Gallup survey showed that half of Americans favor legalizing weed. “This letter that they signed is their attempt to once again become relevant within the public policy debate that has largely turned its back on such archaic viewpoints,” says Paul Armentano, deputy director of the pro-marijuana nonprofit, National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).

The time-honored revolving door between government and business swings fast and often. It can be straightforward, like the appointment of banking behemoth Goldman Sachs' alumni as economic policymakers by recent presidential administrations. But when it comes to the drug war, the family tree is more like a thicket of interests among law enforcement, federal and state prisons, pharmaceutical giants, drug testers and drug treatment programs—all with an economic stake in keeping pot illegal.

Bensinger and DuPont are longtime allies of the marijuana prohibition group that sent the letter to Holder, Save Our Society from Drugs (SOS), which was founded by Mel Sembler, a Florida shopping-mall magnate, and his wife, Betty. The Semblers also founded Straight Inc.—a drug-treatment program that used sleep deprivation, beatings and psychological abuse to treat 10,000 teenage patients, in nine states, from 1976 to 1993, at $1,400 a month plus a $1,600 per patient evaluation fee, raking in millions. Straight wasshut down after investigations in state after state corroborated the hundreds of complaints. But the Semblers, longtime major Republican Party fundraisers, retain their influence as behind-the-scenes bankrollers of the anti-drug faction.

The department of the White House drug czar, otherwise known as the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), is another arm of the government’s war on drugs that can be lucrative to incumbents. Andrea Barthwell, MD, former deputy drug czar during President George W. Bush’s first term and his point person against medical marijuana, has earned a living both treating drug addicts and lobbying against policies that weaken marijuana laws—and cut into her own bottom line.

As a past president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM)—a group that opposes medical marijuana, and whose members’ business model could be threatened by legalized marijuana, since two-thirds of its clientele are court-ordered pot users trying to avoid jail time—Barthwell has been one of its fiercest attack dogs. In ASAM campaigns against Oregon and Illinois’ medical marijuana initiatives, she called those who favor medical marijuana “cruel” and “snake oil salesman.” She denounces this pain-relief and anti-nausea approach for patients with cancer and AIDS because, she claims, it is unregulated and unproven (the Institute of Medicine declared medical marijuana useful in 2003, and since then many studies, and many more users, attest to its benefits.)

Yet Barthwell was happy to jump from the ONDCP to the payroll of GW Pharmaceutical in 2005, lobbying for the Canadian company’s Sativex—a liquefied marijuana spray, extracted from whole plant cannabis, for the same pain benefits. Even as the American Medical Association and federal lawmakers maintain that pot has no medicinal value, Big Pharma is applying for dozens of cannabis-based new medicines in order to take hold of of the $1.8 billion medical marijuana industry, as NORML’s Paul Armentano pointed out five years ago in the Huffington Post.

Barthwell, like Bensinger and DuPoint, also has a financial stake in the prohibition treatment culture. She is founder and CEO of EMGlobal LLC, parent company of the Chicago-based Two Dreams Outer Banks drug treatment center, and is also a director of Catasys Inc., which provides substance abuse programs and behavioral health management services to companies, health plans and unions—a role for which she received $77,994 in compensation in 2011.

When it comes to the drug war, money rolls into whichever corporate pockets are willing to play ball, whether it’s big-time lobbyists or broadcast TV networks. Barry McCaffrey—President Clinton’s second-term drug czar and a former Army general, who also signed the recent letter to Holder—was in charge of the purse strings at ONDCP. He oversaw a money-soaked, ham-handed propaganda campaign: In 1999, his office hired PR giant Fleishman-Hillard (at $10 million a year), which encouraged TV networks to slip anti-drug messages into sitcoms and dramas in exchange for ad time worth millions. The secret effort allowed networks to avoid running PSAs, freeing up airtime for paid ads. Networks also gave the ONCDP advance copies of scripts to review. It’s estimated that between 1998 and 2000, the networks received up to $25 million in benefits.

At the same time, McCaffrey was sharpening his stick for the battle against medical marijuana, flatly denying that patients in pain could receive relief from pot. After he left the drug czar’s job, he went on the payroll of military contractors, promoting their interests in the Iraq war as a frequent talking head on national network TV, never disclosing his financial ties.

Lobbying your former employer—whether it’s the government itself or taxpayers who foot the bill—is the No. 1 way one-time public servants can serve themselves. The same is true of current state-paid employees, like cops and other law enforcement personnel whose job it is to crack down on illegal weed smoking. As Armentano notes, federal grants that target illegal drug use are a major source of funding for local police coffers, paying for new hires, equipment and coveted overtime pay.

John Lovell, a lobbyist for police associations in Sacramento, California, not only obtains those grants, he is a front-line fighter on behalf of the cops to keep pot illegal. When California weighed Proposition 19 to legalize marijuana in 2010, Lovell helped manage the opposition campaign. During the fight, according to a reviewof lobbying contracts by Republic Report, Lovell’s company received $386,350 from police groups, including the California Police Chiefs Association. The same report noted that Lovell helped local police departments apply for drug war money from President Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. In 2009 and 2010, state police groups sought some $75 million from the feds to conduct a Campaign Against Marijuana Planting. Lovell represented one such group.

Indeed, law enforcement agencies around the country could lose as much as $11 billion in taxpayer money if marijuana prohibition is repealed, according to Harvard economics professor Jeff Myron. Weed arrests account for half of all drugs arrests in the US. The tangled money trail can seem at times like something from a smoke-filled Cheech and Chong plot.

In 2009, the California Police Chiefs Association posted on their website a position paperagainst pot for pain, courtesy of a group called Friends of the DEA. “Requiring the DEA unequivocally to take a ‘hands-off’ approach, no matter how egregious the dispensary’s practices, will not serve the best interests of patients. Uncontrolled proliferation of dispensaries will seriously undercut our FDA drug approval system and deprive patients of important regulatory protections,” the group argued. What the paper didn’t note was that Friends was a lobbying group headed by Michael Barnes, a former Bush appointee to the drug czar’s office, as first pointed out by CounterPunch that year. The nine-page, heavily footnoted position paper was written by none other than Andrea Barthwell, MD, the promoter of Sativex, which is likely to receive FDA approval soon.

Among the biggest financial winners from the war on pot are private prisons and the army of DEA agents, local deputies and SWAT teams who help fill them up. Since 1980, federal prisons have ballooned some 790% because of the war on drugs, which began in earnest the previous decade. Private prison companies have seen their business soar. Corrections Corporation of America (CAA), the largest operator in the US, with 60 facilities and a 90,000-bed capacity, had $1.7 billion in tax-payer-funded revenue last year. The GEO Group, a worldwide player with 53,000 beds, pulled in $1.6 billion in government-funneled revenue.

In its 2010 annual report, CAA is fairly transparent about its stake in the anti-drug battle: “Any changes [in laws] with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.” Last year, both companies stuffed millions of dollars into the pockets of Washington lobbyists to pressure lawmakers to maintain the status quo, as revealed in an investigation by Laura Carlsen in March's Counter Punch magazine.

“My most powerful adversity is the police-prison industry,” says former cop–turned–drug policy specialist Howard Woolridge, who lobbies lawmakers for marijuana reform for Citizens Opposing Prohibition. “They can say, ‘If you don’t vote for more prohibition, we will tell people you are soft on drugs on and soft on crime.’ The Fraternal Order of Police is looking out for their 326,000 members’ paychecks. If they say you’re soft on crime, they can move upward of 2% of the electorate. In a close election, that’s victory and defeat.”

Vincente doesn’t doubt that the Bensingers, Bathwells and McCaffreys are fervent believers in their anti-pot mission, even as they earn their living on its front lines or flanks. The same people who wrote to Holder battled Vincente's initiative as well. “It’s what they do—they get together and sign letters,” he says. For the older fighters, says Paul Armentano of NORML, “Their motivation is the fact their failed polices have been proved wrong. All they have is the ability to try to intimidate a couple of high-ranking officials. Most of America has moved on.”

Attorney General Eric Holder may recognize this. He has told members of the Senate that the Obama administration is still formulating its policy toward the states that legalized pot. “We are considering what the federal response to those new statutes will be,” Holder said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this week. “We will have the ability to announce what our policy will be relatively soon.” So far he has not answered the drug warriors' letter.

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Spaanse agenten runnen drugsbende

Spaanse opsporingsautoriteiten hebben op het Canarische eiland Fuerteventura een drugsbende opgerold die werd gerund door politieagenten. Negen dienders van de Guardia Civil zijn opgepakt, samen met elf burgers. Dat werd woensdag bekendgemaakt.

De autoriteiten verdenken de bende van grootschalige smokkel en handel in hasj, afkomstig uit Marokko. De betrokken agenten waren gestationeerd in de toeristische centrum van Corralejo in het noorden van Fuerteventura. Behalve van drugsmokkel worden ze ook verdacht van onder meer marteling, afpersing en belastingfraude.

De bende kon worden opgerold, nadat twee agenten waren betrapt op het strand, terwijl zij een boot met 1000 kilo drugs aan het uitladen waren.

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Homegrown crystal meth industry sparks west Africa crime wave

Clandestine methamphetamine laboratories discovered in Nigeria signal disturbing new chapter in regional drug trade

One May evening last year, as a tropical downpour lashed Lagos, Nigerian drug enforcement agents received the tipoff that would lead to a game-changing bust. Hours earlier, Baez Benitez Milan, a car dealer from Paraguay, had entered the country, telling airport officials that this, one of Africa's most notoriously gridlocked, chaotic cities, was ideal for plying his motor trade.

Instead, he drove to an unfinished, weed-choked building on the deserted outskirts of town, and holed up there for weeks. When agents eventually stormed the building, they found an amphetamine-producing factory capable of churning out 25kg of white crystal meth powder, or "ice", every few hours. Benitez Milan was, in fact, a Colombian drug runner named Gonzalo Osorio, whose skills in the rapid setup of clandestine laboratories commanded a $38,000 (£25,000) weekly fee. The factory, one of an intended three, was among the earliest to be discovered in west Africa, and signalled a disturbing new chapter in the regional drug trade.

For the past decade, west Africa's creek-lined coast has been a pipeline for trafficking South American cocaine to Europe and Asia. About $1.25bn of illicit trade has passed through annually, responsible in part for destabilising huge swathes of the region, from Mali's recent turmoil to the narco-state of Guinea-Bissau. But now homegrown criminal syndicates that previously earned cuts by providing mules for Latin American cartels are cooking up their own slice of the global drug pie. Their narcotic of choice is methamphetamine, a highly profitable powder concocted using readily available and legal ingredients.

"This is the next niche for criminal groups in west Africa because you can easily cook it at home, and you can easily adjust it for supply and demand. It is slowly but surely spreading in the region," said Pierre Lapaque, head of the United Nations office on drugs and crime in west Africa, whose latest report highlights the rising trade.

Four large-scale crystal meth labs have been discovered in Nigeria. Shipments of precursor chemicals have been seized in neighbouring Benin and Togo and in Guinea officials discovered huge vats used to cook MDMA, a similar synthetic drug.

Bola, a lanky drug baron with twitching hands who is based in downtown Lagos, said only local wrestlers bought synthetic drugs when he started peddling eight years ago. "It was difficult to sell. Now the guys selling [meth] to big boys and foreigners in the VIP dens can no longer come to areas like this because they will be robbed. Everybody knows they make big money," he said.

Behind Bola's stifling, corrugated iron shop selling dusty cartons of soft drinks is a warren of cramped brick-walled rooms barely high enough to stand up in. Ghoulish in the occasional shard of sunlight piercing through the haze, dealers and glassy-eyed users slump on wooden benches, hunch over chessboards or incessantly chop and wrap mounds of crystalline powder.

Most international orders come from South Africa and more recently Asia "because many people are afraid to go. The punishment there if they should catch you … " Bola mimed a knife across his throat, indicating the death penalty.

A kilo of meth exported to south-east Asia, where some countries have reported a 250% increase in traffickers from west Africa arrested over five years, brings in $45,000. In Bola's den, poorer users pay $1.20 for a single hit.

Crystal meth was traditionally brewed by US biker gangs but laws were tightened in 2005, curbing production. Thousands of miles away, there was unintended fallout. "Cocaine trafficking was falling because we were making record seizures. Suddenly we started making more and more interceptions of methamphetamine leaving the country, but nothing at all was coming in. We realised criminals had started making it within our borders," said Mitchell Ofojeyu, an official at the heavily guarded headquarters of Nigeria's drug enforcement agency.

Some worry the effects of this new trade will spill over into local communities, raising the spectre of rising crime and health problems.

"The warning signals are there that this really is a problem that could run amok in years ahead if comparable resources aren't devoted to the human consumption side," said Alan Doss, a senior adviser at the Geneva-based Kofi Annan Foundation.

For now, widespread unfamiliarity among the local population has sometimes got in the way of curbing the trade. When Nigerian officials discovered their first meth factory, they wanted to storm the site immediately.

"We didn't realise the chemicals were so poisonous. It was our international partners who told us: 'Look, you basically have to kit yourself up as if you're going to the moon'," said Ofojeyu.

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Op zondag 31 maart 2013 21:00 schreef 16meter het volgende:

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Dat zou het hele probleem oplossen.

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Mexican drug cartels move deeper into US to tighten grip on narcotics market

Cartel threat looms so large that a Mexican kingpin is Chicago's public enemy No 1 – despite never setting foot in the city

Mexican drug cartels whose operatives once rarely ventured beyond the US border are dispatching some of their most trusted agents to live and work deep inside the United States – an emboldened presence that experts believe is meant to tighten their grip on the world's most lucrative narcotics market and maximize profits.

If left unchecked, authorities say, the cartels' move into the American interior could render the syndicates harder than ever to dislodge and pave the way for them to expand into other criminal enterprises such as prostitution, kidnapping-and-extortion rackets and money laundering.

Cartel activity in the US is certainly not new. Starting in the 1990s, the ruthless syndicates became the nation's No 1 supplier of illegal drugs, using unaffiliated middlemen to smuggle cocaine, marijuana and heroin beyond the border or even to grow pot here.

But a wide-ranging Associated Press review of federal court cases and government drug-enforcement data, plus interviews with many top law enforcement officials, indicate the groups have begun deploying agents from their inner circles to the US cartel operatives are suspected of running drug-distribution networks in at least nine non-border states, often in middle-class suburbs in the mid-west, south and northeast.

"It's probably the most serious threat the United States has faced from organized crime," said Jack Riley, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Chicago office.

The cartel threat looms so large that one of Mexico's most notorious drug kingpins – a man who has never set foot in Chicago – was recently named the city's public enemy No 1, the same notorious label once assigned to Al Capone.

The Chicago crime commission, a non-government agency that tracks crime trends in the region, said it considers Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman even more menacing than Capone because Guzman leads the deadly Sinaloa cartel, which supplies most of the narcotics sold in Chicago and in many cities across the US

Years ago, Mexico faced the same problem – of then-nascent cartels expanding their power – "and didn't nip the problem in the bud," said Jack Killorin, head of an anti-trafficking program in Atlanta for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. "And see where they are now."

Riley sounds a similar alarm: "People think, 'The border's 1,700 miles away. This isn't our problem.' Well, it is. These days, we operate as if Chicago is on the border."

Border states from Texas to California have long grappled with a cartel presence. But cases involving cartel members have now emerged in the suburbs of Chicago and Atlanta, as well as Columbus, Ohio, Louisville, Ky., and rural North Carolina. Suspects have also surfaced in Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania.

Mexican drug cartels "are taking over our neighborhoods", Pennsylvania attorney general Kathleen Kane warned a legislative committee in February. State police commissioner Frank Noonan disputed her claim, saying cartels are primarily drug suppliers, not the ones trafficking drugs on the ground.

For years, cartels were more inclined to make deals in Mexico with American traffickers, who would then handle transportation to and distribution within major cities, said Art Bilek, a former organized crime investigator who is now executive vice president of the crime commission.

As their organizations grew more sophisticated, the cartels began scheming to keep more profits for themselves. So leaders sought to cut out middlemen and assume more direct control, pushing aside American traffickers, he said.

Beginning two or three years ago, authorities noticed that cartels were putting "deputies on the ground here," Bilek said. "Chicago became such a massive market … it was critical that they had firm control."

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Grote partij drugsafval in bos bij Oisterwijk aangetroffen

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In een bos bij Oisterwijk in Noord-Brabant zijn in de nacht van dinsdag op woensdag 41 vaten met drugsafval gevonden. Een vat lekte. Dat meldde de politie woensdag. Wie de vaten heeft gedumpt, is nog niet bekend.

In Noord-Brabant zijn de afgelopen maanden vaker vaten met afval van synthetische drugs gevonden. Zo was er half maart een vondst bij Waspik en eind januari bij Alphen, ten zuidwesten van Tilburg.