In the United States, there is a drug trade network set up by Mexicans. These Mexicans are known as the "Hafnium Lesco Boys."
Unlike the drug dealers we imagine, they don't shoot a single shot or even want to make the business bigger. The way they sell drugs is by "stuffing" tiny amounts of drugs into their mouths and keeping them, driving around the streets in cars and selling them piecemeal to people who are addicted to drugs because they take them— mostly young people from middle-class white families.
Scattered, mobile, and tiny, this drug trading network is quite hidden, secretly "binding" countless families and bringing them misfortune.
Dreamland: The True Tale of
America's Opiate Epidemic
Dream Addiction: The Truth About the Opioid Epidemic in the United States
👆
By Sam Quinos
Translated by Shao Qinghua and Lin Jiahong
Shanghai Translation Publishing House
Today, Yi Wenjun shares two paragraphs of the book "Dream Addiction: The Truth About the Opioid Epidemic in the United States", which depicts an American family suffering from the loss of a child due to drugs, and a group of Mexicans who make a living from the drug trade.
The ubiquitous "Hafnium sco Boy"
[Beauty] Sam Kunos by Shao Qinghua, translated by Lin Jiahong
This article is excerpted from "Dream Addiction" of Shanghai Translation Publishing House
All rights reserved, please contact the authorization
1 Poisoned middle-class white families
In 2009, Matt entered his freshman year of college, and his parents never figured out when Matt had started taking the pills that were then spread across central Ohio and Tennessee. But that year, pills had become a big part of Matt's life.
At the end of that year, Matt came home to live with his parents. Back home, Matt no longer seemed as aimless as he had been at school. He is well dressed and has worked full-time in several catering companies. However, his parents later realized that by the time he moved home, he had become a functional addict, using opioid prescription painkillers, especially paracetamol. Later, he switched to OxyContin, a potent drug produced by Purdue Pharmaceuticals.
In early 2012, Matt's parents discovered a problem. They were worried, but the drugs Matt had been abusing were prescription drugs prescribed by doctors, not the kind of street drugs that would kill people, at least that's what they thought. They took Matt to the doctor, who asked him to detoxify at home for a week, using blood pressure and sleeping pills to relieve the symptoms of opioid withdrawal.
Soon, Matt was back to his old ways. Unable to afford OxyContin on the market, Matt switched at some point to black tar heroin, a drug that Had been flooded with Columbus brought by young Mexicans from a small state called Nayarit on Mexico's Pacific coast.
In April 2012, Matt tearfully confessed to his parents about his heroin addiction. Shocked, they sent him to a treatment center.
On May 10, 2012, after three weeks of detoxification treatment, Matt Skunov returned home, which made his parents feel like the nightmare was over. The next day, they bought Matt a new car battery, a new phone. Matt went out to a party at the Drug Rehab Society, and then went to play golf with his friends. He should have called his father after the party.
However, his parents waited all day without waiting for a call. That night, a police officer knocked on their door.
More than 800 people attended Matt's funeral. He was only 21 years old and died of a black tar heroin injection overdose.
In the months after Matt's death, Paul and Alan were shocked by everything they hadn't known before. The first is the pills: how can it be related to heroin and death when prescribed by a doctor? What is black tar heroin? Heroin is used by people who live in tents under the overpass, and Matt grew up in the best neighborhoods, attending private Christian church schools and attending churches that are also very well-known. Matt admitted to being addicted, asked for help, and received Columbus's best inpatient detoxification treatment. Why isn't that enough?
Through pills, heroin entered mainstream society. Rugby players and cheerleaders are new members of the team of addicts; rugby is almost a gateway to opioid addiction. Wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan died in the United States from painkiller addiction. The children became addicted to drugs in college and never got out of school alive again. Among them are the daughters of priests, the sons of policemen and doctors, the children of contractors, teachers, business owners and bankers. Almost every addict is white.
Many parents, whose children are still alive, have become liars, stealing for a molecule invisible to the naked eye. These parents were terrified every night of getting phone calls saying their children had died in McDonald's bathrooms. They used up their family wealth to pay for their children's drug rehabilitation, and in the end they still couldn't stop their children from going to jail. They moved their families to a place where no one knew their family was ugly. They pray that their children will be human again. Some people have thought about suicide. They were both shocked and caught off guard by the sudden nightmare caused by opioid abuse and the profound impact it had on their lives.
2 Drug dealers who only do business with middle-class whites
Chavis always sees drug dealers on the street, couriers with heroin in their backpacks, drivers with heroin balloons, informants say, who look casual and scattered, but they are not. They're all in the same group. They all came from a small town called Hafnium Lesco.
Informants told Chavis that all the people who peddled black tar heroin in the streets of Denver came from the small town called Hafnium Lesco, or a small village nearby. They succeed because they learned to build a system, a heroin retail system. The system is simple, really, relies on cheap Mexican illegal labor, like all fast food takeouts.
Since then, Chavis has often sat with informants in bars or trucks not far from the houses of offline people, listening to the informants talk endlessly about these people from Hafnium And their heroin retail system — something completely different from what informants had seen in the underground drug world before.
Think of it as a fast-food chain, such as a place that offers pizza delivery, the informant said. Every heroin den or chain here has a shopkeeper in Hafniumsco, Nayarit, who supplies heroin to the den. The owner doesn't come to the U.S. very often, and he only contacts the den manager who lives in Denver and helps him run his business.
The informant said that the den manager had an operator under him. The operator stayed in the apartment all day to answer the phone, and it was all called by addicts to order drugs. Under the operator are several drivers, with weekly salaries, and packages to eat and cover. Their job was to drive around town in a car, stuffing their mouths with unhealed balloons of black tar heroin, stuffing 25 to 30 at a time, looking like chipmunks. They would carry a bottle of water with them, and when the police told them to stop, they would gulp down the water and swallow the balloon, and finally the balloon would be discharged unchanged with the excrement. In addition to the balloons in the driver's mouth, there were more than a hundred balloons hidden somewhere in the car.
The operator's phone number circulated among heroin addicts, who would call to order. The informant said the operator's job was to tell them where to meet the driver: the parking lot of a shopping mall in the suburbs, or the parking lot of McDonald's, Wendy Hamburg, Sylvies Drugstore. The operator then relays the information to the driver.
The driver walks around the parking lot, the addict drives and follows, usually driving to the alley where the driver will stop, and the addict will jump into the driver's car. Then, a man speaking crappy English and a poor Spanish speaker, a cross-cultural heroin deal is completed, and the driver spits out the balloons needed by the drug addicts, grabs the cash and leaves.
The informant said the driver did it all day. Working hours – usually from 8 am to 8 pm. In the beginning, drivers at a den could quickly earn $5,000 a day; in a year, the den would earn $15,000 a day.
The system operates according to certain principles, which the informant says would not be violated by drug dealers in Nayarit. These dens compete with each other, but the drivers know each other from their hometowns, so they never use force. They also never carry guns and try to coexist peacefully. They don't meet where they live. They drove a car that had been used for years. None of these drivers took drugs. After a few months in one city, drivers are sent home by their bosses or sent to dens in another city. The frequency of changing cars in dens is similar to that of changing drivers. A steady stream of new drivers arrive, usually from the village boys of Hafnium Scot County. Den owners like young drivers because the latter are less likely to steal from them; the more experienced the drivers are, the more likely they are to know how to steal from their bosses. Informants speculate that thousands of children in Nayarit are eager to go north to do the job of driver, filling their mouths with heroin balloons and wandering around some U.S. cities.
In a way, he said, Hafnium's dens are unlike any other drug trade, and it operates more like a small business. Den owners pay each driver — dens were $1,200 a week at the time. The owner of the den knows everything about the cost of each driver, and there must be a receipt for how much lunch is spent and how much money is spent on prostitutes. To solicit business, drivers are encouraged to offer special offers to drug addicts: $15 for 1 balloon and $100 for 7. Addicts who buy balloons every day from Monday to Saturday can get one for free on Sunday. Selling 0.1 grams of heroin at a time is the only job for these drivers, full-time, seven days a week, christmas days a week. Because heroin-suckers can't do without it every day.
The profits of dens depend on the traditional practice of the retail industry , bonuses. Their customers are trance-like, desperate addicts who can't afford half a kilogram of heroin. Nine times out of ten anyone who wants to buy a lot of heroin is a police officer, with the intention of trying to get a case that would put drug dealers in jail for years. The informant said that you asked to buy a lot of drugs and they would shut down. Then you'll never hear from them again. This really surprised the informant. He had never heard of any Mexican drug cartel preferring to sell drugs in small doses.
Moreover, Hafnium's drug dens never interacted with African-Americans. Their drugs would not be sold to blacks; nor would they be bought from blacks, who were afraid of being robbed by blacks and did almost exclusively white business.
The innovation of hafnium-based drug dealers is actually a delivery mechanism. People from Hafniumsco found that white people — especially the children of middle-class whites — wanted service and convenience most. They don't want to go to slums or some dirty drug house to buy drugs. Now they don't have to go. The people who come from Hafniumsko will deliver the drugs to them.
As a result, the system expanded rapidly. By the 1990s, according to Chavis's informants, more than a dozen major metropolitan areas in the western United States had dens operated by the Hafniumsco people of Nayarit. At the time, in Denver, he could report 8 to 10 dens, each with 3 or 4 drivers, and work was started every day.
Listening to Chavis, I felt that the people of Hafniumsko seemed to have come here on impulse, and in fact many Mexican immigrants were driven by this impulse. Most Mexican immigrants stayed in the United States for a few years, not integrating into the United States, but thinking that one day they would return home. It's their American dream: to return home and show off to everyone in their hometown. They often call home and send money home, and they are usually more concerned about digging a new well in their hometown than with the affairs of the American school where their children attend. They go home to the village's annual religious festival, spending money on barbecues, weddings and coming-of-age ceremonies. For this, while doing the hardest work in the United States, they persevered in building houses in the tun, and the houses carried their desire to return home one day like a monument. The houses took ten years to complete. These immigrants add something to their house every time they come home. They consistently added reinforcement to the roof of the first floor of the house. Reinforcement is a promise that once he gets the money, a second layer will be covered. Steel bars stand out as part of the skyline of thousands of Mexican immigrant villages and tunzi.
Finished houses usually have large iron doors, modern pipes, and marble floors. With the departure of those who dreamed of building their own houses, the towns slowly improved. Over the years, these towns have been transformed into dreamlands, empty as scenes from movies, with immigrants coming back briefly during Christmas or the annual religious holiday to relax and imagine one day they might come back again for a rich retirement. Ironically, jobs, mortgages, and U.S.-born children keep most immigrants from ever being able to return to Mexico to live permanently in the homes they built with that sacrifice.
However, heroin dealers in Hafnium Lisco have been doing so. There are immigrants in their stories, there is the motivation to immigrate to a poor Mexican, and of course there are stories of drug trafficking. The hafnium-based drug dealers who ended up not in jail returned home and lived in their houses. They didn't put down roots in The United States; in fact, they spent very little money here. Jamaicans, Russians, Italians, and even other Mexican drug dealers are buying homes in the United States and flaunting their wealth. The hafnium-based drug dealers are the only immigrant drug cartel known to Chavis whose ultimate goal is to return home and has not fired a single shot.
They spread like a virus, silently, and many law enforcement officers could not recognize them, often mistaking Hafnium's gang for unconventional petty drug dealers.
"I call them the 'Hafnium sco boys,'" Chavis said, "and they're all over the country." ”
(End)
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