Price adds to growing popularity of heroin

Staggering figures about heroin show it is quickly becoming the drug of choice among some high school students. From Seattle to Salt Lake County, it appears the availability of stronger and cheaper heroin is a driving factor. Police in the Seattle area say a bag of heroin can cost as little as $5.00. In Utah, that would make heroin cheaper than marijuana and spice. Unified police tell KSL marijuana and spice each sell for $10 to $50 for an eighth of an ounce, depending on the quality.

It's being called an epidemic in the Seattle area. KING 5 News reports 42 students between the ages of 15 and 17 in Stanwood, Wash., are reportedly receiving treatment or are being admitted for the treatment of heroin addiction. One addict points out the painkiller OxyContin costs $60 for a pill while heroin costs only $5.00. Another problem with heroin is the potency. Police in Utah have said in recent months they occasionally see heroin that is 80 to 90 percent pure, rather than 30 to 40 percent pure.

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Al Qaeda linked to rogue aviation network

In early 2008, an official at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent a report to his superiors detailing what he called "the most significant development in the criminal exploitation of aircraft since 9/11." The document warned that a growing fleet of rogue jet aircraft was regularly crisscrossing the Atlantic Ocean. On one end of the air route, it said, are cocaine-producing areas in the Andes controlled by the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. On the other are some of West Africa's most unstable countries.

The report, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, was ignored, and the problem has since escalated into what security officials in several countries describe as a global security threat. The clandestine fleet has grown to include twin-engine turboprops, executive jets and retired Boeing 727s that are flying multi-ton loads of cocaine and possibly weapons to an area in Africa where factions of al-Qaeda are believed to be facilitating the smuggling of drugs to Europe, the officials say.

Gunmen and bandits with links to AQIM have also stepped up kidnappings of Europeans for ransom, who are then passed on to AQIM factions seeking ransom payments. The aircraft hopscotch across South American countries, picking up tons of cocaine and jet fuel, officials say. They then soar across the Atlantic to West Africa and the Sahel, where the drugs are funneled across the Sahara Desert and into Europe.

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Mexico's Cartel Criminals Manipulate Police Intelligence

Proactive security and organized crime interdiction in Mexico is being seriously compromised in at least three critical facets of national security. Those being military, diplomatic and police intelligence capabilities. The main issue that prevents the use and deployment of sound intelligence initiatives in Mexico is simply trust.

The murders of government officials, police, and military throughout Mexico are not an exaggeration of an ungovernable situation nationwide or along the U.S. border. The use of strategic and tactical intelligence as a prelude to decision and action within Mexican enforcement circles is often challenged by unauthorized disclosure. Expected damage from such leaks is resulting in rivers of blood and associated carnage. Much of this attributed to the execution of clandestine sources of narco-trafficker informers.

Twelve bodies of off-duty military intelligence officers dumped in Michoacan state, ambushed and executed by the La Familia cartel in July of this year, are graphic examples of the cartel’s reach through compromised intelligence elements. Politicians of several Michoacan cities that included seven mayors and a state prosecutor were arrested and jailed on charges that included their protection of the cartel. An arrest warrant for federal lawmaker Julio Godoy, of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the half-brother of Michoacan state Governor Leonel Godoy, was also issued

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Postcards from the Edge: Colombia

Power vacuum fuels vicious drug war

Since the time when undisputed cocaine king Pablo Escobar held sway here, the "northeastern commune" district has forged a fearsome reputation as a recruiting ground for drug cartel hit men and violent gang wars. Medellin is once again in the grip of a vicious drug war. In January to September this year, city authorities say the murder rate has more than doubled with almost 2,000 killings. Officials at the Medellin public prosecutor's offices say the vast majority of victims were shot, likely victims of rival drug gangs and cocaine capos. That makes Medellin as dangerous as Ciudad Juarez, the frontier town dubbed Mexico's most dangerous city as a result of the ongoing cartel war there. Authorities in Juarez say killings are up from last year and are hitting record highs.

Colombian authorities estimate there are around 130 street gangs -- known as "combos" -- in Medellin, totaling some 6,000 members. Their only real loyalty is to the money that drug capos dole out to hire a gang's services. Capos will supply them with drugs to retail on street corners and occasionally issue them weapons to take on rival gangs loyal to another crime boss. Until earlier this year, Medellin's drug underworld was ruled by the so-called "Office of Envigado," named after a district of the Medellin metropolitan area. The "office" was a syndicate of the top cocaine bosses who agreed on the basic rules of doing business in the area. They shared smuggling routes and acted as the ultimate enforcers if cartel members reneged on deals or debts.

Colombian hitmen reveal horror of the kill

My destination: a single-story home in the city's notorious "Commune 13" district where I had set up a meeting with two hit men, who have for years hired their lethal services out to the cocaine cartels. Inside the house, a man called "Red" sat on a couch toying a fully loaded 9mm Ruger pistol. "This will stop somebody nicely," he said, as I glanced at it. His face and arms were covered in burn marks. He said it was a testament of the day a barrel of acid spilled onto him as he was working in a clandestine cocaine processing lab in northern Colombia.

Red explained that after the accident, the lab foreman tossed him out, half-dead, into a jungle clearing. What little strength he had left, he said he used to bat away vultures. And, against the odds, he made his way to safety and slowly recovered. When Red left the clinic months later, he said he went straight back to the drug lab and gunned down the foreman and three of his henchmen. That wasn't his first killing though, he told me. When he was just 11 years old, Red recounted, he took a razor to the throat of a neighborhood drug pusher who had been molesting his little sister.

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International drug ring busted in Queenstown , New Zealand

Queenstown police have recruited the help of Australian and Canadian police after a sophisticated international syndicate was exposed during eight raids yesterday. Seven people were arrested for allegedly importing hundreds of thousands of dollars of ecstasy or LSD from Vancouver, Canada.

Detective Sergeant Grahme Bartlett said the "principals" running the syndicate were two New Zealanders living in Queenstown. "While Queenstown is portrayed as a party town ... we were surprised at the level of drugs being imported," he told The Southland Times.

The drugs were being imported from Vancouver via Bali and Sydney. Canadian authorities were quite astounded by the methods being used. Four people were arrested in Queenstown, one in Oamaru and two in Dunedin. A British man, who lives in Australia, was also arrested in Queenstown.

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