NEW YORK: US seized record amount of meth at the Mexico border during fiscal year 2014, accelerating a trend that began several years ago as new laws that limited access to the drug’s chemical ingredients made it harder to manufacture it in the US.
Meth seized by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s San Diego field office accounted for nearly two thirds 63 percent of all the meth seized at all ports of entry nationwide in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, the San Diego Union-Tribune newspaper reported Sunday.
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Almost all of the meth consumed in the U.S. was once manufactured domestically, with San Diego as a known production hub.But a crackdown in the U.S. on the precursor chemicals used to make the synthetic drug has pushed its manufacture south of the border, where drug cartels now find it cheaper and easier to produce and smuggle over the border than cocaine from South America, the paper reported.
With the California border as their main smuggling route, “the Mexican cartels are flooding the U.S. marketplace with their cheap methamphetamine,” said Gary Hill, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s assistant special agent in charge in San Diego.U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures show a 300 percent increase in meth seizures at California ports of entry from fiscal 2009 to 2014.
