Mexico's gangs take over U.S. meth trade

Chris Hawley
Republic Mexico City Bureau
Feb. 4, 2007 12:00 AM

MEXICO CITY - Four guards lay dead in pools of blood, their hands and feet bound with gray duct tape, as dawn broke over the Medix pharmaceutical plant in Mexico City. The gate was open, the security system dismantled.

It looked as well-planned as a bank heist. Except these robbers made off with a far bigger treasure: more than one ton of the chemical pseudoephedrine, enough to make 4 million hits of crystal methamphetamine, the hottest drug in America. The finished product could fetch $120 million on U.S. street corners.

The robbery at the Medix lab in July is part of a boom in Mexican meth as "superlabs" controlled by Mexican cartels take over what was once a mom-and-pop business in the United States.

The cartels' labs in Mexico and California now produce about 80 percent of the meth in the United States, according to a November report by the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center. And the cartels are far more organized than previous meth rings.