It's the Chinese, seeking revenge on the West for the opium wars.
Or something.
...The reason for the sudden fall in opium demand is a matter of speculation, but is almost certainly related to changes in the supply and demand of illegal drugs in the United States, officials and experts in Mexico and the United States say.
Some evidence is emerging that fentanyl, a powerful and highly addictive synthetic opiate, is replacing heroin and other drugs, particularly on the East Coast. The soaring production of heroin in recent years may also have accounted for the recent drop....MUCH MORE
Of course it's the fentanyl. Here's the U.S - China Economic and Security Review Commission's February 2017 report: "Fentanyl: China’s Deadly Export to the United States".
Additionally there is another opioid called carfentanil that is so powerful it is classified as a banned chemical weapon.
Back in January Borderland Beat (caution: they cover the cartels and it can get awful) was reporting:
The Borderland Beat reporters are either the bravest or the most foolhardy journos in the world.
So far in 2019, six Mexican reporters have been murdered.[now 12 reporters murdered]
From the Washington Independent Review of Books, September 7, 2019 (originally 2018):
Barons of the Sea
Recounting how ocean-going commerce gave rise to an American upper-class.
To old salts and others with strong winds in their sails, this book will be very much to their liking. Barons of the Sea is, after all, about the magnificent clipper ships that allowed the United States to become a major commercial player on the world stage in the mid-19th century. It was all about globalism — and trade winds.
Tea was the primary cargo these ships carried to the United States. But it was also opium that contributed to the country’s maritime economy while also creating an American aristocracy. These pillars of society, families with familiar surnames like Delano, Forbes, and Low, among others, grew rich in part from the opium trade, initially smuggling the stuff from India to China, and later — although to what extent is not entirely clear — to the U.S.
What is clear is that these American captains of maritime industry were at best ambivalent about their controversial cargo. They carefully omitted their opium business from their memoirs, which tended to portray them as adventurous entrepreneurs of the highest type.
It is tempting, therefore, to suggest an alternative title: Robber Barons of the Sea. But this would be unfair to them and to this book, which ranges far and wide, from the expatriate British and American colonies in Canton, to the treacherous cross winds of Cape Horn, to the Gold Rush-fevered port of San Francisco, to the quiet baronial estates along the Hudson Valley. Franklin D. Roosevelt, we learn, was the grandson of Warren Delano, prominent among the sea barons.
Author Steven Ujifusa does not shy away from inconvenient truths, laying bare the shady origins of family wealth that over generations lifted some, if not all, boats, but also gave birth to a privileged social class that was as philanthropic as it was self-serving. Seth Low, for one, built the magnificent Low Library at Columbia University, of which he was president, and served as the first mayor of the consolidated City of New York....MUCH MORE
Scots running amok
