Cocaine Cartels Enter the Heroin Trade:

With cocaine sales rapidly diminishing in the United States during the early 1990s, drug cartels in Colombia who had supplied the lucrative cocaine market for nearly two decades began to diversify from cocaine to the higher-profit, more easily manufactured heroin. They hired experts from Southeast Asia to teach them opium-cultivating and heroin-processing techniques, and expansive poppy fields began to appear along the eastern slopes of the Central Andean Mountain ranges in central Colombia. Just as cocaine had been, raw opium was transported from the fields, often through hidden jungle trails but also through sea and air routes, to concealed laboratories that were far from the opium-growing regions of the country.

Though new to opium growing and heroin manufacturing, the drug cartels needed no lessons in the secrets of drug trafficking.

Their location close to the United States had always been extremely strategic for smuggling. Colombia's coastlines on both the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea provided smugglers a near-infinite variety of air, land, and sea drug-smuggling routes.

Heroin, like cocaine, was smuggled over the U.S. border in many ways. Couriers swallowed small quantities of heroin in balloons or hid the drug inside hollowed-out shoes, luggage, and clothing. Large shipments of the drug were concealed within manufactured goods that were imported into the United States from Latin America.

To compete in the U.S. heroin market, which had long been dominated by Southeast Asian heroin, these Colombian cartels did what had proven so effective for the Mafia earlier in the century: they undercut the competition with inexpensive, high-purity heroin. The entrance of these new suppliers into the American heroin market had dramatic repercussions—not only in the United States but also on the entire global heroin market. When Southeast Asian heroin began to match the purity level and price of Colombian heroin, an ongoing price and purity war resulted. As more and more people around the world began to experiment with this super-potent and inexpensive heroin, a global heroin epidemic began. By 1995 there were an estimated 10 million heroin users worldwide, with large numbers of users in Canada, Great Britain, and the United States, as well as in Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Asia.

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