|
(Continued from page 37)
AP IMPACT: Mexican meth pours into US cities, negates effort to curb US drug production
• ST. LOUIS (AP) -- Mexican drug cartels are quietly filling the void in the nation's drug market created by the long effort to crack down on American-made methamphetamine, flooding U.S. cities with exceptionally cheap, extraordinarily potent meth from factorylike "superlabs."
• Although Mexican meth is not new to the U.S. drug trade, it now accounts for as much as 80 percent of the meth sold here, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. And it is as much as 90 percent pure, a level that offers users a faster, more intense and longer-lasting high.
• "These are sophisticated, high-tech operations in Mexico that are operating with extreme precision," said Jim Shroba, a DEA agent in St. Louis. "They're moving it out the door as fast as they can manufacture it."
• The cartels are expanding into the U.S. meth market just as they did with heroin: developing an inexpensive, highly addictive form of the drug and sending it through the same pipeline already used to funnel marijuana and cocaine, authorities said.
• Seizures of meth along the Southwest border have more than quadrupled over the last several years. DEA records reviewed by The Associated Press show that the amount of seized meth jumped from slightly more than 4,000 pounds in 2007 to more than 16,000 pounds in 2011.
• ___
President's bioethics panel urges new privacy protection to ensure benefits from DNA decoding
• WASHINGTON (AP) -- It sounds like a scene from a TV show: Someone sends a discarded coffee cup to a laboratory where the unwitting drinker's DNA is decoded, predicting what diseases lurk in his or her future.
• A presidential commission found that's legally possible in about half the states -- and says new protections to ensure the privacy of people's genetic information are critical if the nation is to realize the enormous medical potential of gene-mapping.
• Such whole genome sequencing costs too much now for that extreme coffee-cup scenario to be likely. But the report being released Thursday says the price is dropping so rapidly that the technology could become common in doctors' offices very soon -- and there are lots of ethical issues surrounding how, when and with whom (Continued on page 39)
|
|
