News / Education
Heroin Bust Nets Teddy Bears
Authorities break up a drug ring that weekly sold hundreds of thousands of small bags of heroin
Heroin was once marketed as a name brand under Bayer in 1898 and now apparently is also brand named – but the vendor operates illegally. The drugs from this bust were stamped with brand names such as Barack Obama, Swine Flu and Crime 360.
Not unlike Bayer Aspirin a century ago, the vendors of heroin have developed a marketing campaign to ensure that heroin continues to move through the United States. Colombian drug organizations made a strategic decision earlier in this decade to cultivate opium poppy, produce heroin, and sell it through local drug dealers. This strategy also involved the use of modern marketing techniques. The repeat business of heroin is guaranteed with its addictive qualities which result in huge drug abuse rates.
The Heroin “brands” are known as stamp bags and often entice younger people to begin using the drug.
Mike Manko, a spokesman for Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. said:
“The relatively low price for a stamp bag and the use of cartoon characters and other familiar images on the bags can make heroin alluring to young people.”Stamp bags generally sell for about $10.Dealers who buy a bundle of 10 stamp bags or a brick of 50 in the city turn a profit by selling bags for $12 each back in the suburbs. This is no different than when a store merchant buys a product wholesale and retails it for a higher place.
Not having the marketing advantages of television and print (like the pharmaceutical companies) heroin dealers will use violence and murder to ensure profitability, especially in Mexico.
But things are changing in this business.
Hopefully, the violent means to grab market share are becoming harder to execute south of the border. President Calderon is putting up a good fight with the cartels and is putting new meaning into the tired cliché “war on drugs”.
Profits are slipping as the Mexican government is apparently successfully doing what we have been unable or unwilling to do here – stopping drug traffickers, albeit with more violence than we would stand for in this country.
Hopefully this war will be so successful that the price of stamp bags will be out of reach and more individuals will be forced into drug treatment, realizing that the price of drug addiction has gone out of reach.
Unless of course, there is a plan to legalize heroin and put it for sale again, under a brand name pharmaceutical. A wait and see will tell us what this war is really all about.
