Which Drugs Are the Biggest Threat In 2010?

The recently released National Drug Threat Assessment 2010 report is out and it’s pointing the finger at the expanding Mexican drug cartels, growing prescription abuse and Asian ecstasy coming in by way of Canada as some of the biggest threats to sobriety on U.S. soil.

"The trafficking and abuse of drugs affects everyone," said Michael T. Walther, director of the Justice Department's National Drug Intelligence Center, which produced the report. "The economic cost alone is estimated at nearly $215 billion annually."

The drug violence near the Mexican border continues to be in the news, but it hasn’t seemed to hurt business any. Heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine are booming, with more flowing across the border than ever before. And those Mexican organizations aren’t staying south of the border, they’re operating in every part of the U.S. They’re also expanding more into rural and suburban areas and working with U.S. street and prison gangs to further expand distribution.

While U.S. and Mexican governments are working hard to combat the problem, making arrests and banning substances used in the production of these drugs, government officials estimate heroin production in Mexico jumped from 17 metric tons in 2007 to 38 tons in 2008.

Other concerns cited in the report were manufactured drugs like MDMA (aka ecstasy) coming from Asia and then being smuggled across the Canadian border into the U.S. Prescription drug abuse continues to be a growing problem as well, with the increased abuse of prescription opioids (morphine, codeine and methadone among others) causing a whopping 98 percent rise in overdose deaths between 2002 and 2006, according to the report.

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