The ingredients in meth have ranged from ether and paint thinner to drain cleaner and battery acid. What are the cartels putting in the meth they’re making?

Anytime we seize or recover anything we send it to one of our labs. A couple of years ago, we send this stuff in—and this looks like some of the best methamphetamine that we have seen—and it comes back as 102% pure.

I call the lab director and say, “I’m an old cop and not too good with numbers, but I do know 100% is supposed to be the maximum.” She tells me of all the methamphetamine that they’ve tested over the years, there’s a bar that has been set, an industry standard for 100% purity. She goes, “This is exceeding the bar. This is raising the bar on what we thought in the past was pure methamphetamine.”

That doesn’t mean it’ll be that pure when it is being sold to a drug user, right?

When you get down to the lower level dealers, it’s no longer pure methamphetamine. They’re going to cut it with something else. They’re going to try and get two ounces out of each ounce of meth they’ve bought. At the street-level, a 50-50 blend is considered a good hit.

But if you are buying directly from a Mexican cartel member, the drugs you buy are not to be cut before you sell them to the next person. If I’m with a cartel and you buy from me, then cut the drugs before you sell them, that reflects badly on me.

So the cartels are concerned about quality control?

They are worried about their reputation. Now the cartels know further down the line the drugs they sell are going to be cut. But it had better be further down the line. If I am buying directly from the cartel, their attitude toward me is going to be, “you’re the face of the cartel and if the stuff you sell is bad, we’re going to come after you.”

The cartels pride themselves on operating like businesses with production quotas, supply lines, wholesale distributors. But, when you remove that façade, they’re gangsters, running what can literally be a cut-throat business.

Definitely.

In Mexico, there is a lot of bloodshed—one cartel fighting another for control of these drug trafficking routes into the United States. This far into the U.S., you don’t see the cartel rivalries and as much of the violence that goes with them. Up here, you’ll have members of two different cartels just going about their business. Up here, it’s all about making money.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have issues. These cartels have rules, and they enforce them ruthlessly.

We arrested 15 guys in one operation a few years ago, involving a major wholesale drug buy. We got everyone from the ground level all the way up to the top guy here in Jackson County who had a direct line to Mexico. Well, during this investigation, there was a guy in the middle who just disappeared.

Our undercover knocked on the door at the shop where this guy had been working and asked, “Hey, where is Julio?” And nobody in that shop would talk about it. Later, he asked one of them again, and he was told a truckload of guys just pulled up and grabbed Julio, then drove off.

When we arrested this whole group, the U.S. Attorney set up interviews with all these guys having their attorneys present. We started asking about Julio. They all said the same thing: “He started using the drugs he was supposed to be selling. They kicked him out. We don’t know what they did to him. We didn’t ask.”

In the 1990s, shutting down all these meth labs was mostly a local endeavor. The cartels operate on an international level, so more of the Jackson County Drug Task Force’s investigations are now joint efforts involving federal officials, the FBI and DEA. Do you have situations in which you have to tell the feds they may be focused on the big international picture, but we’ve got to shut down what they might consider a small-time operation that’s doing damage in a particular neighborhood?

We talk about getting the head of the snake because if you only chase the tail that’s all you’re going to do.

But all these “little people” we’ve got here in Jackson County, they are, from our local perspective, major drug dealers. They may be dealing a pound of meth a week. That’s about 450 grams, going for about $195 a gram. 

When I first started with the Task Force back in the 1980s, the FBI would go days without returning our calls. Now they will send someone right out if we think we’ve got a case to hand over to them.

At the same time, they understand we have to worry about the local impact—that we have to stop these “little people” from dealing drugs in our neighborhoods. A pound a week… That’s a big problem.

Ideally, we have a situation like we did about a month ago, when we indicted eight people here in Kansas City, but the FBI was able to get the guy they were buying from in California.

In one day, we took all those people off the streets here, plus the guy out in California. The FBI is still carrying the investigation on from there.

So, you have seen the “meth craze” evolve from local dealers and addicts making their own methamphetamine to Mexican cartels becoming the chief supplier. Is there any end in sight?

Law enforcement alone is not the answer. Law enforcement can’t eliminate the demand. We need prevention and treatment to reduce the demand. We in law enforcement will keep trying our best to reduce the supply.

But you really can’t arrest your way of this, and I am not interested in putting in jail people who are addicted. They need treatment. In some families, meth addiction has just gotten passed down from one generation to the next. We’ve got to get them help.

I want to get the bad guys who exploit addiction, who make their money off it, who hurt people.