‘They know who to choose’
Stacy Zinn spent her first four years with the Drug Enforcement Administration in El Paso, Texas, where she investigated Mexican cartels. She went on to work in Afghanistan and Peru pursuing narcoterrorists and cocaine traffickers. In 2014, the DEA transferred her to Montana and later placed her in charge of its offices in Billings, Great Falls, and Missoula.
“When I was promoted and they said, ‘You’re going to Montana,’ I’m like, ‘Montana? Are there drugs in Montana?’” recalled Zinn, who retired from the DEA in October after 23 years.
The state is sometimes referred to as “the last great place” in America. Its 1.2 million people are spread out across 150,000 square miles of mountains, rivers and mostly rugged terrain.
Locally made methamphetamine was long Montana’s primary drug scourge. But in the mid-2000s, the once-plentiful meth houses in the Midwest and northern states began to disappear amid new restrictions banning access to the drug’s precursor chemicals. Mexican cartels saw an opportunity and began capitalizing, law enforcement officials said, flooding the U.S. with a super potent form of meth and targeting indigenous communities in particular.
Zinn was shocked by the scope of the meth problem when she arrived in Montana 10 years ago. But it was soon eclipsed by fentanyl, which is even cheaper to produce and far more deadly.
A counterfeit fentanyl pill that can be made for less than 25 cents in Mexico sells for $3 to $5 in cities like Seattle and Denver where drug markets are more established, but up to $100 in remote parts of Montana. It was one of the few states that hadn’t been a focus of Mexican cartels, Zinn said, but that soon changed.
“The profits are just out of this world,” she said.
Zinn was more than 1,300 miles from the southern border and here she was once again investigating Mexican cartels — the Sinaloa and the Jalisco New Generation cartel, or CJNG.
“I got excited,” Zinn…
Read the full article here