As Russian border agents using dogs have become more adept at catching small-time traffickers, smugglers have been compelled to risk large shipments, he said.
Mr. Gaviria, local designers, businessmen and community leaders sketched for me a picture of a city in which violence, much of it today by small drug traffickers, remains a big problem and victories are fragile.
He started out as a small-time trafficker and worked his way up to the top of the food chain, and that ascent would not have been possible without a series of very unlikely events.
The real value of the drugs is the cost incurred by traffickers, small and large, in steeling themselves against the risks involved in delivering the drugs to the final consumer.
Quinones tells the story of America's opiate and heroin epidemic as a call-and-response: chapters alternate between the small-time Mexican traffickers who created a empire and appropriated Mexico's immigrant work ethic to poison Americans, and the pharmaceuticals, the biggest drug cartel of them all.
He added that small- to midlevel traffickers have soaked liquid cocaine in clothes.
Traffickers use small boats to reduce the chances of being picked up on a Greek patrol boat's radar, but that has costs.
Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami professor who specializes in Latin America and counternarcotics, said the commando program carries potential benefits: the American teams could help arrest kingpins, seize stockpiles, disrupt smuggling routes and professionalize security forces in small countries through which traffickers pass drugs headed to the United States.
Small scale traders use traffickers and courier services to move the illegal pills.
During his tenure he's seen the arrest of both large scale traffickers and small scale users.
