That was an interesting read. Thanks for sharing! Do you know if the Xalisco Boys are still a thing? The newest articles I was able to find about them are from 2016.
I do not. It's worth noting that Quinones was the person who did the investigative journalism to track down the source of the heroin; from a public safety perspective police forces weren't focused on incarcerating dealers because there was no crime wave to go along with it. Not only that but there was nobody "big time" so the typical DEA structure-hunt was worthless. I recommend the book. One thing I didn't realize is that this "OH SHIT WE'VE HAD AN OPIOID EPIDEMIC FOR THE PAST FIVE YEARS" wasn't the typical case of a slow burn of outrage that eventually boiled over until the news media gave a shit. It was a handful of public health officials that started to notice an uptick in "other" deaths in the vital statistics data and painstakingly went back through thousands of counties' reports to get medical examiners to standardize on "overdose". That took more than a year and once it was done, there was the stark evidence of an opioid epidemic in full tear. Realistically speaking, 2015 was the year we went "ohhhhh shit look at the data for the past few years". After that, everyone looked around for a Pablo Escobar to blame for killing America's Promising Young Quarterbacks & Prom Queens and when they didn't find one, they floundered around looking for an angle. It took a while to to settle on "well this whole thing started when we decided opioids were okay to prescribe like candy" at which point the blame game began anew. In the midst of all this, painting up a bunch of part-time ephemeral day-laborers from a province you've never heard of as Public Enemy #1 isn't particularly effective when Republicans are busy inventing MS-13 out of whole cloth and clamoring about El Chapo.