Are Meth Labs Returning to the US?
Meth Labs May Be Making a Come Back
Mariana van Zeller is a journalist that now has a show called "Trafficked" on NatGeo. Mariana has produced some great intelligence and training material from her documentaries on Black Market activities. Mariana's latest episode that aired on December 29th showed how methamphetamine is invading the United States. She visited a P2P lab in Sinaloa, Mexico to show where and how it is being manufactured.
During her documentary, she met with a meth cook in Los Angeles, California. The cook was working for the Sinaloa Cartel and claimed to be reporting to the bosses back in Sinaloa. He had a "shake and bake" lab set up in an apartment in LA. He claimed he had 8 other labs scattered throughout the city and that the cartel is looking at changing its practices and switching to shake and bake labs to get product to the consumer.
Analysis
The claim from the cook in LA is absolutely viable. It makes economic sense for the cartels and they claim to have a source for ephedrine. Prior intel has shown that the cartels are making their own ephedrine in Mexico. We have not had many labs in the US as compared to a decade ago. Many teams have not sent people to lab school, or they have closed down their lab response teams. With this new intelligence, I think it would be a good idea for your team to send people to lab school again and get an SOP together for lab response. History is a predictor of the future. We had thousands of labs each year in the US. It is not a far stretch that we will end up having more than that with our current epidemic.