Cocaine purity is up as Mexicans come to Australia to run their own trafficking operations
High-profile cocaine arrests of “glamour wannabe gangsters” in Sydney and Melbourne have forced Mexico’s top cocaine cartel to take record levels of drug shipments to Australia into their own hands.
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Exclusive: Mexican drug cartels are dispatching their men to Australia to oversee trafficking operations of cocaine which are now at their highest ever purity levels.
Such has been the successful seizure and arrest rates of Aussie “glamour wannabe gangsters” distributing the drugs in Australia, Australian Federal Police intelligence has noted Mexican cartels are for the first time dispatching their own men here to oversee distribution operations.
It is understood a series of high-profile cocaine arrests and seizures nationally, notably in Sydney and Melbourne, has promoted cartel distrust in local contacts and an influx of Mexican nationals to work with local gangs from bases here.
“That is a bit of a trend we are seeing now with Mexican groups, particularly in Melbourne,” AFP deputy commissioner (operations) Neil Gaughan confirmed to News Corp.
“Two years ago we were not seeing that, Mexicans on the ground working here, they were getting others to do it. Now they come here to handle it and pack it out, not senior figures just disposable, low-level characters to handle the unpacking,” he said.
Mr Gaughan said concealments were also becoming more highly complex requiring the foreign overseers to find their hidden hauls being shipped over; police detections of shipments had also become harder with seizures usually intelligence-based more than chance finds.
That intelligence was partly based on the movement of Outlaw Motorcycle Gang (OMCG) members from Australia meeting offshore with Mexican and Eastern European targets and domestically “glamour wannabes” wanting to enter the drugs trafficking game.
News Corp has learnt despite the low level characters coming here from Mexico two middle ranking cartel members and a senior figure have also been detected here.
Cocaine purity levels had also gone through the roof which was a concern for authorities.
Helen Salouros, deputy director of the Australian Forensic Drug Laboratory at the National Measurement Institute which conducts analysis of illicit substances seized at the border on behalf of police forces said the purity switch had been noted.
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“In the last couple of years, over 60 per cent of the cocaine samples that we have analysed in here have a purity of greater than 80 per cent, that’s pretty pure, with 40 per cent of our submissions greater than 90 per cent pure and over 65 per cent of samples that we’ve analysed have not been cut with a diluent or adulterant,” she said.
“That gives you a gauge of how clean the (border seizure) samples are. What has changed is what they have been cutting the samples with. Prior to 2017 we had up to 50 per cent of our samples cut with a product called Levamisole. So that’s 50 per cent of the cocaine samples we have been seeing in here cut with this which brought the purity down obviously so when you cut something the purity goes down. But that Levamisole agent in the cocaine samples now we are seeing is about 15 per cent in the last year of samples so that’s dropped significantly.”
Levamisole is a medication used to treat parasitic worm infections in animals which can cause serious health issues in humans.
Originally published as Cocaine purity is up as Mexicans come to Australia to run their own trafficking operations
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