When the Narco Became Flexible

The decentralized production of synthetic drugs transformed the logic of the drug war.

The second transformation of drug trafficking through the legal instruments of the economy.

The ghosts who drifted through New York in the nineteen-eighties could be recognized by their orange teeth—when they still had them—or by noses stripped of hair by brief, intense bursts of flame. The same fire left black calluses where the pads of the index finger and thumb once were. The strangest thing was that these ghosts emerged from the market, not from tragedy.

The relationship between drugs, economics, and public policy was never tighter than during the crack cocaine epidemic of the nineteen-eighties. A glut of cocaine in the drug market enabled the launch of a new product—crack cocaine—cheap to produce and affordable enough for the impoverished sectors of the American working class.

Millions of workers and unemployed people, especially Latinos, African Americans, and poor whites, became addicted to a product born of traffickers’ ability to understand what the market demanded.

The crude, simple method used to extract alkaloids from the coca leaf to produce cocaine hydrochloride was developed by the Peruvian-French pharmacist Alfredo Bignon in the late nineteenth century. The Bignon method is still in use, but beginning in the nineteen-eighties Colombian traffickers adapted it for mass production through the implementation of Fordist methods.

By installing enormous laboratories near their sources of raw materials—coca-leaf shrubs—and equipping them with what was then modern technology, the Medellín and Cali cartels quadrupled output while lowering costs, enabling them to sell cocaine more cheaply and dramatically expand the consumer base.

These changes spread to the production systems of other drugs, including heroin and marijuana. Poppy cultivation—the plant from which opium, heroin’s basic raw material, is derived—and marijuana farming became concentrated in plantations spanning hundreds of hectares, streamlining processing, packaging, and transport to destination markets.

One trafficker who applied Fordist methods to large-scale marijuana production was Rafael Caro Quintero. As a founder of the Guadalajara cartel, he planned and developed a six-thousand-hectare marijuana plantation that at its peak employed ten thousand workers.

By then, however, most of the legal global economy had already moved beyond the Fordist model. Productive rigidity was giving way to new social demands and was being replaced by another system, also born in an automobile company—this time Japanese. Under Toyotism, firms began manufacturing what consumers actually demanded, in facilities located where physical and human inputs were cheaper and closer to major markets.

As legal companies shifted to this model, Mexican traffickers began preparing to adapt it to their own needs—which, ultimately, were those of their customers. The desire to consume different drugs required a new system, and the narcos began to build one.

The Narco’s Global Factory

In many cultures, cooking is considered an art. Culinary critics have often suggested that certain chefs’ dishes resemble works by Da Vinci, Picasso, or Rembrandt. In narco culture, there are also cooks—artists of a kind. But their creations do not come from kitchens or ateliers in glittering capitals. They come from precarious laboratories in towns remembered only by the devil: in the Sierra Madre Occidental, Kansas, Noord-Brabant, or Bali.

On the first day of 1994, Mexican society was entering one of the most turbulent years in its history. That January 1, Mexico, the United States, and Canada activated the North American Free Trade Agreement. The treaty became a highway for capital, people, and goods—one that Mexican traffickers quickly exploited, multiplying their profits by moving Colombian cocaine into the United States by air, sea, and land.

Control over the lanes of this new corridor connecting Mexico to the narco’s promised land allowed Mexican groups to temporarily push Colombian traffickers out of center stage. Although most of the world’s cocaine was still produced in Colombia, without Mexican organizations it could not reach American noses.

By the late twentieth century, methamphetamine was back in vogue, and Mexican traffickers worked aggressively to become its primary suppliers. It was not especially difficult. The meth smoked in the United States was often of poor quality, produced in filthy garages, basements, or abandoned suburban homes. Before spending time in the market’s underbelly, meth was consumed by soldiers, college students, and workers with long shifts. Housewives trying to lose weight—or struggling with depression, or both—were also among its users.

Methamphetamine was banned in 1985 at the urging of the D.E.A., but demand never disappeared. Instead, it created space for new illegal and improvised suppliers whose culinary skills resembled those of a fast-food employee. Besides producing substandard Ice, Crystal, or Speed, these amateur cooks had serious trouble securing the necessary raw materials. Ephedrine—the key chemical precursor—was difficult to obtain, and incompetent producers frequently caused fires, explosions, or poisonings by substituting lithium, drain cleaner, or automotive antifreeze in their recipes.

While these enthusiastic amateurs continued producing low-quality meth, Mexican traffickers emerged as the world’s dominant suppliers of high-grade product, backed by extensive distribution networks and production hubs across the globe—especially in countries with strong demand or weak controls on chemical precursors. In modest houses on the outskirts of Kansas, New Mexico, or Arizona, university-trained chemists working for the cartels set up small laboratories capable of supplying whatever volume the market required.

The same scene repeats itself in every country where the trade is sufficiently profitable. This system allows traffickers to keep production flexible, avoid idle inventory, and reduce the risk of seizure—both of raw materials and finished product. Through local affiliates, the narco economy adapted its production to respond efficiently to demand, ultimately driving a state apparatus armed with obsolete tools toward frustration.

The State Against Real Ghosts

The Sinaloa Cartel was the criminal organization that gained the greatest advantage from adopting Toyotist methods. Led by figures such as Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, its leadership also included Ignacio Coronel Villarreal, known as "The King of Cristal." Drug traffickers rarely retire. Their careers tend to end in prison or death, creating opportunities for others to rise, as Coronel did.

What kept him at the top, however, was his ability to import precursors, recruit chemists, and install methamphetamine laboratories across multiple continents. Sinaloa’s expansion rested in part on its territorial control over key production and logistics corridors into the United States—control achieved in alliance with corrupt sectors of the state—but it was Coronel’s methamphetamine strategy that allowed the cartel to broaden its network of accomplices, suppliers, and buyers.

Coronel was killed in a clash with Mexican Army forces. Until the day of his death, he maintained control over the states of Jalisco, Michoacán, and Colima. It was hardly surprising that, after he fell, multiple criminal groups fought fiercely for dominance over those territories. The organization that ultimately accumulated the greatest power was the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (C.J.N.G.), led by Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias El Mencho, who died on February 22, 2026, during a Mexican Army operation attempting to capture him in the small city of Tapalpa, in Jalisco.

The response of the so-called four-letter cartel echoed what had occurred in Sinaloa in 2019. On that occasion, the Mexican Army briefly detained one of El Chapo’s sons, and cartel gunmen flooded the city of Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa. Burning vehicles and dump trucks mounted with .50-caliber rifles—capable of downing large aircraft—blocked the main access routes, besieging the city from within and preventing the military from removing the detainee. Images broadcast worldwide on social media looked less like a judicial operation than like a trailer for Call of Duty.

Since the emergence of modern criminal structures such as the Colombian and Mexican cartels, the state has relied on a single tactic: capture the leaders, destroy laboratories, or seize shipments. The continued growth of criminal organizations, the mass consumption of drugs, and the mounting social and fiscal costs all testify to the limits of that strategy—above all because the structures themselves have evolved.

The era when Fordist methods defined narcotrafficking ended with the Toyotist shift toward decentralized production and organization. State blows are weaker today—not because the state itself is weaker, but because these organizations have become better at absorbing damage. Leaders change, organizations mutate, yet production, trafficking, and money laundering continue. New drugs come into fashion, but the victims remain the same.

States keep hunting heads. The narco world has learned how to survive without them. And that is the stage we are in now.