For decades, farmers in the most marginalised regions of Mexico have depended for survival on the illicit cultivation of opium poppy for the US heroin market. In 2017 they could earn up to 20,000 pesos ($950-$1,050 dollars) per kilo of opium, which channelled around 19 billion pesos ($1 billion...

Classic treatments of both the opium industry and the international drug trade tend to leave out Mexico’s opium production. Yet the industry, which emerged in the 1920s, both fulfilled U.S. demands and shaped the Mexican narcotics trade.