Savages

9

Chon explains this to O.

The Baja Cartel, with its corporate headquarters in Tijuana, exports by land, sea, and air a shitload of boo, coke, smack, and meth into the USofA. Originally they just controlled the cross-border smuggling itself and left the retail end to others. In recent years, however, they have moved to vertically integrate all ends of the trade, from production and transportation to marketing and sales.

They accomplished this with relative ease in regard to heroin and cocaine, but had to overcome some early resistance from American motorcycle gangs that controlled the methamphetamine trade.

The biker gangs quickly grew tired of throwing lavish funerals (have you checked the price of beer lately?) and agreed to join the BC sales team, and ER doctors across America were pleased that meth production became standardized so they would know what biochemical symptoms to expect when the ODs came rolling in.

However, sales figures for the three aforementioned drugs have sharply declined. There is a relentless Darwinian factor in meth use particularly, in which its users die off or become brain-dead so quickly they can’t figure out where to buy the product. (If you think you hate junkies, you haven’t met tweekers. Tweekers make junkies look like John Wooden.) And although heroin seems to be making a tenuous but noticeable recovery, the BC still needs to replace the declining income to keep its shareholders happy.

So now it wants to control the entire marijuana market and eliminate competition from the mom-and-pop hydro growers in SoCal.

“Like Ben and Chonny’s,” O says.

Chon nods.

The cartel will let them stay in business only if they sell solely to the cartel, which will then take the big profit margin for itself.

“They’re Walmart,” O says.

(Have we covered that O is not stupid?)

They are Walmart, Chon agrees, and they have moved horizontally to offer a wide variety of products—they sell not only drugs, but human beings for both the labor and sex markets, and they have recently entered into the lucrative kidnapping business.

But that is not relevant to this discussion or the vid-clip in question, which graphically illustrates that—

Ben and Chonny can take

De Deal

Or

De Capitation.