The porous southern border has admitted not just hard-working seekers of a better life anxious to join the American middle class, but also vicious drug gangs pushing heroin on middle America. All of this revealed in an exceptional piece of investigative journalism from the LA Times. (Part Two. Part Three.)Immigrants from Xalisco, Mexico, they have brought an audacious entrepreneurial spirit to the heroin trade. .... using Southern California and Phoenix as staging areas, they have established networks in Salt Lake City; Reno; Boise; Indianapolis; Nashville; and Myrtle Beach, S.C. From those cities, their heroin -- called black tar because it's sticky and dark -- has made its way into suburbs and small towns.In Ohio, where Xalisco networks arrived around 1998, black tar has contributed to one of the country's worst heroin problems. Since then, deaths from heroin overdoses have risen more than threefold, to 229 in 2008. The number of heroin addicts admitted to state-funded treatment...(Read Full Post)