Xalisco Boys Character Analysis

All these guys running around Denver selling black tar heroin are from this town of Xalisco, or a few small villages near there, the informant told Chavez. Their success is based on a system they’ve learned. It’s a system for selling heroin retail. Their system is a simple thing, really, and relies on cheap, illegal Mexican labor, just the way any fast-food joint does.

Everyone could have his own business, be his own boss. The Xalisco system was a lot like the United States in that way. America fulfilled the promise of the unknown to rancheros, and an escape from humiliation for Mexico’s poor from villages just like Enrique’s. The Xalisco heroin system did it faster.

“We realized this is corporate,” Stone said. “These are company cars, company apartments, company phones. And it all gets handed to the next guy when they move on.”

“We can get away from these silly elixirs and cocktails into tablets that people take once or twice a day, and we’re into a revolutionary field of pain management…It was the drug-delivery service that changed, not the drug, and with that the whole mentality, ‘Well now that we have this drug, we can treat pain.’ Really extraordinary.”

Some Purdue reps—particularly in southern Ohio, eastern Kentucky, and other areas first afflicted with rampant Oxy addiction—were reported to have made as much as a hundred thousand dollars in bonuses in one quarter during these years. Those were unlike any bonuses ever paid in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. […] Whatever the case, the bonuses to Purdue salespeople in these regions had little relation to those paid at most U.S. drug companies. They bore instead a striking similarity to the kinds of profits made in the drug underworld.

Many of these methods—premiums, trips, giveaways—were time-tested strategies that grew from the revolution Arthur Sackler began and were refined over time by many pharmaceutical companies. Only this time, the pill being marketed contained a large whack of a drug virtually identical to heroin.

Amid this madness, the sons and daughters of Portsmouth’s business owners, the children of sheriff’s captains and doctors and lawyers, saw a future in OxyContin. Some regarded pills as a grassroots response to economic catastrophe—the way some poor Mexican villagers view drug trafficking. Dealers who could not have found a legitimate job in moribund Portsmouth bartered pills to support themselves and feed their kids.

They were dope traffickers for a new age when marketing is king and even people are brands. Purdue branded OxyContin as the convenient solution to disruptive chronic-pain patients. The Xalisco Boys branded their system: the safe and reliable delivery of balloons containing heroin of standardized weight and potency. The addict’s convenient everyday solution. The one to start with and stay with.

All these guys running around Denver selling black tar heroin are from this town of Xalisco, or a few small villages near there, the informant told Chavez. Their success is based on a system they’ve learned. It’s a system for selling heroin retail. Their system is a simple thing, really, and relies on cheap, illegal Mexican labor, just the way any fast-food joint does.

Everyone could have his own business, be his own boss. The Xalisco system was a lot like the United States in that way. America fulfilled the promise of the unknown to rancheros, and an escape from humiliation for Mexico’s poor from villages just like Enrique’s. The Xalisco heroin system did it faster.

“We realized this is corporate,” Stone said. “These are company cars, company apartments, company phones. And it all gets handed to the next guy when they move on.”

“We can get away from these silly elixirs and cocktails into tablets that people take once or twice a day, and we’re into a revolutionary field of pain management…It was the drug-delivery service that changed, not the drug, and with that the whole mentality, ‘Well now that we have this drug, we can treat pain.’ Really extraordinary.”

Some Purdue reps—particularly in southern Ohio, eastern Kentucky, and other areas first afflicted with rampant Oxy addiction—were reported to have made as much as a hundred thousand dollars in bonuses in one quarter during these years. Those were unlike any bonuses ever paid in the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. […] Whatever the case, the bonuses to Purdue salespeople in these regions had little relation to those paid at most U.S. drug companies. They bore instead a striking similarity to the kinds of profits made in the drug underworld.

Many of these methods—premiums, trips, giveaways—were time-tested strategies that grew from the revolution Arthur Sackler began and were refined over time by many pharmaceutical companies. Only this time, the pill being marketed contained a large whack of a drug virtually identical to heroin.

Amid this madness, the sons and daughters of Portsmouth’s business owners, the children of sheriff’s captains and doctors and lawyers, saw a future in OxyContin. Some regarded pills as a grassroots response to economic catastrophe—the way some poor Mexican villagers view drug trafficking. Dealers who could not have found a legitimate job in moribund Portsmouth bartered pills to support themselves and feed their kids.

They were dope traffickers for a new age when marketing is king and even people are brands. Purdue branded OxyContin as the convenient solution to disruptive chronic-pain patients. The Xalisco Boys branded their system: the safe and reliable delivery of balloons containing heroin of standardized weight and potency. The addict’s convenient everyday solution. The one to start with and stay with.