Grandmaison, RL, et al. 2019. The Last Harvest? From the US Fentanyl Boom to the Mexican Opium Crisis. Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 1(3): pp. 312–329. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31389/jied.45 RESEARCH The Last Harvest? From the US Fentanyl Boom to the Mexican Opium Crisis Romain Le Cour Grandmaison1, Nathaniel Morris2 and Benjamin Smith3 1 Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, FR 2 UCL, GB 3 University of Warwick, GB Corresponding author: Nathaniel Morris (
[email protected]) 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 dollars) into the country’s poorest communities, sustaining regional economies, religious ceremonies, and intra-community relations while stemming out-migration to Mexican cities and the US. With the recent upsurge in fentanyl use in the US, however, the demand for Mexican heroin has fallen sharply, meaning that farmers are now being paid around 6000 to 8000 pesos ($315–415 dollars) per kilo of raw opium. Thus the total money being paid to opium producing villages has dropped to an unprecedented low of 7 billion pesos ($370 million dollars). Drawing on fieldwork conducted in two poppy-producing regions of Mexico – one in the State of Nayarit, one in the State of Guerrero – this article shows that today, farmers cannot make a profit from opium once fertilizers and other capital inputs have been taken into account; village economies are starting to dry up; and out-migration is on the up.