Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, head of research at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California San Diego: “Follow-the-money approaches are certainly not new. The counternarcotics program at the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has been operating for many years, including with a focus on Mexican criminal organizations. However, in view of the tremendous loss of life to accidental overdoses, public officials need to signal that they care and that they are acting. Prosecuting money laundering is not that easy. If we look at the number of sentences, there are typically fewer than 1,000 per year in the United States, which is arguably a high-capacity jurisdiction. This speaks to the difficulty of putting together cases and also plea bargains. The efficacy of these measures, however, will also largely depend on cooperation from other jurisdictions, in this case China and Mexico. With China, we know the United States has had significant obstacles in getting…”