Border Crisis
Main Source for all Deadly Fentanyl in the US comes through the Southern Border
Mexico has now become the primary source for fentanyl entering the United States, per a new report published this week. Most of this deadly drug is reportedly coming through the southern border.
The report was made by the bipartisan Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking, a group established by the FY 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. The report also stated that the source of fentanyl that’s coming into the U.S. has evolved from 2014 to 2019, which was the period when the said drug came in via international mail from China.
“Since then, the dominant source of illegally sourced fentanyl has been Mexico,” the report states. “The drug is manufactured in illegal laboratories there using precursors from Asia – mainly the PRC – and is trafficked principally by land into the United States.”
The report mentions that fentanyl from Mexico is typically of very low purity. However, it now accounts for most or even almost all of the fentanyl that law enforcement has encountered since 2019. The report also says that fentanyl is trafficked “primarily across the southwestern border but also by passenger boat, cargo ship, train, commercial plan, drone and mail carrier.”
It then warns that the policies the Mexican government has in place have not been successful in battling the issue of fentanyl trafficking, which, it says, has shown to be a more profitable drug to heroin for Mexican traffickers.
“The Mexican government, in part out of self-preservation and in part because the trafficking problem transcends current law enforcement capacity, recently adopted a ‘hugs, not bullets’ approach to managing the transnational criminal groups,” the report mentions. “However such approaches have not been able to address trafficking issues, and further efforts will be needed.”
Fentanyl is an opioid used for pain management. It’s around 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, but it can be fatal in extremely small amounts. In FY 2021 alone, Customs and Border Protection managed to seize 10,586 pounds of this drug at the southern border. This rate went up from FY 2020’s figure of 4,558 pounds and FY 2019’s 2,633 pounds.
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