New Mexico law enforcement officers are seeing extraordinarily high levels of fentanyl that dealers have passed across the southern border. The Las Cruces-Doña Ana County Metro Narcotics Task Force captured nearly 3,200 fentanyl pills between January and most of April. In all of 2020, 115 fentanyl pills were blocked, marking a 2,682% increase from all of last year and still eight months from the year’s end, task force Commander Sergeant Eric Avilucea told the Washington Examiner.
“Fentanyl pills [are] more prevalent now. They tend to get it through whichever way possible they can," said Avilucea. "They’re, you know, smuggling it through the port of entries.”
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Fentanyl and precursor elements are moving through Customs and Border Protection's gates of entry, but customs officials are also holding large amounts of fentanyl from getting through their review booths.
Border Patrol highway checkpoints north of the border, along with CBP’s border crossings in El Paso, the state of New Mexico, and one in Presidio, Texas, caught 247 pounds of fentanyl in 31 incidents that befell from Oct. 1, 2020, to mid-April. Just in the first 5.5 months of the fiscal year 2021, border authorities are seeing far more fentanyl apprehended than the 36 pounds caught in all of 2020.
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“Increasing fentanyl seizures are a reflection of effective law enforcement action as transnational criminal organizations traffic ever greater amounts of fentanyl into the United States," a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) official wrote in an email. "Specifically, Mexican drug cartels have capitalized on the opioid epidemic and prescription drug misuse by flooding the United States with mass quantities of counterfeit prescription pills."
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Fentanyl is an artificial opioid that is produced in a lab and is 50 times stronger than heroin. More than 87,000 people in the U.S. died last year from a drug overdose, the most in a year. Deaths involving these man-made synthetic opioids rose 60% in the fiscal year 2021.
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Fentanyl is often transferred in pill form. The pills can be so powerful that the DEA found an average of one in four were strong enough to kill the user. One kilogram of fentanyl can contain 500,000 potentially fatal doses, meaning CBP’s seizures alone probably prevented more than 56 million lethal doses from making it onto the streets. China produces the main component used to make fentanyl that the Mexican drug cartels are smuggling into the U.S.
The massive rise in fentanyl captures has come while marijuana seizures are significantly below. Up and down the entire southern border, marijuana seizures have decreased by 81% since 2013, according to the DEA.
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