https://www.realclearinvestiga...ler_drug_801549.html

On a September afternoon, Allyssia Solorio wondered why her energetic young brother hadn’t emerged from his bedroom in their Sacramento, Calif., home. When she opened his door, she saw 23-year-old Mikael leaning back on his bed with his legs dangling over the side. She rushed to her brother and shook him, but to no avail. He was dead. A counterfeit pharmaceutical pill laced with illicit fentanyl had killed him.

Mikael Tirado was one of an estimated 93,331 overdose fatalities in the United States last year – an all-time high. Nearly five times the murder rate , the deadly overdose toll was primarily caused by fentanyl, a highly lethal synthetic opioid. It’s manufactured mostly by Mexican cartels with ingredients imported from China, and then smuggled over the southwestern U.S. border. Fentanyl has been arriving in larger quantities each year since at least 2016.

The cartels are taking advantage of law enforcement weaknesses and policy failures to smuggle record amounts of the lethal drug into the United States

While a lack of screening technology to find contraband at ports of entry and an inept U.S-Mexico campaign to cripple the cartels are longstanding issues, there’s also a new one: the flood of migrants across the border that the Biden administration has done little to stop.

The administration is pivoting away from law enforcement and embracing a public health approach to the fentanyl crisis. It has proposed spending $11.2 billion – a huge increase over last year – to expand substance abuse prevention, treatment and recovery services

The vast majority of substance abusers avoid treatment, according to researchers, and only about one-third of those receiving long-term medical care fully recover.

Cartels have turned to fentanyl because the super-potent powder is cheap to produce, making it more profitable than heroin

Two of Mexico’s most powerful crime groups – the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels – manufacture the synthetic drug in rustic clandestine labs. In the U.S., the powder is mixed with heroin to stretch supplies.

To boost sales, cartels have more recently increased production of counterfeit pharmaceuticals . They are made with fentanyl but labeled to look exactly like legitimate medications such as Percocet, Vicodin and Xanax.

The fake pills, which are promoted and sold on social media platforms as real pharmaceuticals, are priced to sell at a discounted rate of about $20 each. They have brought the dangers of fentanyl to mainstream America, with victims belonging to every age, class and racial group. Nationwide, DEA agents seized an unprecedented 9.5 million fake pills

Crime groups have gained complete control of the Mexican side of the 1,950-mile border, directing the flow of both migrants and drugs. The Gulf Cartel runs the region around Brownsville, Texas, and moving west to California, the Cartel of the Northeast, Juarez Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel have staked out turf

They operate openly as if they were the Mexican military. Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which has recently expanded operations, even slaps a “CJNG” logo in big letters on its military-style trucks and uniforms as part of a show of force.

The surge of migrants that began in 2019 and accelerated after Biden took office has been a boon to these violent enterprises. The migrants are coming from Eastern Europe and Africa as well as Central and South America, lured partly by the administration’s policy that allows unaccompanied children and families to stay in the states while they apply for asylum, according to border agents who have interviewed them. In addition to paying cartels between about $2,000 and $9,000 each to cross, migrants are also used as decoys in drug smuggling operations.

Equipped with encrypted communications and satellite technologies, crime organizations are precisely orchestrating the timing and location of the border crossings of large migrant groups as part of a diversion tactic, several officers say. Dozens of agents are forced to leave their posts guarding many miles of the border and at checkpoints on roads to assist with apprehensions of the groups.

The cartels work with spotters in the Halcon network to identify these wide security gaps along the border and send drug smugglers on foot through them undetected.

Curious:

1. "Mainstream America" is buying Percocet, Vicodin from social media platforms? Don't these drugs require a Rx?

2. Social media platforms = ?? Facebook?

3. Why would the cartels use fentanyl for fake drugs? Why draw attention to it? Why not do what the Chinese have done and just use sugar some sort of cheap powder?

4. Why don't the governments do something about this? Are their hands in the pie?

cartels have been making illegal drugs that look like normal prescription drugs for some time. I think the main advantage is that if the drugs are examined by police, they appear to be a normal prescription. Would probably also help in distribution operations as looking "normal".

when Prince died I believe there were several bottles that were labeled as normal drugs but were actually laced w Fentanyl.

quote:

Why don't the governments do something about this? Are their hands in the pie?

Bingo!

I watched a docuseries called "Dope" and supposedly they cut cocaine with fentanyl to increase the intensity of the high. Presumably because their customers like it and it stretches out the dealer's supply of cocaine.

I'm also convinced that all one has to do to survive a gunfight with gangbangers is to take cover for the first magazine. Not one of the guys knew how to load an AK.

Or it could be staged.