The Fentanyl Flood Into The US: Why Can’t We Make It Stop?

About 11 times every hour, about 250 times a day, an American citizen dies of a drug overdose. The most frequent culprit is fentanyl. The most popular mode of delivery is fentanyl-laced heroin, fentanyl mixed with cocaine, or illegally produced OxyContin pain pills containing fentanyl. And it’s not just hardcore addicts who are dying.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports overdose deaths skyrocketed to a mind-boggling 93,000 last year, a 29 percent increase over the previous year. The death rate is now so frightening a bipartisan group, called Families Against Fentanyl, asked the president to declare the synthetic opioid an official weapon of mass destruction.

Think about this. Ninety-three thousand Americans dead in one year. That’s more than we lost during the entire Vietnam War. That’s more than the population of Santa Fe, New Mexico; Palo Alto, California; or St. Joseph, Missouri.

So, where is all this fentanyl coming from, why does it keep pouring into this country year after year and why has the U.S. government been unable to stop it?

The short answer to the first question is China, the same country that unleashed the COVID-19 virus upon the world.

But China is only a cog, albeit the largest one, in a far-flung supply network that seems impossible to disrupt. Laboratories in China produce fentanyl and ship the man-made poison to the United States via international mail. Our postal system tries to control the flow, but it’s an impossible task. Also, Chinese drug lords send large amounts of fentanyl to associates in Mexico and, to a lesser degree, Canada. Operatives then move the deadly product across the U.S.-Mexico border and, less frequently, across our northern border.- READ MORE