What’s fueling the fentanyl crisis is ‘not a whodunit,’ DEA chief says | 60 Minutes

Two powerful Mexican drug cartels have flooded the US with fentanyl, creating the worst drug crisis in American history.

Fentanyl was responsible for more than 70,000 deaths last year. The U.S. is “losing a generation” to fentanyl, Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Anne Milgram said in an interview with 60 Minutes. Nearly all fentanyl in the U.S. is made by the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, with chemicals purchased primarily from China.

“As complex and as big as this problem is, it’s not a whodunit,” Milgram said. “We know who’s responsible.”

How the fentanyl crisis began

The fentanyl crisis began 10 years ago when cartels began seizing control of the supply chain from China, buying the drug’s precursor chemicals to manufacture fentanyl themselves in secret labs in Mexico. In 2019, China “scheduled,” or blocked, the export of finished fentanyl to the U.S., further cementing the cartels’ dominance over the pipeline.

Fentanyl was originally intended for hospital patients in extreme pain. Now, it can be found in virtually every community in the United States. That’s because the synthetic opioid is cheap to produce, easy to smuggle, and incredibly addictive. Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin.

Sherri Hobson saw the fentanyl crisis coming. As an assistant U.S. Attorney in San Diego, she prosecuted Mexican cartel cases for 30 years before retiring in 2020.

“Cartels are very business-oriented,” Hobson said. “They’re looking for profit. They’re looking for perpetual power. They’re institutionalized.”

From Mexico to the US: How Fentanyl Crosses the Border

About 90 percent of the fentanyl entering the U.S. comes through the U.S.-Mexico border in passenger vehicles, said Acting Commissioner Troy Miller, a 30-year veteran of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Nearly all fentanyl entering the U.S. is smuggled through legal ports of entry, such as San Ysidro, between San Diego and Tijuana, the busiest land port in the Western Hemisphere.

More than 60,000 cars snake through San Ysidro’s 34 lanes every day. CBP officers use high-resolution scanners and dogs trained to sniff out fentanyl, but they only have the resources to search about 8 percent of the cars, Miller said.

The cartels are constantly adapting to the CBP’s containment measures, for example by hiding fentanyl in plastic bags in the gas tanks of cars so that the odor is not detectable by drug-sniffing dogs.

Two-thirds of the people arrested for fentanyl smuggling are American citizens paid by the cartels.

“We’ve seen terrible trends. We’ve seen middle school and high school students smuggling fentanyl,” Miller said.

How Agencies Are Fighting the Fentanyl Tide

Miller said it is clear that Customs and Border Protection needs more officers and intelligence specialists to prevent fentanyl from flooding across the border. The Senate failed to pass a bill earlier this year at the urging of former President Trump. bipartisan bill that more money would be made available for border control.

“We need more resources to do our work,” Miller said. “We all need to get on the same page and tackle this together.”

At the Drug Enforcement Administration, Milgram oversees 10,000 employees, many of whom gather intelligence and conduct counter-narcotics operations around the world. Milgram, a former New Jersey attorney general, took over the DEA three years ago. Since then, more than 200,000 Americans have died from fentanyl overdoses.

She began posting photos of people who had died from fentanyl in the lobby of DEA headquarters as a daily reminder of the drug’s catastrophic impact. Milgram says that since she took over, the DEA has targeted and cracked down on “every part of that global supply chain” responsible for illicit fentanyl.

““Every day we look at where the vulnerabilities are for these cartels, for their networks, how we can target them and attack them to dismantle them and defeat them,” Milgram said. “And we are working tirelessly to stop this threat, and we are making progress. But there is so much more to be done.”