Billions of potentially lethal doses of fentanyl were seized by federal law enforcement at the border over the past year, but hundreds of millions of deadly doses have slipped past authorities into U.S. communities, according to government officials.
Federal law enforcement agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration have found an "unprecedented" amount of Mexican-made fentanyl within the United States, which shows how much drug cartels push past authorities and how widely available the drug is to Americans, witnesses told a Senate panel Tuesday afternoon.
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"So far in 2023, DEA has seized more than 65 million fake pills and 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder," said DEA Chief of Operations William Kimbell during testimony before the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control. "That's approximately 300 million deadly doses of fentanyl taken off America's streets."
The seizures of fentanyl within the country in the first nine full months of 2023 were already more than the total seized in all of 2022, Kimbell said.
More than 6 billion potentially lethal doses of fentanyl, 27,000 pounds, were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the border between October 2022 and September 2023, the most ever interdicted since a few pounds of fentanyl was first caught in 2013.
Nearly 90% of fentanyl seized was at the ports of entry, primarily between the United States and Mexico, where body smugglers, commercial trucks, and passenger vehicles attempted to transport it through customs inspection booths. But plenty more has managed to get through.
"The availability of fentanyl throughout the United States has reached unprecedented heights," Kimbell said in a written opening statement. "The Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels pose the greatest criminal drug threat the United States has ever faced."
In an October indictment against eight companies and 12 people based in China, the DEA seized 80 kilograms of synthetic precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl, enough to make 48 million deadly doses.
The DEA considers 2 milligrams of fentanyl, the amount that could fit on the tip of a pencil, lethal because it can put a user in a coma or cause death.
U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 45 years old are more likely to die from consuming fentanyl than they are to die due to a car crash, the coronavirus, a heart attack, suicide, or a terrorist attack. More than 100,000 Americans died due to a drug overdose last year.
In a DEA review of pills that its agents have seized since January, seven out of 10 counterfeit prescription pills, fentanyl-laced imitations of drugs like Percocet, had enough fentanyl present to kill the person who consumed it.
"It costs the cartels as little as 10 cents to produce a fentanyl-laced fake prescription pill that is sold in the United States for as much as $10 to $30 per pill. As a result, the cartels make billions of dollars from trafficking fentanyl into the United States," Kimbell wrote in his prepared remarks.
The emergence of fentanyl marked the third wave of the opioid epidemic following the abuse of prescription painkillers and then a rise in heroin use that prompted major concern during the Obama administration. Fentanyl is a legitimate pharmaceutical drug that is used to treat severe pain and advanced-stage cancer patients.
As drug cartels discovered fentanyl could be made in labs and was not restricted to growing seasons, the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels shifted their operations to making and pushing more of it into the U.S. by making fake versions of popular prescription drugs laced with fentanyl. Because pills are pressed in cartel-run drug labs, there is no quality assurance, resulting in some pills being more potent than others.
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At the start of the fentanyl epidemic, U.S. airport facilities were ground zero for fentanyl seizures. CBP officers found the drug hidden in packages entering the country through international mail. Seizures of fentanyl in the mail have declined as their detection got better and cartels pivoted to ways they can get larger loads in.
In 2016, when seizures were under 1,000 pounds, national health leaders approached the Obama administration to warn that fentanyl was becoming a drug epidemic, the likes of which had never been seen before, according to a Washington Post investigation. It was not declared a public health emergency until 2017 after President Donald Trump took office.