Is an open border to blame for the fentanyl crisis in the Americas?

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Joe Biden arrived in Mexico this week for a summit with President Andres Manuel Lpez Obrador aimed at tackling record amounts of illicit fentanyl being smuggled across the border into the United States.

The fentanyl crisis has wreaked havoc in the United States, making an already catastrophic opioid epidemic even more deadly. Of the estimated 107,622 fatal overdoses in the United States in 2021, the highest number ever of fentanyl was responsible for two-thirds of deaths.

Republicans have sought to frame the fentanyl deaths as a border security issue and have faulted Mr. Biden for failing to block shipments from entering the country. That claim became a key theme in November’s midterm attacks on Democrats.

But even as Mr. Biden and his counterpart met to discuss ways to ban the flow of fentanyl across the border, as White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said during a At a Monday briefing, experts questioned whether the approach would have a significant impact.

Above all, it is not a law enforcement problem. This is a public health issue that needs to be tackled as a public health issue, Adam Scott Wandt, assistant professor of public policy at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told The Independent in an interview. telephone on Tuesday.

Professor Wandt, who received a three-year, $600,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice in 2020 to study fentanyl sales on the dark web, said the border had become something of a red herring regarding the causes of the fentanyl crisis.

It is true that border seizures of fentanyl have reached record levels, a trend that began under the Trump administration. Since August last year, Customs and Border Patrol have seized more than 20,000 pounds of fentanyl from smugglers. authorities estimate that this number represents only a small percentage of the total amount entering the country.

These seizures only tell a small part of the story, he said.

I think those people who are naturally passionate about securing the border, when they look at something like fentanyl, they get what we call confirmation bias, Professor Wandt said. When they see confiscated drugs at the border, which they regularly do, I think they just focus on the fact that it’s a border issue and don’t realize it’s is much more important than that. I don’t think most people appreciate the seriousness of this opioid epidemic. And that by removing opioids, you won’t solve the problem that people are addicted.

Many Republicans have called on the Biden administration to devote more resources to fighting the Mexican cartels responsible for smuggling fentanyl into the United States.

Currently, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) says that most fentanyl crossing the border is produced and smuggled into the United States by the Sinaloa and New Generation Jalisco (Crtel de Jalisco Nueva Generacin or CJNG) cartels. These cartels use precursor ingredients mass-produced in factories in China to make the finished fentanyl product.

Ben Westhoff, the author of Fentanyl, Inc., a book about the manufacture, sale and use of fentanyl and other synthetic drugs, broke into one of these Chinese fentanyl labs during his research.

He told The Independent that the relationship between the cartels and Chinese labs grew in the 2000s but has generated huge profits for both parties over the past seven out of eight years.

He explained that the causes of the fentanyl crisis have their roots much closer to home.

The problem of opioid prescribing, starting in the 1990s, created a huge new market for opioids of 1-3 million people. And so when these people’s prescriptions ran out, they basically turned to the black market and started using street heroin. And then, ultimately, fentanyl kind of helped fill the void, Westhoff said.

Many people who used heroin for years have now switched to fentanyl because they need a stronger substance to experience the same high. Since fentanyl is readily available, dealers often mix fentanyl with other drugs such as heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and MDMA to increase potency. It has also found its way into counterfeit prescription pills like oxycodone (Oxycontin, Percocet), hydrocodone (Vicodin), and alprazolam (Xanax); or stimulants like amphetamines (Adderall). Often people who take these pills do not know that they contain fentanyl.

Mr. Westhoff said the potency of fentanyl is one of the main reasons it is so difficult to intercept.

There’s no way to stop it, he said. Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin. Before, if you were smuggling 50 pounds of heroin, now you only have to smuggle a pound of fentanyl. There are so many ways to pass it around that it can be packed into secret compartments and cars. There can be underground tunnels, there are drones, it can be brought on boats. If you look at prisons in the Americas, people are constantly dying of overdoses in prisons. If we can’t stop drugs from entering prisons, there’s no way to stop them from crossing the border.

Mr. Westhoff and Professor Wandt, along with most experts on the fentanyl crisis, say more border policing will not solve America’s deeper fentanyl crisis.

I think it’s worth talking about, Mr. Westhoff said of Mr. Bidens’ meeting with his Mexican counterpart, but frivolous is certainly the right word. We spend billions and billions, tens of billions of dollars every year on international drug interdiction, that is, trying to prevent drugs from entering this country from other countries . It’s just this giant waste of money.

He added: I think we need to focus on helping our own citizens at home trying education campaigns to try to get people to try bad drugs like fentanyl in the first place, not to not get involved with them at all. And then for addicted users, trying to get them into treatment programs and drug treatments.

Professor Wandt also suggested that focusing on more policing would only repeat the mistakes of the past.

We know the war on drugs has been a failure. We know the war on drugs is not working. We have studies that have shown you can’t get out of the war on drugs, he said.

Bidens’ border visit follows an announcement last year that his administration would provide $1.5 billion in funding to communities to address addiction and overdose crises. The money provides funding for access to treatment for substance use disorders, removes barriers to public health interventions like naloxone, and expands access to recovery support services such as treatment programs for 24/7 opioids, according to the White House.

The latest figures from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest the overdose death rate may have slowed slightly, but fentanyl remains the biggest killer.

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