Old North News

The crisis at the Southern border of the U.S. continues to be driven by the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, according to analysts and U.S. border officials, fueling an opioid crisis whose death toll is still climbing.

As competition for market share intensifies, fentanyl has become an increasingly profitable export -- both more potent and easier to produce than heroin. Fentanyl has been identified as a leading culprit of opioid overdoses in the U.S. and a driver of the opioid epidemic, claiming record numbers of lives in North Carolina today.

“According to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), cartels increasingly target children and young people,” U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) wrote in an op-ed for Fox News, announcing legislation for harsher penalties for fentanyl traffickers. “The most obvious instance of this trend is the pills of ‘rainbow fentanyl’ that the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels are smuggling across the border, which law officers have seized in 18 states this month.” 

Drug overdose deaths in North Carolina skyrocketed in 2021, according to data from the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. Nearly 4,000 people died of a drug overdose in the state last year (from March 2021 to March 2022), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said. That represents a 26% increase from 2020 and a 47% increase from 2019, according to data from the North Carolina Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. 

Last week, Forsyth County law enforcement officers recorded the largest drug bust in the county’s history, as detectives recovered 22 pounds of fentanyl that had an approximate street value of $2.6 million, according to Fox News. 

Fentanyl abuse and deaths are on the rise, The Wall Street Journal reported, in part because heroin is roughly 30 times more expensive to produce than fentanyl. Heroin usually costs around $6,000 per kilogram to produce, while fentanyl can be as cheap as $200 per kilogram, Bryce Pardo, the associate director of the Rand Corporation’s Drug Policy Research Center, told WSJ.

Declassified Drug Enforcement Agency intelligence reports indicate that the New Generation Jalisco and the Sinaloa cartels are the primary traffickers of fentanyl into the country. These cartels dominate trafficking corridors at the Southern border leading into Arizona and California. 

The DEA reports that fentanyl is frequently and intentionally mixed in with other drugs like heroin or cocaine to increase its potency. Of course, blending these drugs together results in a much higher likelihood of an overdose -- and without laboratory testing, it’s impossible to know how much of each drug is present. 

The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) says nearly 4.9 million people have illegally crossed the border into America in the 18 months since President Joe Biden took office, contributing to the drug overdose increase.

“The endless flow of illegal aliens and the incursion of lethal narcotics pouring across our border will not end until this administration demonstrates a willingness to enforce our laws,” FAIR President Dan Stein said, according to FAIR's website.

The FAIR statement goes on to point out that the drugs seized at the border represent only a fraction of what is actually trafficked into the country -- and in July alone, 469 million lethal doses of fentanyl were seized at the border.