THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mexico’s Army and National Guard announced July 7, 2022, a “historic” seizure of more than a half-ton of fentanyl at a warehouse in the northern city of Culiacan. Mexican prosecutors followed up that news a day later by reporting that a half-million fentanyl pills were confiscated at another warehouse in the city.
Culiacan is the capital of Sinaloa state, home to the drug cartel of the same name.
“This is the largest seizure in history of this lethal drug,” Assistant Public Safety Secretary Ricardo Mejia said of the first haul, which took place July 2 and netted fentanyl with an illicit value of about U.S. $230 million. The second raid took place July 8.
The enormous seizures came just days before President Andrés Manuel López Obrador met in Washington with U.S. President Joe Biden.
In a series of agreements announced July 12 as López Obrador met with Biden at the White House, the two countries pledged to enhance law-enforcement cooperation against fentanyl smuggling. Biden also said that a “major anti-smuggling operation” against fentanyl traffickers has been underway since April and had led to more than 3,000 arrests.
The nearly 1,200 pounds (543 kilograms) found at the warehouse in the “historic” first seizure could have produced millions of the counterfeit pills in which fentanyl is usually offered. Soldiers also found a half-ton of meth in the raid, as well as cocaine, opium and at least 70 tons of precursor chemicals.
Fentanyl is so deadly because it is pressed into pills made to look like Xanax, Adderall or Oxycodone, or mixed into other drugs. In the second raid, Soldiers also found 83 kilograms of powder fentanyl and about a ton of meth, in addition to bales of pills.
Synthetic opioids like fentanyl have been behind a major increase in overdose deaths in the United States; as little as 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be lethal. The drug is 100 times more potent than morphine. (Pictured: Packets of fentanyl, mostly in powder form, seized in 2019.)
That has led to tens of thousands of U.S. overdose deaths because people often do not realize they are taking fentanyl. Almost all of the fentanyl smuggled into the U.S. comes from Mexico, where it is produced with precursor chemicals smuggled from China.
In June, Mexican prosecutors said they found an illicit facility with a pill press used to manufacture fentanyl pills in the border town of San Luis Rio Colorado, across from the U.S. city of Yuma, Arizona.
Agents at the U.S.-Mexico border are using new technology to scan trucks for fentanyl as fentanyl-laced pills seized by law enforcement surged nearly 50-fold between 2018 and 2021, CBS News reported.
IMAGE CREDIT: REUTERS