Peach Tree Times

The crisis at the southern border of the United States continues to be driven by the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, according to analysts and US 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 United States, and a driver of the opioid epidemic claiming record numbers of lives in Georgia today.

“According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, cartels increasingly target children and young people. 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,” Sen. Marco Rubio said in an op-ed announcing legislation for harsher penalties for fentanyl traffickers. 

According to an end-of-March press release from the Georgia Department of Public Health, fentanyl-related overdose deaths have been increasing in the state since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Between May 1, 2020, and April 30, 2021, fentanyl-involved overdose deaths increased 106.2% compared to the same period the previous year.

Earlier this week, four people were arrested by the Tift County Sheriff’s Office for trafficking fentanyl and other drugs–their combined value was over $700,000.  The arrests occurred as the result of a two-month-long investigation in conjunction with the GBI Southwestern Regional Drug Enforcement Office.

According to data released by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in Georgia alone, over 2,400 overdose deaths were reported from March 2021 to March 2022.

This comes as the Wall Street Journal reported heroin is roughly 30 times more expensive to produce than fentanyl.  According to Bryce Pardo, the associate director of the Rand Corporation’s Drug Policy Research Center, heroin usually costs around $6000 per kilogram to produce, while fentanyl can be as cheap as $200 per kilogram.

The New Generation Jalisco and the Sinaloa cartels are the primary traffickers of fentanyl into the United States, declassified DEA intelligence reports state. These cartels dominate trafficking corridors at the southern border leading into Arizona and California.

According to a recent press release from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), nearly 4.9 million people have illegally crossed the border into America in the 18 months since President Joe Biden took office.  

“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,” President of FAIR Dan Stein said in the report. 

 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 US–and in July alone, 469 million lethal doses of fentanyl were seized at the border.

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.