The Drug Enforcement Administration said it has seized 379 million potentially fatal doses of illegal fentanyl this year, as Mexican drug-trafficking organizations continue to flood the U.S. with the cheap synthetic opioid responsible for record numbers of U.S. overdose deaths. The agency said it has confiscated more than 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder and 50.6 million illegal fentanyl tablets in 2022. That was twice the number of tablets seized in 2021, when more than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses. Two-thirds of those deaths were caused by fentanyl, reports the Washington Post. DEA chief Anne Milgram, said the seizures this year contained enough fentanyl “to kill everyone in the United States,” home to 330 million residents.
“DEA’s top operational priority is to defeat the two Mexican drug cartels — the Sinaloa and Jalisco (CJNG) Cartels — that are primarily responsible for the fentanyl that is killing Americans today,” Milgram said. Illegal fentanyl has become the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18 to 49. Fatal overdoses from fentanyl have surged 94 percent since 2019, and the drug now claims more lives in the United States than car accidents, gun violence or suicides. The DEA seizure numbers are only a partial count of the volume of illegal fentanyl detected by law enforcement agencies this year. The statistics do not include seizures by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) along the southern border, where authorities detected more than 14,000 pounds of illegal fentanyl — a record amount — during the fiscal year ending Sept. 30. Last month, CBP seized more than 2,900 pounds of the drug along the Mexico border, the highest one-month total ever. Fentanyl, 50 times more potent than heroin, is a billion-dollar business for drug cartels that produce the highly addictive narcotic in clandestine Mexican labs.