Fentanyl is ‘single greatest challenge US faces,’ says Department of Homeland Security Secretary
Fentanyl is the “biggest challenge facing the US as a country,” said the Secretary of Homeland Security.
Alejandro Mayorkas made the comment during a Senate hearing Wednesday, in what is believed to be the first time a member of Biden’s cabinet has described the deadly synthetic opioid in such stark terms.
Mr Mayorkas pointed to the record 75,000 deaths in 2022 from fentanyl overdose, the equivalent of 1,500 American lives lost each week.
The drug, pouring into the US from Mexico and China, has become the leading cause of death for people aged 18 to 49 in the US, figures suggest, surpassing gun and car accidents.
Republican lawmakers have blamed the Biden administration’s lax immigration policies for the increase in fentanyl coming across the southern border.
The number of deaths from fentanyl in the US increased sharply in the 2010s. At the beginning of the decade, 2,666 Americans died of fentanyl overdose. This figure rose to 19,413 in 2016. Covid made the situation even worse, with a record 72,484 deaths recorded in 2021
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said at a Senate hearing on Wednesday that fentanyl is the “biggest challenge facing the US as a country”
According to US Customs and Border Protection, the vast majority of fentanyl enters the US through legal gateways, in vehicles
The chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, opened the Senate panel by telling Mr. Mayorkas that he wanted the fentanyl crisis to be the department’s top priority for 2024.
Sen. Murphy said, “This budget had better do everything humanly possible to stop the importation of the deadly fentanyl into the United States.”
Mayorkas told the committee that the current fentanyl crisis was going on before Biden took office. He added that the government was working with Mexico to “bring the fight to the cartels.”
Customs and Border Protection seized a record nearly 15,000 pounds of fentanyl last year. More than 90 percent of the arrests took place at ports of entry along the Mexican border.
The powerful synthetic opioid is 50 times stronger than heroin and 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. It is used by doctors for patients with severe pain or terminal illnesses.
It’s cheap, highly addictive, relatively easy to smuggle into the US, and cost-effective for dealers to mix it into their stock, which saves them money and can prolong or boost the high users experience.
But it takes a negligibly small dose of fentanyl to cause a fatal overdose. Just two milligrams, the equivalent of five grains of salt, is enough to cause death.
Because it is incorporated into other popular medications, many people who die from overdoses do not know they are taking fentanyl. Fentanyl is partly responsible for the sharp drop in life expectancy in America over the past three years.
It’s now in everything from cocaine to molly and street benzodiazepines like Xanax.
Fentanyl, a highly addictive synthetic opioid, is causing a massacre in the streets of Portland, Oregon. The drug has flowed into the US, initially along the East Coast, but the strongest increases are now seen in the West
The drug was initially produced in India and China and shipped to recipients in North America. Since then, makeshift laboratories have sprung up in Mexico to receive the precursor chemicals from Asia, mix them or crush them into pills and smuggle them into the US
The fentanyl crisis has contributed to the sharp decline in American life expectancy in recent years. Americans now live an average of 76.4 years, up from 78.8 years in 2019. In the UK, which like the US suffered from the Covid pandemic but is not experiencing a fentanyl crisis, life expectancy has increased slightly from 81.3 years in 2019 to 81.52 years in 2021.
The Department of Homeland Security includes Customs and Border Protection, the agency tasked with preventing illegal fentanyl and other narcotics from entering the Americas.
According to the US Customs and Border Protectionthe vast majority of fentanyl enters the US through legal gateways, in vehicles.
However, no one knows how much fentanyl in both gel and pill form successfully crosses the southern border, and the number of seizures remains low.
The opioid cut with virtually every street drug in the country killed a record 75,000 Americans by 2021, the equivalent of 1,500 lives lost weekly.
The common counterfeit drug is very potent and deadly in large doses. The equivalent of five grains of salt of fentanyl is enough to cause death.
Meanwhile, a drug testing company has detected a nine-fold rise in fentanyl use in the western US over the past three years, showing that the powerful opioid has now cast its deadly shadow across the country.
This week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Narcan, the nasal spray that quickly reverses opioid overdoses.
The drug can now be sold without a prescription.
Fentanyl was invented in the US in 1959 as a cheaper alternative to other painkillers used in hospitals and health centers worldwide.
Three chemicals, benzylfentanyl, 4-anilinopiperidine and norfentanyl and considered by the DEA to be precursors to fentanyl – meaning they are key ingredients in the drug’s creation.
It binds to opioid receptors in a person’s nervous system, which are responsible for giving the body a pleasant sensation when activated.
However, its prevalence in the illicit drug supply rose in the 2010s. In 2011, 2,666 deaths were caused by fentanyl – a figure that has risen dramatically almost every year since.
The fentanyl crisis began in 2016, where annual deaths more than doubled to 19,413, compared to 9,580 a year earlier. In 2017, the number of deaths from the synthetic opioid was 28,466.
Covid accelerated the fentanyl epidemic and caused a rise in deaths in successive years.
As early as the first three weeks of 2023, there have been 35 overdose deaths in King County, Washington, according to local outlets. Pictured: A man in Seattle smokes fentanyl
A bustling industrial district until the 1950s, Kensington is now described by The Philadelphia Inquirer as “the poorest neighborhood in America’s poorest major city”
In 2020, the first year of the pandemic, deaths from fentanyl rose 52 percent to 55,516, from 36,359 in 2019.
The crisis worsened in 2021, with death rates rising another 30 percent to 72,484.
America’s homeless population is one of the hardest hit by the country’s fentanyl crisis.
In King County, Washington, which includes Seattle, officials say the number of fentanyl deaths among the city’s homeless has left morgues without space to store bodies.
America’s homeless population is one of the hardest hit by the country’s fentanyl crisis.
In King County, Washington, which includes Seattle, officials say the number of fentanyl deaths among the city’s homeless has left morgues without space to store bodies.