The reason for the fentanyl crisis is ‘not a crime story,’ says DEA chief | 60 Minutes

Two powerful Mexican drug cartels have flooded the United States with fentanyl, creating the worst drug crisis in American history.

Fentanyl was responsible for more than 70,000 deaths last year. The U.S. is “losing a generation” to fentanyl, Anne Milgram, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said in an interview with 60 Minutes. Almost all fentanyl in the U.S. is produced by the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, with the chemicals purchased primarily from China.

“As complex and massive as the problem is, it is not a crime story,” said Milgram. “We know who is responsible.”

How the fentanyl crisis began

The fentanyl crisis began a decade ago when cartels began wresting control of the supply chain from China, buying the drug's precursor chemicals to manufacture fentanyl themselves in secret labs in Mexico. In 2019, China “scheduled” or blocked the export of finished fentanyl to the United States, further cementing the cartels' dominance over the pipeline.

Originally developed for hospital patients in extreme pain, fentanyl is now available in virtually every community in the United States. That's because the synthetic opioid is cheap to produce, easy to smuggle, and incredibly addictive. Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin.

Sherri Hobson saw the fentanyl crisis coming. As an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego, she prosecuted Mexican cartel cases for 30 years before retiring in 2020.

“Cartels are very business-oriented,” Hobson said. “They are looking for profit. They seek eternal power. They are institutionalized.”

From Mexico to the USA: How fentanyl crosses the border

About 90 percent of the fentanyl that comes into the U.S. is smuggled across the U.S.-Mexico border in passenger vehicles, says Acting Commissioner Troy Miller, who has worked with U.S. Customs and Border Protection for 30 years. Almost all of the fentanyl that comes into the U.S. is smuggled through legal border crossings such as San Ysidro between San Diego and Tijuana, the busiest land port in the Western Hemisphere.

More than 60,000 cars snake through 34 lanes of traffic in San Ysidro every day. CBP officers use high-resolution scanners and dogs trained to detect fentanyl, but Miller says their resources are only enough to search 8 percent of cars.

The cartels are constantly adapting to CBP's interception efforts, for example by hiding fentanyl in plastic bags that they stuff into the gas tanks of cars to mask the smell from drug-sniffing dogs.

Two-thirds of those arrested for fentanyl smuggling are American citizens who are paid by the cartels.

“We've seen terrible trends. We've seen high school and middle school students smuggling fentanyl,” Miller said.

How authorities are fighting the flood of fentanyl

Miller said it is clear that Customs and Border Protection needs more officers and intelligence specialists to stop the flow of fentanyl across the border. The Senate failed to pass a bipartisan bill This would have provided more money for border protection.

“We need more resources to do our job,” Miller said. “We all need to pull together and tackle this together.”

At the Drug Enforcement Administration, Milgram is responsible for 10,000 employees, many of whom collect intelligence and conduct counterdrug operations around the world. Milgram, a former New Jersey attorney general, took over the DEA three years ago. Since then, more than 200,000 Americans have died from fentanyl overdoses.

She began hanging pictures of people who had died from fentanyl in the lobby of DEA headquarters as a daily reminder of the drug's catastrophic effects. Milgram says since she took office, the DEA has targeted and taken action against “every part of the global supply chain” responsible for illegal fentanyl.

““Every day we study where the vulnerabilities of these cartels and their networks are and how we can target them to disrupt and defeat them,” Milgram said. “And we are working tirelessly to stop this threat and we are making progress. But there is so much more to do.”