U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in 2023 seized more than 77 million fentanyl pills and nearly 12,000 pounds of fentanyl powder – the most the DEA has ever seized in a single year.
The quantity translates to more than 386 million deadly doses of fentanyl – enough to kill more than everyone in the United States.
Last year, as the agency celebrated its 50th anniversary, it also transformed its organization and strategy, it said, “to meet this extraordinary moment in time as the United States confronts the deadliest drug threat our country has ever faced – fentanyl.”
But their efforts weren’t enough to keep up with the supply pouring into the U.S. from the southern border, where the drug is manufactured in Mexico using precursors shipped from China, it said. And the potency of drugs they are seizing is more deadly than before.
“The dedicated women and men of DEA are doing everything in our power to battle the fentanyl scourge that is destroying our communities, but we’re essentially drinking water from a firehose,” Special Agent in Charge J. Todd Scott, head of DEA’s Louisville Field Division, said in a statement. “This is not a problem that can be solved by law enforcement alone.”
The DEA says the unprecedented threat of fentanyl “that is flooding our country” is largely being created by two Mexican drug cartels: the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels. In response, the DEA created a new “strategic layer of Counter Threat Teams to focus on each cartel and the illicit finance networks that fund them both.” The teams use intelligence gathered from 334 DEA offices worldwide “to map the cartels’ global networks and to identify targets for investigation and prosecution,” it said.
While the cartels’ operations are based in Mexico, DEA has identified more than 50 countries where they operate and traced their global supply chain worldwide. The DEA also explained the process of how fentanyl pours into the U.S.: cartels purchase chemicals from Chinese companies, which are shipped to Mexico and then mass produce fentanyl in Mexico. They then traffic and distribute finished fentanyl widely throughout the United States, primarily through a vast network coming through the southwest border.
