President-elect Donald Trump has said that stopping the trafficking of fentanyl along the southern border is a priority for his administration. promises to impose tariffs of 25%. on all imports from Mexico until the flow of “drugs, especially fentanyl, and illegal immigrants” into the United States is stopped at will.
trump has claimed Fentanyl overdoses kill 300,000 people each year, a toll he said is “probably much higher,” while incoming “frontier tsar”. Tom Homan supposed in a Fox News interview this week that Mexican cartels they have “killed a quarter of a million Americans with fentanyl.”
Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl have become the leading cause of overdose deaths since 2016, devastating communities in the US and causing a major public health challenge, according to the National Institutes of Health. Mexican cartels are the main source of fentanyl ending up in the United States, officials say.
However, both Trump and Homan cite inflated numbers, with Trump often making a misleading connection between migrants crossing the border illegally and the flow of fentanyl.
according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 334,000 people died in the US from synthetic opioid drug overdoses, like fentanylover a period of almost 10 years from 2013 to 2022. As of July, the last provisional data reported more than 73,000 fentanyl overdose deaths in 2023.
More than 86 percent of people convicted of fentanyl trafficking in fiscal year 2023 were U.S. citizens, according to the US Sentencing Commission. researchers say drug trafficking organizations hire US citizens because they are subject to less scrutiny.
The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
The fentanyl crisis
fentanyla synthetic opioid approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use as a pain reliever and anesthetic, is about 50 times more potent than heroin, according to the Drug Control Administration. It is often mixed with heroin and other substances and has been found in pills that mimic pharmaceutical drugs, such as oxycodone, the agency said.
Mexican cartels are the main source of finished fentanyl that is distributed in the US, with China being the main supplier of precursor chemicals and the pill presses that the cartels use to produce the drugs, according to a report published in May by the AED.
The Department of National Security found that as of December 2023, more than 90% of fentanyl is stopped at ports of entry, which are designated areas where people can legally enter the country.
Customs and Border Protection analyzed data by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that 80% of people caught with fentanyl at ports of entry from 2019 to 2024 were US citizens.
Analysis of CDC data showed that opioid overdose deaths rose 56% year-over-year in 2020, then rose another 22% in 2021, when most migrants were prohibit crossing the border with Title 42a measure of the pandemic era.
Combating drugs smuggled across the border
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has urged Trump against it addressing migration and drug use in the US through tariffs, vowing to retaliate with their own.
The CBP informed record fentanyl seizures in 2023 and 2024 and launched Operation Plaza Spike in April, a multi-agency effort targeting Mexican cartels and their logistics hubs to disrupt fentanyl trafficking.
Drug policy experts say it can be difficult to keep all drugs from crossing the border.
“We want to make it difficult for criminal organizations to carry out their business, but we have to be realistic about how difficult it would be to actually make it impossible,” said Dr. Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information. . Systems and public policies. “Fentanyl is so extraordinarily potent that very small amounts can be sold for huge sums of money.”
The flow of synthetic drugs is also difficult to stop because traffickers can easily replace any drugs that are lost, Caulkins said.
“By prioritizing targeting the most violent and corrupt organizations, we can reduce the damage that the global drug supply chain creates, an issue that is also valuable to efforts to restrict the total amount of fentanyl entering the country,” Caulkins said. .