The Drug Control Administration is the agency of the Department of Justice of the United States dedicated to the fight against smuggling and drug use in the country. In a recent letter sent from this agency to all police chiefs in the nation, the fight against fentanyl smuggling is established as a priority, citing as cause a increase in the number of mass overdoses as a result of the use of this drug.
Fentanyl is a strong synthetic opioid analgesic similar to morphine, but between 50 and 100 times more powerful than it.. In its prescribed and controlled form, it can be very useful in cases of extreme pain, such as patients with recent surgeries, but the body gets used to it easily and it is necessary to increase the dose, making its consumption increasingly dangerous. When consumed illegally, without medical control, it is extremely dangerous, being able to generate an overdose after the first time it is tried.
In this fiscal year alone (which began in September 2021), the border control office has seized more than 81 kilos of fentanyl (which is consumed almost in drops) only at the border crossing between Mexico and the Tucson area, in Arizona. The number is alarming considering that with less than a gram of fentanyl a person can overdose.
The vast majority of fentanyl trafficked illegally into the United States enters the country’s southern border from Mexico.. The authorities are controlling not only license plates of the vehicles that try to cross the border, but X-ray machines and trained dogs are installed to detect if they are trying to cross with the illegal drug.
“The main purpose of having dogs at the border is to detect people hidden in cars, to prevent human trafficking. But today, in the second place of our objectives is the detection of fentanyl. We have seen an exponential increase in the amount of fentanyl attempted to be trafficked into the country”, indicated the border officer Aaron Escobarin Arizona, to the local press.
The chemicals with which fentanyl is developed are usually manufactured in China or India, from where they are exported to Mexico. Once there, they are processed into pills and in this format they try to cross the border to be sold in dollars.. Fentanyl consumption in the United States is the highest in the worldand it is what has become known in the country as the opioid crisis, the main cause of unnatural death of people under 30 years of age.
Fentanyl is sometimes mixed with other drugs, generating situations such as adulterated cocaine to reduce costs. Recently in South Florida, a group of spring breakers overdosed en masse (six of them became unconscious) from consuming adulterated cocaine with fentanyl. It is not yet clear if they knew what they were consuming or if they were duped by a trafficker when he sold them to them.
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Source-www.infobae.com