Author: fentvic Admin

Fentanyl Isn’t Just Smuggled In From Mexico. It Also Arrives Duty Free By Mail

Fentanyl isn’t only arriving in the U.S. by your standard-fare drug smuggler, hiding it in suitcases and the back seat of a go-fast boat from Mexico bound for San Diego. It’s still coming in via U.S. mail and other international shippers. And it comes in duty-free. Barring drug-sniffing dogs at Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facilities catching the wayward package shipped usually from China and Mexico, duty-free entry remains a small but active way of getting the killer drug to addicts nationwide.

“CBP continues to see bad actors seeking to exploit the increasing volumes of de minimis shipments to transit illicit goods, including fentanyl and the precursors and paraphernalia used to manufacture it,” a spokesperson for CBP told me. De minimis is a Customs trade provision that allows for duty-free entry of all goods if priced under $800. CBP said that in fiscal year 2022 (beginning Oct 1 and ending Sept 30), most package seizures by Customs agents were from de minimis mail, including seizures for narcotics.

Although the CBP did not specify the source of these packages, Mexico and China are the top two, with China long known as the go-to spot for the raw materials and equipment used to make fentanyl in a lab.

Equipment such as pill presses, used by drug cartels for turning powder into consumable pills, were often seized at CBP mail rooms. Some 80% of those seizures came from duty-free entry, Brandon Lord, executive director of the trade policy and programs directorate, said on Sept. 11 at the National Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association of America conference.

Read the full article on Forbes.com (subscription may be required).

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Revised death by distribution law offers relief to victims’ families

RALEIGH, N.C. (WTVD) — Advocates and law enforcement in the fight against opioids in North Carolina are calling a new piece of legislation a major victory. On Thursday, Governor Cooper signed a revised version of SB 189 into law, establishing harsher penalties for people who traffic and provide bad drugs.

Under the revised bill, which treats death by distribution as a Class C felony, drug traffickers and people whose drugs result in others dying will face more serious jail time. It also makes charging those people easier, no longer requiring prosecutors to prove a transaction, just that the drugs were “delivered”.

“What this means is the families who worked to help change the law for the better won. And it means that anyone who loses a loved one in the future faces a better chance of justice,” said Barbara Walsh, Executive Director of the Fentanyl Victims Network of North Carolina.

Walsh lost her daughter, Sophia, to fentanyl in August 2021, and founded the Victims Network to help impacted families get justice — and to advocate for legislation like the revised SB 189.

Read the full article and watch the video on the ABC11 website.

AG Garland announces $345M in grants to tackle fentanyl epidemic

Vowing to attack the nation’s fentanyl problem on multiple fronts, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Tuesday the Justice Department has awarded $345 million in grants to support education, prevention, treatment and recovery programs.

“We know that no one — no one person and no one family — can defeat the epidemic alone. We need each other,” Garland said during a speech at the Drug Enforcement Administration’s National Family Summit on Fentanyl in Arlington, Virginia. “That is why the Justice Department is providing resources to public health and public safety programs across the country.”

Nearly a third of the funding will go toward the DOJ’s Comprehensive Opioid, Stimulant, and Substance Use Program for initiatives such as increased access to the overdose-reversing drug Naloxone, medication-assisted treatment and peer support to overdose survivors and their families. 

Twenty-five million dollars will go toward support, mentoring and other services for young people who have been affected by opioid and other substance use, as well as those who are at risk for substance abuse.

“No one, especially no young person, should have to face this alone,” Garland said.

Garland did not say how all the grant money will be spent. 

Read the full article on the Spectrum News One website.

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Demonstrators call for more federal help to address fentanyl epidemic

WRAL News coverage of the National Fentanyl Rally held in Washington DC on September 23, 2023.

Hundreds of people from around the country attended the march and rally outside the White House yesterday. It was organized by Lost Voices of Fentanyl.

Rockingham County holds town hall on dangers of fentanyl

ROCKINGHAM COUNTY, N.C. — Students, teachers, and parents will attend a town hall Tuesday night in Rockingham County to talk about the dangers of fentanyl. 

It’s a hot topic that’s growing as Rockingham County joins Guilford County on the matter.

Guilford County hosted town halls last spring. The town halls came about after a survey at Northern Guilford High School showed nearly 90% of students said drugs were a problem at school.

Kathleen Smith helped plan that meeting. She’s happy to see more counties doing the same.

“It feels really good, but you don’t want to pat yourself on the back too much as a school community, knowing there’s just so much more work to be done, and you know, the problem is really pervasive. I sat down with some moms and kids not long ago on my back porch and you know, I had this girl who I highly respect, who is in college; she’s just like, ‘Ms. Smith, everybody does it,’ kind of like, get over it, but that’s not what I want. We want to raise our kids to treat their bodies, for the most part, like cathedrals,” Smith said.

Law enforcement officials said fentanyl really ramped up in 2015. They said what used to be a heroin problem is now a fentanyl problem.

Read the full article and watch the video on the WFMY News2 website.

How deeply did prescription opioid pills flood your county? See here.

For the first time, Americans can see the rise — and fall — of legal opioids entering their community. A database maintained by the Drug Enforcement Administration that tracks every single pain pill sold in the United States, tracing the path from manufacturers and distributors to pharmacies in every town and city, is now public through 2019, the tail end of the pain pill crisis.

These records provide an unprecedented look at the surge of legal pain pills that fueled the prescription opioid epidemic, which resulted in more than 210,000 overdose deaths during the 14-year time frame ending in 2019. It also sparked waves of an ongoing and raging opioid crisis first fueled by heroin and then illicit fentanyl.

The Washington Post sifted through 760 million transactions from 2006 through 2019 that are detailed in the DEA’s database and specifically focused on oxycodone and hydrocodone pills, which account for three-quarters of all opioid dosages shipped to pharmacies during that time. The Post is making this data available at the county and state levels to help the public understand the impact of years of prescription pill shipments on their communities.

A county-level analysis shows where the most oxycodone and hydrocodone pills were distributed across the country over that time — more than 145 billion in all.

Read the full article on the Washington Post website (may require subscription).

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Overdoses soared even as prescription pain pills plunged

The number of prescription opioid pain pills shipped in the United States plummeted nearly 45 percent between 2011 and 2019, new federal data shows, even as fatal overdoses rose to record levels as users increasingly used heroin, and then illegal fentanyl.

The data confirms what’s long been known about the arc of the nation’s addiction crisis: Users first got hooked by pain pills saturating the nation, then turned to cheaper and more readily available street drugs after law enforcement crackdowns, public outcry and changes in how the medical community views prescribing opioids to treat pain.

The drug industry transaction data, collected by the Drug Enforcement Administration and released Tuesday by attorneys involved in the massive litigation against opioid industry players, reveals that the number of prescription hydrocodone and oxycodone pills peaked in 2011 at 12.8 billion pills, and dropped to fewer than 7.1 billion by 2019. Shipments of potent 80-milligram oxycodone pills dropped 92 percent in 2019 from their peak a decade earlier.Many of the counties with the highest fentanyl death rates — in hard-hit states such as West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio — started out with alarmingly high doses of prescription pills per capita, according to a Washington Post analysis of the DEA data and federal death records.Counties with the highest average doses of legal pain pills per person from 2006 to 2013 suffered the highest death rates in the nation over the subsequent six years.

Read the full article on the Washington Post website (may require subscription).

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