Category: National News

At a rural property an hour outside Vancouver in October, Canadian police found 2.5 million doses of fentanyl and 528 gallons of chemicals in a shipping container and a storage unit. Six months earlier, they raided a home in a cookie-cutter Vancouver subdivision packed with barrels of fentanyl-making chemicals, glassware and lab equipment.

Thousands of miles away outside Toronto, police in August found what is believed to be the largest fentanyl lab so far in Canada — hidden at a property 30 miles from the U.S. border crossing at Niagara Falls, N.Y.

U.S. authorities say they have little indication that Canadian-made fentanyl is being smuggled south in significant quantities. But at a time when record numbers of people are dying from overdoses in the United States, the spread of clandestine fentanyl labs in Canada has the potential to undermine U.S. enforcement efforts and worsen the opioid epidemic in both nations.

Investigators in Canada say the labs are producing fentanyl for domestic users and for export to Australia, New Zealand and, they assume, the United States.

“It’d be hard to believe it’s not occurring,” said Philip Heard, commander of the organized crime unit for police in Vancouver, a city hard-hit by fentanyl overdose deaths. “Most police leaders I’ve spoken to believe our production outstrips what our domestic demand is.”

The Canadian labs are a curveball for U.S. authorities whose efforts to combat fentanyl are focused on the southern border with Mexico. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has installed about $800 million worth of powerful scanning and detection equipment at land border crossings since 2019. Nearly all that technology has been deployed along the U.S. southern border, where CBP confiscated nearly 27,000 pounds of fentanyl during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the most ever.

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).

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.