The Fentanyl Crisis at The Border
By Brock Muncey
Felipe Calderon—the former president of Mexico—once said “we are living in the same building. And our neighbour is the largest consumer of drugs in the world. And everybody wants to sell him drugs through our doors and our windows.”
For years, right-wing media and politicians have pushed the idea that the lack of security on the US-Mexico border is to blame. Data from the US Sentencing Commission in 2023 showed that 86.4% of those sentenced for fentanyl trafficking were US citizens.
According to the American Immigration Council, a non-partisan, non-profit organization, using data from the FBI, “immigrants—including undocumented immigrants—are less likely to commit crimes than the U.S.-born. This is true at the national, state, county, and neighborhood levels, and for both violent and non-violent crime” (americanimmigrationcouncil.org). The National Institute of Justice put out a research article that came to the same conclusion.
Drug traffic through the border has been a specific concern of many politicians, with president Trump campaigning on the promise of building a larger wall on the US-Mexico border. Fentanyl is an extremely potent synthetic opioid that can result in fatal overdose in very small quantities. It is the drug that has resulted in the largest amount of fatal overdoses in the U.S. every year for the past few years.
“In 2024, DEA seized more than 60 million fentanyl-laced fake pills and nearly 8,000 pounds of fentanyl powder” (dea.gov), and according to the Department of Homeland Security, “more than 90% of fentanyl interdicted is stopped at Ports of Entry (POEs) where cartels attempted to smuggle it through” (dhs.gov). This means that there is a large supply of fentanyl through the US-Mexico border, but it’s important to consider why there is such a large demand.
According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, “In primary care settings, one in four people who receive prescription opioids chronically for noncancer pain struggles with opioid dependence” (aafp.org). This is an extremely high proportion considering the amount of people who are prescribed opioids. The CDC estimates that, “Approximately 125 million opioid prescriptions were dispensed to American patients in 2023” (cdc.gov). Patients who develop opioid dependence are much more likely to try to obtain an illegal synthetic opioid like fentanyl when they lose access to prescription opioids.
It may be much more important to restructure our own medical system to avoid giving so many patients lingering opioid dependence, rather than to try to stop a seemingly never-ending supply of synthetic opioids through the southern border. In fact, if we do decrease the supply of illegal drugs without decreasing the demand for them, illegal opioids may become more expensive and give drug cartels more power.
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/debunking-myth-immigrants-and-crime/
https://www.aafp.org/about/policies/all/chronic-pain-management-opiod-misuse.html
https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/about/prescription-opioids.html
