us-regions Attorney General Ashley Moody is sounding the alarm on the fentanyl surge at the U.S. southwest immigration, demanding joe-biden” target=”_blank”>President Biden<
Moody wrote that there “has been an unprecedented increase in the amount of opioid-crisis” target=”_blank”>fentanyl< officials know “from hard experience” that what is seized is “inevitably just the tip of the iceberg.”
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“This tidal wave of lethal crime can only have devastating effects on our citizens,” Moody wrote, citing news reports that fentanyl overdoses have become the “number one cause of death for adults ages 18 to 45, surpassing deaths by infectious-disease, cancer and car accidents.”
“It is a direct consequence of the mayhem that now exists on our southwest border, with hundreds of thousands of immigrants crossing out border—and U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 1.85 million migrant encounters from January to November 2021, according to the agency’s own website,” she wrote, saying it represents “the highest number of illegal crossings recorded since at least 1960.”
FENTANYL OVERDOSES BECOME NO.1 CAUSE OF DEATH AMONG US ADULTS, AGE 18-45: ‘A NATIONAL EMERGENCY’
Moody warned that the “atmosphere of chaos” on the border gives “free rein to some of the worst actors in the criminal world,” including Mexican drug cartels, to “smuggle drugs in enormous quantities.”
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody visits the Lakeland Police Department in Lakeland, Florida, Sept. 7, 2021.
(ERNST PETERS/ THE LEDGER/Reuters)
“And we know that with drug smuggling, there is also the smuggling of people. Including thousands of children, and the ugly specter of human trafficking,” Moody wrote.
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Fentanyl, an opioid for pain treatment, is between 50 and 100 times more potent than morphine. Between 2020 and 2021, nearly 79,000 people between 18 and 45 years old — 37,208 in 2020 and 41,587 in 2021 — died of fentanyl overdoses, data analysis from opioid awareness organization Families Against Fentanyl shows.
TEXAS SEIZED ENOUGH FENTANYL TO KILL 200 MILLION PEOPLE THIS YEAR ALONE, OFFICIALS SAY
According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), there were 10,586 pounds of fentanyl seized at the southwest border in Fiscal Year 2021, significantly higher than the 4,558 pounds seized in FY 2020 and 2,633 seized in FY 2019.
The letter by Moody comes after 16 Republican attorneys general, including Moody, wrote to the foreign-policy urging it to put pressure on world-regions and world-regions over “China’s complete unwillingness to police the production and distribution of fentanyl precursors and Mexico’s subsequent failure to control illegal manufacturing of fentanyl using those precursors.”
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They cited government data that shows that fentanyl smuggling directly from China has shrunk from 128 kilograms in 2017 to half a kilogram in 2020, but the amount smuggled over the U.S. Southern border has increased dramatically.
The attorneys general warned that they are seeing an “extraordinary tide of senseless death from fentanyl,” with fentanyl accounting for three out of four of every drug death in us-regions. In Florida, meanwhile, fentanyl was the leading cause of drug deaths in 2020 and deaths had risen 63%.
