Trump Is Freaking Out About the Wrong Border: Killer Fentanyl Is Coming From Canada
""100% of heroin/fentanyl epidemic is because we don't have a WALL." — Ann Coulter on Tuesday, January 30th, 2018 in a tweet"
While Trump raged about building a wall on the southern border, a lab in Calgary was pumping out 18,000 counterfeit OxyContin per hour. Inside the new threat north of the border.
Christopher Moraff 04.09.18 5:06 AM ET
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As The Daily Beast reported in 2016 .. https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-knockoff-fentanyl-dodges-cops , in recent years Chinese labs have become a supplier of powerful fentanyl analogs designed to skirt U.S. law by modifying the chemical structure of the drugs. Last year China banned more than 100 of these analogs, and over the past two years the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has scheduled dozens of new novel opioids with close chemical structures to fentanyl. However they were unable to keep up with innovative clandestine chemists, and in February the DEA classified .. https://goo.gl/crnByU .. all chemicals with a structure similar to fentanyl under Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act.
Canada is hardly a new player when it comes to satisfying demand for contraband in the U.S.
Long-established smuggling routes exist across America’s notoriously porous northern border, which has 120 points of entry, and stretches more than 5,500 miles—encompassing large areas of remote wilderness and numerous waterways.
“The Northern Border doesn’t always make headlines, but for too long it has been understaffed and there have not been sufficient resources to effectively combat drug trafficking and other crimes that can come across the border,” said Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), who has sponsored legislation to strengthen security at the U.S.-Canada border.
During Prohibition, it’s estimated that 60-90 percent of booze entering the United States came from distilleries and breweries north of the U.S. border.
The border between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit was a nexus of post-war drug trafficking; and until the early 1980s, heroin traffickers associated with fragments of the French Connection were still funneling large quantities of heroin from French-speaking Quebec to distribution networks in New York.
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In recent years, Canada emerged as a global epicenter of synthetic and counterfeit drug manufacturing and processing—with everything from MDMA to fake Viagra flowing from clandestine labs north of the U.S. border. A 2005 State Department cable identified Canada as a “significant producer and transit country for precursor chemicals used to produce synthetic drugs,” and a “hot spot” of rising clandestine lab activity.
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A dozen U.S. states share a border with Canada, including some of those hit hardest by the overdose crisis, such as New Hampshire and Vermont.
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A story published in the Canadian news magazine MacLeans in 2009 refers to Canada as “The New Global Drug Lord .. https://goo.gl/rvXHNd ,” citing data showing that more than 60 percent of the methamphetamine seized in Japan and more than 80 percent in Australia is synthesized in Canada.
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The RCMP blames much of the trafficking on “criminal groups with connections to Asian source countries,” where the precursors for most synthetic drugs are sourced. The Criminal Intelligence Service of Canada says Asian gangs are especially strong in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, and Toronto—all cities where fentanyl is endemic. According to published reports .. https://goo.gl/9oD2G1 , the powerful “14K” and “Sun Yee On” triads are suppliers of precursor chemicals to Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel.
Much of the focus is on transnational shipments of the drugs and their precursor ingredients from China. And Asian organized crime groups in Canada have been implicated in a number of cross-border drug trafficking schemes over the years. A 2011 report from the Department of Justice said Vietnamese and Chinese gangs produce “tens of millions of [MDMA] tablets for the U.S. market,” smuggling the drugs through border crossings in Washington, Michigan, New York, and Vermont.
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With fentanyl on its way to replacing heroin in most major drug markets, it’s not a matter of if, but how traffickers will get the synthetic opioid on U.S. soil. President Trump seems intent on closing one window for traffickers, but it will have limited effect as long as another, even bigger window, remains ajar.
Unless the United States wants to become even more walled in (as Israel), more attention, and even more money, must be spent on examining, and dealing with, the question, Why is the demand in the U.S.A, for illegal opioids as high as it is?
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