Law enforcement in California has seized 110 packages holding some 720,000 fentanyl pills weighing a total of more than 158 pounds. The narcotics were seized from a vehicle stopped in Alpine, San Diego County, after “an investigation determined that the individual was driving a vehicle containing a large quantity of fentanyl.”
The pills were branded as M-30s, sometimes known as “blues” — a type of pill containing 30 mg of oxycodone hydrochloride. It has become common for narcotics, including marijuana, to be laced with fentanyl by drug dealers, partly to increase its addictive power and partly because fentanyl is relatively cheap to manufacture. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) special agent Towanda Thorne-James recently warned fentanyl is now in “everything we seize.”
The increase in Americans taking fentanyl, sometimes without their knowledge, has greatly increased overdose deaths. San Diego County suffered 815 fentanyl deaths in 2022, up a remarkable 785 percent on the figure for 2018. (Full statistics on overdose deaths for 2023 are currently unavailable.)
Donald Trump has warned the ongoing border crisis is exacerbating the fentanyl crisis, due to illegal aliens trafficking narcotics themselves or taking time and resources away from border officials that might otherwise be used to tackle drug trafficking.
