New US Strategy Focuses on Fentanyl Supply Chain

As overdose deaths continue at a record pace, US Customs and Border Protection announced a new government-wide strategy Thursday involving scores of agencies that will target the precursor materials used by traffickers to make fentanyl and other synthetic drugs. Under the plan, CBP will work with the Postal Service and express consignment carriers, air carriers, and other logistic companies to share information about suspicious goods, potential transit routes, and other data that can help thwart the supply chain of fentanyl and other illicit synthetic drugs. Legal goods that could be targeted include molds and presses to make pills, as well as chemicals, the AP reports.

Legal goods used in the making of fentanyl have been arriving increasingly via air cargo from Asia to airports including in Los Angeles and then driven south into Mexico, where cartels produce the drug and send it back to the US to be sold illegally, officials said. The aim is to hit "each node of the supply chain, based on data-driven intelligence," the agency said. The strategy will start in the San Diego corridor and then expand to other cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon, officials said. It will leverage partnerships at all levels—state, local, tribal, territorial, law enforcement, governments, commercial industries, nongovernmental partners, and the international community—to combat networks tied to the deadliest overdose crisis in US history.

Troy Miller, acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, made the announcement on the US-Mexico border, standing with Coast Guard officials, San Diego County sheriff's deputies, and others at the nation's busiest pedestrian crossing. Nearly half of the agency's seizures of fentanyl happen in the San Diego sector, he said. The trade has evolved from 2016 when fentanyl was entering primarily via mail, concealed in envelopes, to now, with machinery, dyes, and other materials arriving on ships and planes. In June, CBP officers at Los Angeles International Airport unpacked a box from Asia labeled "keyboards" and found 175 pounds of chemicals that were found to be those used to make fentanyl, Miller said. The box had been destined for a warehouse on the US-Mexico border. "These criminals are sophisticated, innovative and relentless," Miller said. "But so are our efforts to stop them."

(More fentanyl stories.)