On Tuesday, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) announced that in 2022 it seized enough fentanyl to kill the entire American population.
The DEA seized more than 379 million doses of fentanyl so far in 2022. The agency said it confiscated over 10,000 pounds of fentanyl and 50.6 million fentanyl tablets, the Washington Post reported. The number is more than twice what was seized in 2021, when a record 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses. Two-thirds of those deaths were due to fentanyl.
As noted in the report, “The DEA seizure numbers released Tuesday represent only a partial count of the volume of illegal fentanyl detected by law enforcement agencies this year. The statistics do not include seizures tallied by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) along the southern border, where authorities detected more than 14,000 pounds of illegal fentanyl — a record amount — during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.”
According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the amount of fentanyl seized at the U.S. southern border in 2022 was three times more than the amount seized in 2020 – before President Biden entered office – as a result of the border crisis.
Anne Milgram, the DEA administrator, said in a statement, “DEA’s top operational priority is to defeat the two Mexican drug cartels — the Sinaloa and Jalisco (CJNG) Cartels — that are primarily responsible for the fentanyl that is killing Americans today.”