US Drug Squads Seize Enough Illegal Fentanyl in 2022 'to Kill Everyone in United States'

Illegal fentanyl was singled out as a leading cause of death of Americans between the ages of 18 and 49 by an earlier US report, with fatal overdoses of the drug surging 94 percent since 2019 and claiming more lives than car accidents or gun violence.

Illicit fentanyl smuggled into the US is claiming increasingly more American lives, freshly-revealed data shows.

The amount of the synthetic opioid seized by American drug squads this year alone would be enough “to kill everyone in the United States,” the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) stated on December 20 in a news release.

Over 379 million potentially fatal illegal doses of the prescription painkiller have been confiscated so far in 2022. The haul of over 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder and 50.6 million fentanyl tablets is twice the amount apprehended the year before.

DEA agents

© AP Photo / Louis Lanzano

The agency added that Mexican drug-trafficking organizations were responsible for smuggling the synthetic opioid mass-produced at their clandestine labs into the US.

“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,” Anne Milgram, the DEA administrator, said in a statement.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), man-made opioids like fentanyl are the cause of the majority of overdose deaths in the United States, with a mere speck of two milligrams of the drug enough to claim a life. In 2021, more than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, with two-thirds of those deaths attributed to fentanyl, according to US figures.

Previously, a US report revealed that illegal fentanyl has become the leading cause of death of Americans between the ages of 18 and 49. Since 2019, fatal overdoses from fentanyl have surged 94 percent, outstripping deaths from car accidents, gun violence, and suicides.

Fentanyl, a painkiller first manufactured in the late 1950s, is relatively cheap to make, and can be 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine and heroin. Furthermore, drug dealers often lace counterfeit pills, passed off as authentic prescription medications, with the synthetic opioid.

Such fentanyl pills are often “made to look identical to real prescription medications — including OxyContin, Percocet, and Xanax — but only contain filler and fentanyl,” the DEA warned, alerting people to the fact that "no pharmaceutical pill bought on social media is safe.”

Republicans, who have repeatedly denounced the Joe Biden administration's "open border" policies as responsible for the migrant crisis at the US-Mexico border, have also pointed out that the increased inflow of fentanyl and fatal overdoses have also occurred on the Democratic POTUS' watch.