Global Courant
NEW ORLEANS – Tracking the Mexican cartels’ drug network in the United States is a top priority for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), as the agency reports that most U.S. drugs containing fentanyl originate from the southern border.
“The new-generation Jalisco cartel and the Sinaloa cartel, these two cartels are driving the drug overdose epidemic,” said Chief Agent Brad Byerley of the New Orleans Field Division, which oversees drug investigations in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama. .
Although New Orleans is nearly 700 miles from the Mexican border, Byerley said the greater New Orleans area is a gateway for drugs distributed to other states, as Interstates 10, 55, 30, 40 and 65 are considered major routes for drug trafficking.
“The cartels use these highways to get their product to local distributors in the New Orleans metro area and other areas in the southern and mainland US,” Byerley said.
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Interstates hundreds of miles from the border are used to traffic drugs across the US, the DEA reported. (Fox news)
In a recent a year-long investigation called Operation Last Mile, the New Orleans Field Division seized more than 147,000 fentanyl pills and 63 pounds of fentanyl powder.
“That’s enough to knock out the New Orleans metro area,” Byerley said. “We went for what we call ‘the last mile’, from the cartel to the local distributor.”
Operation Last Mile was a year-long investigation by the New Orleans Field Division from May 2022 to May 2023 that resulted in the seizure of more than 147,000 fentanyl pills and 63 pounds of fentanyl powder. (Fox news)
Across the country, the DEA arrested 3,337 drug distributors and dealers operating in local communities and seized nearly 44 million fentanyl pills and more than 6,500 pounds of fentanyl powder.
Despite the successful arrests and arrests, millions of drugs containing lethal doses of fentanyl are still reaching several US cities.
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The coroner in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, is seeing firsthand what happens when these drugs make it to the “last mile.”
“If you want to walk back to the morgue, I can show you the results,” Dr. Charles Preston said. “In my opinion, that pipeline will continue to enter the United States until there is some security of the southern border.”
As of May 12, fentanyl was included in 32 of the 48 drug overdoses in St. Tammany Parish for this calendar year. By 2022, 91 out of 127 overdoses will contain fentanyl – that’s almost 72%.
“What’s really concerning now is that over the past month we’ve been able to identify some ‘fentanyl cousins’, if you will, that are generally more potent and deadly,” Preston said.
A Families Against Fentanyl billboard in El Monte, California, attempts to draw attention to America’s raging fentanyl crisis. (Paul Bersebach/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register)
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He explained that variants of fentanyl have the same basic chemical structure, but one or two molecules could be different, creating an entirely new drug. Some of these variations go unnoticed because they don’t show up on a routine lab test.
“Keeping up with these evolving drugs is very difficult,” Preston said. “We look at the trends and how our office approaches it is like a medical catastrophe.”
Another class of drugs that may go undetected through standard testing are nitasenes, also known as “ISO,” a new group of potent, illegal synthetic opioids that have never been approved for medical use.
“The future will only get scarier and scarier as amateur chemists are driven by profit motives to produce more potent, cheaper drugs,” Preston said.
The DEA seized nearly 44 million fentanyl pills and more than 6,500 pounds of fentanyl powder between May 2022 and May 2023. (JOHANNES EISELE/AFP via Getty Images)
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The St. Tammany Parish Coroner’s Office is a member of the Regional Organized Crime Information Center, allowing Preston to alert local police to the drugs he encounters.
“If we see a certain type of fentanyl in Galveston and now we see this fentanyl in Little Rock, in Slidell; where do you think we’re going to see it next? In Gulfport,” Preston said. “This can help law enforcement agencies track shipments and conduct interventions.”
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While the highways are a transportation route for the Mexican cartels, social media — which the DEA has dubbed the “superhighway” — also facilitates the movement of drugs.
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Operation Last Mile allowed the DEA New Orleans Field Division to track drug deals across 45 different social media platforms.
“Anyone with access to social media can fall victim to the Mexican cartel,” Byerley said. “It totally changed the game in terms of how these drug traffickers do business. Fentanyl is deadly, but the cartels don’t care because they know there are another 302 million people on social media.”
Rebekah Castor joined Fox News in 2021 as a multimedia reporter based in New Orleans.
