At least 90 percent of heroin consumed in the United States comes from Mexico despite “historically high levels” of law enforcement cooperation on either side of the border, according to the State Department.
“My estimate is that between 90 and 94 percent of all heroin consumed in the United States comes from Mexico,” William Brownfield, the assistant secretary of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, told reporters Thursday. “My estimate is that a very tiny percentage now, perhaps as little as 2 percent to 4 percent, comes from Colombia. And the remainder, which might be somewhere in the 4 to 6 percent category, comes from Asia, the majority of that coming from Afghanistan.”
That puts the U.S. in a unique position even compared to Canada, which gets most of its heroin from Afghan sources. That influx, which includes a dangerous new synthetic variant called fentanyl, has fueled an opioid epidemic that claimed more lives than gun homicides in the U.S. in 2015. Brownfield’s estimate dovetails with assessments from some local sheriffs who are pushing lawmakers to tighten border security as a means of preventing drug overdoses.
Brownfield allowed that “we’ve still got major challenges ahead to address the opioid crisis,” but he touted the anti-drug trafficking coordination between the U.S. and Mexico.
“The cooperation that now exists that is unprecedentedly good between Mexico and the United States on this issue,” he said. “We’re in a far better place to address those challenges now than we would have been 20, 30 or 40 years ago.”
Brownfield’s report on international drug trafficking comes one day after a Wisconsin sheriff linked “border insecurity” to hundreds of drug-related deaths in his county over the last decade.
“The greatest impact on the safety of our community as it relates to ‘border insecurity’ is the ease of bringing controlled substances into our community by way of the Mexican-American border,” Sheriff Eric Severson told the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee on Wednesday. “The lion’s share of the controlled substances consumed in SE Wisconsin is sourced from south of the border.”
Brownfield demurred when asked if President Trump’s promised border wall would impede drug traffickers.
“In a sense, we have developed a law enforcement cooperative wall at this point without actually having the physical construction of a wall,” he said. “The President of the United States has been very clear on his intentions in terms of this border, and I would say to you that we will integrate any realities, any new opportunities or tools that are made available to us that would help better control drug trafficking across the U.S.-Mexican border.”
