South Dakota recently made national news for its eye-catching awareness campaign to combat the dramatic rise of meth in the state. Two states over, law enforcement in Wisconsin is battling the growth of drug abuse as well.
Just last month, the Central Wisconsin Narcotics Task Force announced a groundbreaking investigation into a multi-state meth-trafficking ring. Last year, I joined federal, state, and local law enforcement partners to form the federally funded Transnational Organized Crime Task Force intended to address the impact of drug trafficking organizations. After only one year, it has become clear that the extraordinary rise of drug abuse is due in large part to drugs smuggled into the country.
Wisconsin and South Dakota are not unique. Last month, law enforcement in Oregon busted an international trafficking network that smuggled meth, heroin, and cocaine worth $15 million. In January, border agents made the country’s largest fentanyl bust in history when they seized 254 pounds of fentanyl and 395 pounds of meth. The fentanyl alone — a mere 254 pounds — could kill 100 million people.
The result of increased drug trafficking is that the country is in the middle of the most devastating drug overdose epidemic in our history. Prescription opioids are often cited as the driver of this crisis, but overdoses from prescription drugs have actually remained flat in recent years. Deaths from fentanyl, however, have skyrocketed by 520%, killing more Americans than the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined.
Calling it the “third wave” of the opioid crisis, the Centers for Disease Control has found that black-market fentanyl is now fueling the drug abuse crisis. The drug is often manufactured in China and smuggled across the border by Mexican cartels, but increasingly, the cartels are making the deadly drugs in their own labs and pumping record-setting amounts into the country. Border agents seized as much fentanyl in the first half of 2019 as they did in all of 2018 — a staggering amount that is enough to kill the entire U.S. population.
Similarly, the Drug Enforcement Agency has specifically noted the rise of meth in the upper Midwest, saying it is deadlier, easier to access, and cheaper than ever before. The distribution channels that send meth from Mexico to South Dakota also send the drug to Central Wisconsin. Given these Mexican-based trafficking routes, the entire region is at serious risk from the influx of fentanyl as well. Already, even before a potential spike, fentanyl was involved in all but one of the seven overdose deaths in Marathon County, Wisconsin, so far this year.
Mexican drug cartels are moving to dramatically expand their fentanyl trafficking empires to hook a new population of drug addicts. The cartels use fentanyl as their tool because it’s easy to produce, extremely potent, and offers a powerful euphoria that keeps users coming back. For this reason, the cartels fuse meth, cocaine, and other dangerous drugs with fentanyl and mass-produce fentanyl-filled counterfeit pills that look like common opiates, to hook unsuspecting pain patients and more casual drug users.
The goal of this vast criminal enterprise is clear — to flood the country with more potent, addictive, and easy-to-produce drugs to hook more users. To combat the drug abuse crisis, we must stop this criminal network from bringing deadly drugs into the country before the crisis gets even worse in the upper Midwest and other areas throughout the United States.
Scott Parks is the sheriff of Marathon County, Wisconsin, and a member of the Central Wisconsin Narcotics Task Force, a federally funded Transnational Organized Crime Task Force intended to address the impact of drug trafficking organizations in Central Wisconsin.
