How multiple presidential administrations failed to stop fentanyl’s rise in the U.S.

Amna Nawaz:

More than 100,000 Americans have died from drug overdoses last year. This year, the same awful toll is expected. Two-thirds of those deaths are tied to the drug fentanyl.

But the federal government has for years been slow to recognize the rise and real threat of this highly Putin drug.

Now, as William Brangham tells us, a new investigation looks at many policy decisions over the years and their consequences.

William Brangham:

Amna, just to put these numbers into context, nearly 200 people in this country are dying every single day from fentanyl.

The Washington Post did this new investigation about fentanyl, focusing in large part on how multiple administrations dating back over 20 years have made what The Post calls a series of strategic blunders and cascading mistakes.

Nick Miroff is one of the reporters who worked on this project. And he joins me now.

Nick, this is really such a tremendous piece of reporting you and your colleagues have done.

And, as I mentioned, you track multiple presidential administrations, Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden, and chronicle the ways in which each of those administrations either didn't catch the rise of fentanyl or didn't respond appropriately to the threat.

I know this is hard to generalize, but can you — do you have a sense as to why all of these different administration's didn't quite get this right?

Nick Miroff, The Washington Post:

Well, I think what we're seeing here, when you step back, is an accumulation of failures. And it really goes back to the first wave of opioid addiction that came out of American struggles with pharmaceutical pain pills.

And once the U.S. government started to crack down on the U.S. opioid manufacturers during the Bush administration, there was a tremendous vacuum in the market. There were millions of people who were addicted already, and essentially primed and in need of something to continue that addiction.

And that vacuum, so to speak, was filled first by illegal heroin that Mexican drug trafficking organizations were sending to United States, but quickly after by failure. And the United States government, really across multiple institutions and administrations, was slow to recognize that threat, slow to see that transition, and has been — and has been generally slow to respond.

And that is true of the DEA, the nation's premier anti-narcotics agency, which, in the face of the biggest challenge in its 50-year history, really, really faltered, but also the Department of Homeland Security and the White House drug czar's office and others. This is really a failure of American institutions to respond to a grave national security threat.

William Brangham:

A lot of your — you and your colleagues' reporting is focused in San Diego, California. Why is that so central to this story?

Nick Miroff:

Well, San Diego is really the epicenter for fentanyl trafficking into the United States.

And that's because the Mexican cartels on the opposite side of the border, the Sinaloa cartel in particular, are really responsible for sending the vast majority of hard narcotics across the border. And so more than half of all the fentanyl seizures reported along the entire U.S. Southern border are in the San Diego area.

That said, this — the drug does not remain in San Diego, obviously. It goes from there across the United States to many East Coast cities, to Appalachia, to New England, to many of the places that have been hardest hit by the opioid epidemic.

William Brangham:

There are so many startling facts in your report. But one really jumped out, and it's relevant to this point you're making, which is that, at one point, that there were nearly a quarter-million trucks and cars coming through and across the Mexico border into the U.S..

But, at one point, we were only scanning about 6 percent of trucks and 1 percent of cars. I mean, isn't that principally one of the main ways this is getting through? And have we gotten better at scanning those vehicles?

Nick Miroff:

This is the main way that fentanyl is entering the country, in vehicles and in commercial trucks coming through the official border crossings.

Traffickers are hiding their drug loads in those vehicles and attempting to smuggle them across. But the U.S. government — and this is one of the missteps that we describe in our investigation. The U.S. government has been very slow to rapidly scale up the kinds of scanning technology needed to detect more of this illegal fentanyl.

And so what we saw, for example, during the Trump administration is that the government spent $11 billion on a border wall with Mexico. And the border wall is virtual useless for stopping fentanyl, because the fentanyl, again, is coming through the ports of entry.

What we need — as one congressional aide described to me, we needed a — like a Manhattan Project for the kind of scanning technology it would take to detect this fentanyl. And that effort is starting to be under way now. And the Biden administration is accelerating those efforts, but it's years behind.

And so we still are not scanning the vast majority of the vehicles coming in. And the Mexican cartels are taking advantage of that.

William Brangham:

One other issue that your reporting touches on — and this goes back to the Obama administration — is the failure to see that fentanyl, in and of itself, wouldn't be just an additive to other drugs, but that, in and of itself, it would become this monster that it has become.

Why do you think that is?

Nick Miroff:

Well, one of the most extraordinary things we found in the course of reporting this is that fentanyl has virtually replaced heroin on U.S. streets as the go-to opioid.

And that's simply because the Mexican cartels recognized a tremendous opportunity. They could make as much illegal fentanyl as they needed to. And that's one of the reasons why the price has really plummeted. And so the kinds of — a fake Mexican fentanyl pill that sells on the streets of the United States goes for $4 or $5 now, just a fraction of what someone with an opioid addiction would have paid years ago, when — during the prescription pill crisis.

So, again, the price has just crashed. And I don't think any of the American law enforcement institutions that were facing this years ago ever anticipated that they would see fentanyl almost entirely replace heroin in the — on the streets of the United States.

William Brangham:

All right, Nick Miroff off of The Washington Post, and you and your team's tremendous work, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you, William. Any time.

Amna Nawaz:

And thank you, William.