Weyoun wrote: ↑Thu Mar 30, 2023 12:43 pm
On another subject, I do find it hilarious that the crowd that thinks we can just shut the border down and fentanyl will magically disappear are the same folks that act like we could never possibly police the amount of guns we have in this country. Fentanyl strikes me as much easier to smuggle and much easier to illicitly make the guns are. I’m favor of trying to do what we can to contain both
Once again, the right wing Biden bashers are wrong and Weyoun is right. The vast majority of fentanyl comes into this country through legal points of entry, either border checkpoints or ports, not illegal mules or drug runner boats on deserted coastlines. Last month, a US citizen was stopped at a border checkpoint and they found almost a million dollars worth of fentanyl and meth in the gas tank of her pickup truck (54 pounds of fentanyl and 32 pounds of meth). Most of these smugglers are US citizens doing it for a payday, financed by the Mexican drug cartels. In the entire month of February, there were only two pounds of fentanyl seized during illegal crossings.
In FY 2022 (October 2021-September 2022) 84% of the fentanyl coming in from Mexico was seized at border checkpoints and only 16% at illegal crossings. Almost none of the drugs that come into the country do so with illegal immigrants. Seizures have been going up under Biden as well. Here's a study from the Cato Institute, which is a libertarian, predominantly right wing, free market think tank:
An NPR‐Ipsos poll last week (September 2022) found that 39 percent of Americans and 60 percent of Republicans believe, “Most of the fentanyl entering the U.S. is smuggled in by unauthorized migrants crossing the border illegally.” A more accurate summary is that fentanyl is overwhelmingly smuggled by U.S. citizens almost entirely for U.S. citizen consumers.
In 2021, U.S. citizens were 86.3 percent of convicted fentanyl drug traffickers—ten times greater than convictions of illegal immigrants for the same offense. Over 90 percent of fentanyl seizures occur at legal crossing points or interior vehicle checkpoints, not on illegal migration routes, so U.S. citizens (who are subject to less scrutiny) when crossing legally are the best smugglers. The location of smuggling makes sense because hard drugs at ports of entry are about 97 percent less likely to be stopped than are people crossing illegally between them. Just 0.02 percent of the people arrested by Border Patrol for crossing illegally possessed any fentanyl whatsoever.
https://www.cato.org/blog/fentanyl-smug ... um-seekers
The way to limit fentanyl imports into the country is by increased detection and enforcement procedures at the legal checkpoints, not by chasing after illegal immigrants in the desert. But Republicans aren't interested in limiting the import of fentanyl. They're interested in bashing Biden.