OVERLAND PARK, Kan. — The St. Louis Division of Drug Enforcement Administration, which includes the Kansas City area, seized a record-breaking number of fentanyl pills in fiscal year 2023.
Below is data of pill seizures for the last three fiscal years:
- 2021: 132,000
- 2022: 891,000
- 2023: 1,034,000
KSHB 41 visited the DEA office in Overland Park, Kansas, to learn how prisoners are processed and interviewed before heading to jail to await their day in court.
Investigators also process all drugs that are seized at the Overland Park facility to package as evidence before sending it off to the North Central Regional lab in Chicago, Illinois.
“What they do for us determines how much time they get reduced from their sentence,” said Chad Whiteman, assistant special agent in charge for Kansas. “We often share that information and spawn investigations down at the border; places like El Paso, Phoenix, San Diego and our offices in Mexico.”
The DEA started seeing fentanyl as a crisis in 2021. Because it is entirely synthetic, it is stronger, faster and cheaper for cartels to produce than other narcotics.
“There’s no growing cycle, and there’s no expense from the agricultural part of growing plants," Whiteman said. "The drug cartels operating out of Mexico simply have to gather up the right chemical ingredients."
Whiteman also says the fight against fentanyl is that much more critical because of how deadly it is. There is also a lack of public knowledge and awareness, and the newness in which how the drug is distributed adds to the challenge.
“More and more through social media, through things like Snapchat, Instagram, apps like WhatsApp and Signal. The distributors are using these to make it a product that's readily available,” Whiteman said. “In Kansas City area, we’re also seeing quite a few dealers distributing pills in the regular manner where you call on the phone, order a certain number of pills, meet in a parking lot and have a transaction.”
In the United States, fentanyl poisoning is the number one cause of death in people aged 18 to 45, according to the DEA.
John Schrock, the assistant special agent in charge for Western Missouri, says two biggest challenges with this crisis is the sheer volume of fentanyl and relationships with foreign countries.
Most of it comes into the U.S. across our southern border through vehicle transportation. Once here, distributors are targeting victims through social media and street deals.
“Shutting down the flow of precursor chemicals from China to Mexico to create fentanyl — that becomes one of our biggest priorities and our biggest hurdles we need to overcome,” Whiteman said.
But the DEA has changed its strategy in recent years.
Instead of just going for cartel leaders, they are now targeting distributors, manufacturers and the street dealers.
The DEA has partnered with local law enforcement and state highway patrols to do this.
“By having those relationships, not only does DEA benefit by augmenting the personnel, but that also makes it easier for DEA to be out in those communities if somebody has partnered with us — that intelligence exchange that goes on,” Shrock said.
Investigators use various tactics such as uncover work or intercepting electronic communication. If and when caught, agents say prosecution depends on several things:
- The amount of drugs you can attribute to an individual;
- The complexity of the crime;
- Prior criminal history;
- The result of the crime, such as overdose or death
“In our investigations, it’s not unusual for them to do an excess of 20 years for charges that we pursue them on,” Whiteman said.
In addition to catching the bad guys, one of the unique things the DEA has been pushing for with fentanyl is education campaigns.
They believe one of the most powerful weapons in this fight is public knowledge.
“This isn’t a crisis that we’re going to arrest our way or seize our way out of,” Whiteman said.
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