The Drug Enforcement Administration stated that it had seized more than 379 million doses of fentanyl this year, which is more more than double the amount of pills laced with the powerful synthetic opioid that it had seized in the previous year. The agency also stated that it had seized more than 379 million doses of fentanyl this year.
In 2022, the agency stated in a statement that it had seized more than 50.6 million counterfeit prescription tablets that included fentanyl, in addition to more than 10,000 pounds of fentanyl powder. The counterfeit pills were designed to seem like typical prescription drugs like Xanax and OxyContin, but they were really produced with filler and fentanyl instead of the real drugs.
That was more than twice as many fentanyl-laced pills than the government reported seizing in 2021, when it reported seizing 20.4 million counterfeit prescription tablets. According to the data provided by the Food and Drug Administration of the United States, there were more than 107,000 drug-related deaths in the United States in 2017. The organisation could not provide any clarification on the amount of fentanyl powder that had been seized in 2021.
Fentanyl was seized “from communities throughout the nation,” according to Anne Milgram, the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), who said that “the men and women of the DEA have persistently worked” to achieve this goal.
According to the organisation, the most dangerous drug threat that the nation faces right now is fentanyl. It is a synthetic opioid that is very addictive and has a potency level that is 50 times higher than heroin.
A potentially lethal dosage of fentanyl is two milligrammes, which is about equivalent to the amount that can be held on the point of a pencil. Fentanyl, which has a potency that is one hundred times higher than that of morphine, was associated with the deaths of more over 70,000 people in the United States in 2021.
According to the agency, the majority of the fentanyl that is trafficked in the United States by the cartels is “mass-produced” in clandestine facilities in Mexico. These factories often use chemicals that are imported from China, as stated by the agency.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) issued a public safety advisory regarding the widespread trafficking of potentially dangerous phoney prescription medications laced with fentanyl and methamphetamine a year ago.
The pills laced with it are manufactured to seem similar to genuine prescription pharmaceuticals such as OxyContin, Percocet, and Xanax. According to the agency, however, the tablets merely contain filler and fentanyl, and they are frequently fatal. Users may purchase the counterfeit tablets over the internet.
The government issued a warning that “no medicinal medication that is purchased on social media is safe.”
The Drug Enforcement Administration issued a warning about how dangerous counterfeit prescription tablets that contain fentanyl are one month ago. The government agency said that its laboratory tests had shown that six out of ten of those tablets had a potentially deadly amount of fentanyl. This is an increase over the previous year’s finding of four out of ten containing such a dose.
In its release on Tuesday, the agency said that it had also confiscated approximately 131,000 pounds of methamphetamine, more than 4,300 pounds of heroin, and over 444,000 pounds of cocaine throughout the course of this year.
