Attorney General Ashley Moody is again bashing President Joe Biden in the wake of reports showing skyrocketing rates of deadly fentanyl and illegal immigrants entering the country.
Florida leads the nation in fentanyl seizures, according to a new report funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which found the number of seizures by law enforcement more than quadrupled nationally between 2017 and 2023.
The surge in recent years coincides with an explosion of unlawful border crossers, referred to as "gotaways," whom U.S. authorities neither apprehended nor turned back since Biden took office.
Newly revealed Customs and Border Protection data show there were 136,808 gotaways in 2020 during Donald Trump's last year as President. That year, about 4 million fake pills containing fentanyl were seized at the border.
The numbers last year: 670,674 gotaways — more than the previous 10 years combined — and over 115 million pills of which about 70% contained lethal levels of fentanyl.
"This damning report shows the deadly impact of Biden's wide-open border — record-smashing amounts of fentanyl flooding in and an extremely high death toll accompanying the massive influx of this Mexican poison," Moody said in a statement.
"In Florida, we are fighting back the death and destruction emanating from Biden's border crisis — leading the nation in fentanyl seizures and taking Biden to court in an effort to force him to do his job: close the border and protect the American people."
Fewer than 50,000 pills with fentanyl were seized in 2017. Within three years, that number grew eightyfold to 4 million. Then it more than doubled to 11.4 million 2021, quadrupled to 44.4 million in 2022 and more than doubled again to 115.5 million in 2023.
Pills are increasingly becoming the go-to choice among smugglers for the deadly narcotic, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said were largely responsible for more than 81,000 deaths last year — 3,000 fewer than in 2022.
One major reason for the shift to pills is that they can be disguised as other, legal pills.
"The main finding is how strikingly fast fentanyl is entering into the country disguised as imitator pills," NIDA Director Nora Volkow told The Hill last week. "I must also state that the total number of deals is just gigantic, which is very concerning."
China is directly subsidizing fentanyl's production and exportation to the U.S., according to a report last month from the U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.
Florida topped the nation with 2,089 total fentanyl seizures between 2017 and 2023, followed by Arizona with 1,783.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's One Pill Can Kill webpage says U.S. fentanyl seizures in 2023 surpassed 381 million lethal doses — more than one dose for every person in the country. Roughly half were in pill form, and of every 10 pills the agency seized, seven contained a lethal dose of fentanyl.
Moody's Office operates a website, Dose of Reality, that provides Floridians with information and resources to help combat opioid abuse. The site features a "Fast Facts on Fentanyl" toolkit to teach parents and children about the drug in both English and Spanish.
Her office also launched the Helping Heroes program to provide free naloxone — a federally approved medication that rapidly reverses opioid overdoses — to emergency response agencies.
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