‘If people are busy dealing with the migrant issue, they’re not busy dealing with the drug issue,’ said Glenn Farley of Arizona’s Common Sense Institute.
In early August, Phoenix police pulled over a suspicious vehicle driving through the city. Officers with a special enforcement team obtained a search warrant and seized 39,000 deadly fentanyl pills from the vehicle — likely enough of the potent drug to kill thousands of people.
The department promoted the bust as an example of good police work. It seemed like a significant haul of the synthetic opioid that the Drug Enforcement Administration has identified as the nation’s “deadliest drug threat.” But the month was just getting started.
That weekend, authorities to the north in Yavapai County seized 55,000 fentanyl pills in two traffic stops less than an hour apart. A few days later, Phoenix police announced the results of a year-long investigation of a drug trafficking operation that netted more than 500,000 fentanyl pills and 14 indictments. About a week later, the Arizona Department of Public Safety led a drug trafficking investigation in Phoenix that led to the seizure of approximately 150,000 fentanyl pills worth more than a half-million dollars.
In late August, Border Patrol agents working along the Arizona border conducted a traffic stop and found 187 pounds of fentanyl worth an estimated $4.3 million stuffed in black duffel bags. It was enough to kill 42 million people, according to news reports.
Cheap and increasingly abundant, fentanyl has been a growing scourge in the U.S. for several years now. Last year, more than 71,000 Americans were killed in synthetic opioid-related overdoses, the majority of which involved fentanyl. Sourced primarily in China, the drug typically makes its way into the U.S. from Mexico — and Arizona is a key distribution route.
A new report by the Common Sense Institute in Arizona attempts to quantify just how costly the crisis has become in the Grand Canyon State
According to the report. which is authored by Glenn Farley, the institute’s senior economist, as well as its director of policy and research, the economic costs of the opioid crisis in Arizona increased to $53 billion in 2021, four times more than a decade ago.
The surge in fentanyl has been fueled by what Farley has described as a “perfect storm” of unintended consequences set in motion by policy decisions: The crackdown on prescription opioids sent addicts searching for a fix on the streets; street drug decriminalization efforts in some states and tolerance generally made drug use less costly for users; and supposedly more “humane” Biden administration border policies led to an unprecedented surge of migrants coming up through Mexico, and shifted border agents’ attention away from stopping the flow of drugs into the country.
“Those three things really combined and interacted in ways that nobody thought about,” Farley told National Review. Lawmakers, he said, need to understand that “policy has consequences, and those consequences are often unintended.”
Farley’s study looked at the costs of the opioid epidemic from 2010 through 2021, with an estimate for 2022. It used the same methodology as a 2017 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study that found the opioid epidemic cost Arizona $21.8 billion that year.
The $53 billion price tag for 2021 includes real-dollar costs for things like law enforcement, health care, and substance abuse treatment. But those costs are dwarfed by the estimated and harder to pin down social costs involving the decreased productivity of drug addicts and the value of lives lost to overdoses. The tally also includes new costs that state and local agencies are incurring for border security. Earlier this year, Arizona governor Doug Ducey signed a $564 million border security bill.
Farley said that half-billion dollars may constitute just a sliver of the larger $53 billion price tag, “but the growth from zero ten years ago to $500 million today is astronomical.”
Synthetic opioid abuse dates back to the 1970s, as the availability of prescription alternatives to morphine for pain management began to rise, according to the CSI report. In 1999, there were 116 million active opioid prescriptions in the U.S. Seven years later, in 2006, there were 215 million. In 2012, opioid prescriptions peaked at 255 million.
Concerns about abuse and pill mills led to state and federal crackdowns, including in Arizona, which passed the Arizona Opioid Epidemic Act in 2018. The crackdowns worked. But while opioids became harder to get legally, the demand for the drugs didn’t disappear.
In the meantime, some states, including California, Colorado, and Oregon out west, started experimenting with drug decriminalization. City residents in Denver, Portland, and San Francisco increasingly started to complain about open-air drug markets.
“At the same time that we became less tolerant of the use of prescription drugs, we became more tolerant of the use of street drugs,” Farley said. “Unsurprisingly, people reduced their use of prescription drugs and increased their use of street drugs.”
The legalization of marijuana in some states for medical or recreational uses started cutting into the profits of drug cartels, which shifted gears to focus on fentanyl, which is both profitable and easy to make.
Hard drug seizures by federal border agents skyrocketed between 2014 and 2020, according to the CSI report. But seizures by federal agents have since plummeted, even as the number of migrants flooding across the southern border reaches record hights. The CSI report says drug enforcement by federal border agents “collapsed” as agents were forced to focus on processing and handling migrants.
“Demand went up. Supply went up. Border Patrol starts seizing more drugs,” Farley said of the half decade before 2020. “What happens after 2020? Migrant encounters skyrocket, and those seizures start to collapse. Not because the drugs stopped coming – if anything there’s more coming across today than there was in 2020.”
“If people are busy dealing with the migrant issue, they’re not busy dealing with the drug issue,” Farley said of federal border agents.
Increasingly, he said, state and local police agencies – already struggling to hire and maintain their forces – have been forced to pick up the slack, despite having a fraction of the federal resources. That means they have less time to spend on their other responsibilities.
Farley said it is hard to draw a direct connection between the rise in fentanyl, the shift in policing, and general crime patterns, but “what you can for sure see is that there are fewer police per capita today in Arizona then there were a decade ago. And if those police are doing more, it stands to reason that could have consequences for crime rates on the other side.”
Last week, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre pushed back on allegations that Biden isn’t doing enough to crack down on drug traffickers, calling it “categorically wrong.”
“This is something that is incredibly important to this president,” she said before trying to pin blame on Biden’s political opponents. “If Republicans want to help us stop overdose, and stop our kids getting overdosed because of these dangerous drugs, because of these fentanyl that we’re seeing in the streets, we’re happy to work with them. But they’re not.”
Maricopa County attorney Rachel Mitchell has been on the front lines of the fight against fentanyl in the Phoenix area. She said she wasn’t surprised by the findings of the CSI report, but still called it “horrifying.” Large fentanyl busts are becoming increasingly common in Arizona, she said. “But behind that are how many that we didn’t find?” she questioned. “How many are making it across to not only the citizens of Arizona but also to parts beyond Arizona?”
In addition to sending drugs into the U.S. with migrants, cartels are targeting young Arizona residents, and paying them to smuggle fentanyl into the state, Mitchell said. Earlier this year, Phoenix police arrested a 30-year-old suspected drug dealer who referred to himself as “Fetty Jeff,” using the slang term for fentanyl, according to news reports.
Cafes and convenience stores are dealing with people using fentanyl in their restrooms, and addicts are stealing from retailers and swiping catalytic converters to fuel their habits, said Mitchell. In some cases, other street drugs are cut with cheap fentanyl.
“We’re sending out the message, don’t take pills from anybody, really, because you don’t know,” said Mitchell, and oftentimes, she noted, neither does the person providing the drug.
“This is not a victimless crime,” Mitchell said. “It is impacting every segment of society.”
Farley said a key message from his report is that lawmakers need to understand that well-meaning policies often have devastating unintended consequences. Federal border agents need to be able to refocus their efforts on targeting dangerous drugs entering the country, said Farley, and local authorities should get back to prosecuting criminal drug use.
“These laws are already on the books in most states,” he said. “Anything you can do to raise the cost of drug use in the United States is going to bend this curve, whether that’s stop the flow, whether that’s prosecute the open drug use. Those kinds of things all help.”