Over the summer of 2023, just before starting his senior year of high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, 17-year-old Laird Ramirez suddenly passed away due to an accidental fentanyl overdose. He had taken a pill that he thought was Percocet, for pain relief, but was a counterfeit drug laced with fentanyl.
Ramirez is not alone. Fentanyl was the cause of 84% of all teenage overdose-related deaths in 2021 and fentanyl-related adolescent overdose deaths nearly tripled in just two years, from 2019 to 2021. However, what is further unfortunate is that an American trade law has only been fueling this crisis to new, brutal heights.
It is no secret that the importation of fentanyl into the United States has increased by an extreme amount. The National Immigration Forum found that in Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 alone, “U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Border Patrol and Office of Field Operations (OFO) together seized nearly 549,000 pounds of illicit drug substances” including 27,000 pounds of fentanyl. This marks a sharp increase from 14,700 pounds in FY 2022 and is equivalent to approximately 1.1 billion fatal doses of fentanyl.
Despite political candidates at all levels of government putting the fentanyl crisis at the forefront of their agendas, federal policies actively counteract their purported beliefs. After all, what continues to fuel this dangerous cycle that takes thousands of American lives every single year is an American trade law from 2016 that was lobbied through Congress by major parcel carriers and e-commerce platforms. Essentially, the legislation known as the de minimis rule loosened regulations for imports and made it easier for international goods, including the base ingredients used to make fentanyl, to enter the United States.
Over the last decade, Mexican cartels have become a key part of the circulation of illicit substances. When the distribution started increasing at extremely high levels in the mid-2010s, China was at the helm of the fentanyl production industry, distributing the finished products to syndicates around the world. However, as a result of pressure from the United States government in 2019, China controlled these illegal exports and maintained them at very low levels. In turn, Mexican criminal organizations became the major producers while China supplied them with the base ingredients, known as precursors, used to make fentanyl. Nevertheless, these precursors still had to be inconspicuously smuggled from the US to Mexico, which was made far easier through the de minimis law.
The liberalized regulation allows for individual parcels of all merchandise valued at up to $800 to enter the US with minimal paperwork and inspections, to promote global e-commerce sales. American de minimis laws, which come from the Latin phrase meaning ‘too small to bother about’, started in 1938 when the ceiling for duty-free entry was at $1. This amount escalated over the years as the US became a larger and more influential trading hub, reaching $200 in 1994. As e-commerce became increasingly popular in the 2000s, major package delivery firms such as UPS, DHL, and FedEx ramped up their lobbying efforts in Washington and finally pushed through the latest regulations in 2016, raising the de minimis ceiling to $800.
Specifically, this law has helped online retailing platforms such as Temu and Shein, both based in China. This made the international trading apparatus an honor system, one that is becoming increasingly simple for bad actors to exploit.
Although those who distribute products to the US are supposed to truthfully disclose what is in the shipping containers, the documents are easy to falsify and the chemical precursors to fentanyl can easily be disguised with ordinary household products due to the vast number of shipments received in a world where digital purchases reign. US Customs and Border Patrol estimates that nearly 4 million de minimis parcels arrive in America every single day, and only a small fraction are searched. As Patrick McElwain, a senior official with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), said in an interview with Reuters, “It just makes it a monumental task to find that needle in a haystack.”
The base chemicals are then trafficked across the Southern border by informal delivery organizations, often made up of American citizens who take parcel handling as a side hustle. In fact, in 2021, US citizens made up 86% of convicted fentanyl drug traffickers. After members of Mexico’s largest criminal gangs, such as the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco New Generation cartel with a total of 45,000 members, receive the precursors, they produce the final product of fentanyl and use the same unwitting American courier to smuggle the lethal drugs back into the US.
In recent months, the Biden administration has made an effort to remove de minimis eligibility for various Chinese exporting companies because of their abuse of the tariff-free exemption. Specifically, the White House reported that approximately 40% of imports into the US would no longer fall under the regulation and would be subject to more thorough searches. However, executive action is limited compared to congressional legislation; it is up to the federal lawmakers to support fundamental changes in America’s broken system.
Over 150,000 Americans died as a result of fentanyl overdose in 2022 and 2023 alone. While synthetic opioid-induced death rates have declined in recent years, the toll has already bypassed the number of American soldiers killed in the Second World War. At the end of the day, it is the very trade law made for consumption-minded, e-commerce customers in the US that is proliferating the smuggling of illicit substances that take thousands of lives every single year.
As Eddy Wang, a special agent at the HSI’s Los Angeles division, put it, “It’s unfortunate and ironic how they’re using the U.S. trade system to come back full circle and then kill Americans.”
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/30/1196343448/fentanyl-deaths-teens-schools-overdose
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7150a2.htm#:~
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/drugs-fentanyl-shipping
https://www.cato.org/blog/fentanyl-smuggled-us-citizens-us-citizens-not-asylum-seekers