PHOENIX — U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials announced Thursday their biggest fentanyl bust ever, saying they captured nearly 254 pounds of the synthetic drug that is helping fueling a national epidemic of fatal opioid overdoses from a secret compartment inside a load of Mexican produce heading into Arizona.
PHOENIX — U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials announced Thursday their biggest fentanyl bust ever, saying they captured nearly 254 pounds of the synthetic drug that is helping fueling a national epidemic of fatal opioid overdoses from a secret compartment inside a load of Mexican produce heading into Arizona.
The drug was found hidden Saturday
morning in a compartment under the rear
floor of a tractor-trailer after a scan during a
secondary inspection indicated “some anomalies” in the load, and the agency’s police dog team alerted officers to the presence of drugs, Nogales CBP Port Director Michael Humphries said.
Most of the seized fentanyl with an overall street value of about $3.5 million was in white powder form, but about 2 pounds of it was contained in pills. Agents also seized nearly 395 pounds of methamphetamine with a street value of $1.18 million, Humphries said.
“The size of a few grains of salt of fentanyl, which is a dangerous opioid, can kill a person very quickly,” Humphries said. The seizure, he said, had prevented an immeasurable number of doses of the drug “that could have harmed so many families.”
The Drug Enforcement Administration said the previous largest U.S. seizure of fentanyl had been in August 2017 when it captured 145 pounds of the drug in a Queens, New York, apartment that was linked to the Sinaloa Cartel.
Before that, the largest recorded fentanyl seizure was 88 pounds nabbed from a pickup truck in Bartow County, Georgia.
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