- Joined
- Aug 1, 2014
- Messages
- 26,719
- Reaction score
- 6,278
- Location
- California
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Other
NEW YORK — The middle-aged couple in the station wagon went shopping at a New Jersey Walmart on a warm night in August. They stopped for dinner at an IHOP on the way home. And when they arrived at their apartment building in a quiet residential section of Queens, the narcotics agents *following them got a warrant to go inside.
It was the largest fentanyl seizure in U.S. history. There was enough inside the apartment to kill 32 million people, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The married couple who were arrested, Rogelio Alvarado-Robles, 55, and Blanca Flores-
Solis, 52, had no criminal record in the United States. They had flown to New York a few weeks earlier with Mexican passports. They had no weapons.
But they were drug cartel emissaries, investigators said, sent to broker the sale of tens of millions of dollars’ worth of narcotics, like pharmaceutical executives on a business trip.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...ory.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.db22920d898e
More than 60,000 people died from overdoses in the United States last year, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and deaths from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl increased fivefold.
Drug overdose is now the leading cause of death of Americans under the age of 50, replacing suicide and car accidents, the two previous most common causes. Mexican drug cartels are a much bigger threat to American lives than terrorism, police shootings, or suicide. Drug cartels can only thrive if we allow them to, and sadly, we do.