Montana has seen firsthand the devastation that drugs such as fentanyl can cause, including addiction, overdoses and crime. Stopping those drugs from coming into our country and our state is no easy task.
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“Really, if you can imagine it, they have found a way to sneak it across. Once it’s across the border, Interstate 25 (which runs from Arizona to northern Wyoming) is a direct pipeline right up here to Montana,” says Special Agent Jonathan Pullen with the DEA’s Rocky Mountain Field Division.
Pullen said Monday in an interview with MTN News the focus continues to be on fentanyl and methamphetamine, which continue to make their way into the state.
"We really expected to see a drop already in the supply coming into the United States because the border is so much tighter. However, that hasn't transpired yet,” Pullen says.
Pullen says Mexican cartels are 100 percent to blame for the fentanyl that is finding its way to Montana, often with deadly consequences.
“A pill in Mexico is produced in Mexico from two to four cents. That same pill in Denver might sell between two and five dollars per pill—an incredible markup when it only costs two cents to make it. By the time that pill makes it to the Blackfeet Indian reservation, it can be sold for as high as $120 for one pill. An incredible markup, incredible amount of money to be made by these criminal groups that are selling this poison,” Pullen says.
Pullen warns that just one fentanyl pill is capable of killing.
“Half of the pills that the DEA seized last year across the United States had a deadly dose of fentanyl in it, so fentanyl itself is incredibly deadly. Only two milligrams is enough to kill me or you,” he says.
Carfentanil has also begun to show up in the region. It’s synthetic opioid approximately 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 100 times more potent than fentanyl.
While the problem isn’t going away, Pullen believes some of the steps that the Trump administration has taken are already making a difference, including designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and invoking the Alien Enemies Act.
“These people are violent. They are not the people you want to be your neighbors, so the ability to invoke that Title 50 rule has really been a gamechanger because now some of these people who are really just up here committing crimes—we can send them home,” he says.
While Pullen is optimistic that will help law enforcement and eventually bring down the number of drugs making their way in, he also knows all too well that the cartels won’t back down easily.
“What I can tell you is the Mexican cartels are relentless," he says.
