by Paul Martin
I often, probably too often, second-guess myself.
The voice rings and swirls, bounces, and sometimes pounds: Why are you doing this? Why do you have to get involved? You don’t have to get involved. Can’t you get a normal job?
I live in Orange County, California. Just down the street is the high school featured in that iconic TV series, The OC, and not too long after, The Real Housewives of OC.
I wish the shows were an exaggeration of this place.
So here I sit, a cool Saturday morning in February, hearing chirps of sparrows and then roars of jet engines from departing flights out of John Wayne Airport, facing a window where I can see dozens of lemons on the tree.
And I’m thinking of fentanyl. I’m thinking of fentanyl and those teenagers in Española. Next week I return to teach them lessons on leadership.
How far is Española from The OC? Last year, I drove out—if I remember correctly, around 850 miles.
But it’s so much further away than that.
We don’t know what to do about fentanyl. Public health officials are scrambling even to gauge where to turn. The DEA seized enough pills in 2023 to kill—yes, kill—nearly 400 million Americans.
Our population is 330 million.
Mexican cartels are not backing down from this profit center, though they make some big promises.
Chinese companies are not backing down, though their government is talking a big game.
Fentanyl requires no crops. Think of heroin and cocaine and marijuana. All require crops. That means land. That means irrigation. That means protecting the land. That means harvesting and packaging.
Most of all, it means hiding large quantities of the drug to export.
Fentanyl is synthetic. It comes directly from chemicals commonly referred to as precursors. An amount the size of two grains of salt is required to get a good high. And that’s about the amount that would cause an overdose. There’s little margin for error with the stuff.
Two kilos—what would fill an average-sized backpack—is enough to kill one million people.
Fentanyl is the dream drug for manufacturers, smugglers, and dealers. It is cheap, easy to make, easy to hide, and ridiculously addictive. That’s why they put it in counterfeit drugs made to appear to be Xanax, Oxy, or Adderall.
If illegal entry at the southern border completed stopped this year, we would have successfully stopped 10% of the drug from entering the country; 90% is hidden and enters via legal ports of entry. But even if we stopped that, a virtually impossible feat, we have enough in the country to last for many years.
Enough poison to kill millions of young adults. Enough to send countless family members into a life of grief.
That’s why we do this work. That’s we get involved.
That’s why we care.
