Facts, Fear and the Lethal F-word
Federal agencies and private companies are working collaboratively to combat an international opioid crisis, employing increasingly sophisticated technologies and methods.
As the United States battles an opioid abuse crisis, some experts point at potential national security concerns around the substance. Illicit fentanyl, which has jolted the health and national security communities, has been called a potential weapon of mass destruction, or WMD.
The 2020 Fentanyl Flow to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) intelligence report illustrated shifts in drug flow into the states. Though China remains in the lead, India has become an emerging source “for finished fentanyl powder and fentanyl precursor chemicals.” Ultimately, the report projects further diversification in the flow of the lethal drug.
Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more powerful than morphine, according to the DEA. In 2022, the DEA seized over 58.3 million fentanyl-laced fake pills and 13,000 pounds of fentanyl powder, equaling 387 million fatal doses.
The agency’s 2023 data through June shows 167.8 million deadly fentanyl doses currently seized, suggesting a significant increase.
Most consumers, according to the administration, are unaware of fentanyl presence in other substances.
In lieu of these figures, and according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, fentanyl-related overdose deaths have nearly tripled since 2016. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced 107,375 drug-related deaths in the 12-month period ending in January—67% of those involved synthetic opioids. Thus, analysts and political leaders have labeled this the biggest health challenge in the United States.
This data underscores the lethality of the substance, and many are sounding the alarm beyond those who abuse it.
In a recent New England Journal of Medicine paper, a team of health professionals warned that terrorists could potentially use a targeted opioid attack as a low-cost high-impact action.
“We modeled dropping carfentanil out of this drone over a mass gathering stadium ... it was estimated that this dispersal through a drone would kill about 5,000 people,” said Dr. Gregory R. Ciottone, a Harvard University professor and paper co-author.
Ciottone warned that a version of the opioid carfentanil is 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 1,000 times stronger than fentanyl, according to the Department of Justice.
According to Ciottone, the synthetic drug can be easily purchased online through the dark web and delivered “in quantities that quite literally would be large enough to kill millions, without exaggeration.”
“Replace ‘fentanyl’ or ‘carfentanil’ whatever it might be, with the word or the term ‘nerve agent’ and you’ll immediately understand that the crisis, or the situation, is just that people don’t recreationally use nerve agents on the streets,” Ciottone told SIGNAL Media in an interview.
This threat has drawn attention from the public and political leaders. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) introduced a bill, cosponsored by nine other representatives, in June 2022 to designate fentanyl as a WMD. This text entered the legislative process through the Homeland Security House Committee. Such actions stress the complexity of the challenge posed by a substance that can be used to kill and to heal.
“I use fentanyl in the ER [emergency room] in a medicinal way to provide some, you know, sometimes we do what’s called conscious sedation to do certain procedures,” Ciottone explained.
Fentanyl is a Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved synthetic opioid used to treat severe pain, often after surgeries.
While this group of substances saves lives, its presence in multiple illegal channels adds to various concerns, especially as tiny amounts can kill a human.
Though most illegal dealers and manufacturers lace other chemicals with fentanyl, even a small amount of the narcotic can be fatal. “The average lethal dose is roughly two milligrams,” Rosanna Anderson, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science & Technology Directorate (S&T) opioid and fentanyl detection program manager, told SIGNAL Media.
In a May news release, DHS S&T announced collaboration with the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to enhance portable drug-detection technologies. “S&T has offered twelve original equipment manufacturers access to collect reference data on seventeen commercial-off-the-shelf narcotics detection systems,” the report stated. The data includes information on synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl.
In exchange, the manufacturers will supply first responders who use their systems with updated narcotic detection libraries.
Kickstarted in 2020, the Fentanyl Reference Spectra project includes two phases: phase one is a request for information, which was received from the 17 companies; phase two focuses on testing and evaluation, the conclusion of which will be made public in early fall.
But testing and evaluation must be able to correctly identify chemicals. Without that technology, the risk of traffickers altering compositions to avoid detection by authorities is high.
“What we noticed, and the actual potential is that we’re still largely seeing fentanyl as its kind of pure form. There were a number of sort of experimentations; looking at those, other fentanyl-like molecules, and they were just evading detection because the detectors didn’t have it in their database,” Anderson said.
This fast-moving target required authorities to step up their identification tools, and a new technology was brought in to estimate traffickers’ next steps.
“We were working also with [Pacific Northwest National Laboratory] on a separate project where they really did do deep learning, and they took entire databases and applied their mathematical models to say, ‘Based on the information and the data that we’ve collected’ we can start to go out and do like fragment matching and start to build up and sort of self-learn,” Anderson explained.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next step to define substances that may already exist and are successfully avoiding the attention of the authorities or that have yet to be invented in this cat-and-mouse game.
Though the misuse of fentanyl began in the ’90s, the nation saw big spikes in opioid overdoses around 2017. “This is when the illicitly manufactured fentanyl really started being transported into the United States, primarily via China through the international mail,” Anderson added.
Postal mail was the main source of the illicit drug’s spread at the time; therefore, legislation was passed to combat the issue. According to Anderson, the movement has now shifted to the southern border and drug trends continue to change.
Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas announced a task force dedicated to artificial intelligence, as well as a 90-day sprint to combat international adversarial threats, specifically from the People’s Republic of China.
Along with protecting critical infrastructure and preventing economic threats from China, the sprint lists disrupting the fentanyl supply chain as part of the department’s priorities.
Furthermore, the April DHS press release reads that the department “will explore using artificial intelligence technology to better detect fentanyl shipments, identify and interdict the flow of precursor chemicals around the world, and target for disruption key nodes in the criminal networks.”
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data, there have been 19,800 pounds (about 8,981 kg) of fentanyl seized through May of this year. Comparatively, 2022 saw 14,700 pounds (about 6,668 kg) of fentanyl at the land border.
The President’s Budget for Fiscal Year 2024 includes $25 billion for the CBP and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with $535 million reserved for border technology. Of those, $40 million are earmarked for fentanyl trafficking and criminal organizations.
A two-month DHS operation named Blue Lotus ended in early May and led agents to seize more than 4,700 pounds (about 2,131.88 kg) of fentanyl, according to a statement from acting CPB Commissioner Troy Miller.
The lethal drug was found hidden in car doors, spare tires, inside of seats, in backpacks, strapped to bodies and more. “This operation leveraged advanced analytics and intelligence capabilities across DHS, including the deployment of [Homeland Security Investigations] HSI personnel alongside CBP officers at ports of entry,” Miller said.
The CBP has expanded its use of innovative nonintrusive inspection technology, allowing officers to examine the contents of large and small containers and vehicles without physical contact.
There have been cases where law enforcement agents have been known to suffer effects after encountering the substance, and technologies are also trying to safeguard those interdicting shipments.
In his State of the Union address, President Biden announced the deployment of 123 new large-scale scanners at the southwest border ports of entry by fiscal year 2026. The scanners are projected to increase inspection capacity significantly.
In April, the CBP announced solicitation for a nonintrusive anomaly detection algorithm. Awards will be made within this and next fiscal year.
Large X-ray scanners at the border have the tools to inspect vehicles, cargo and luggage. “These scanners can identify suspicious shapes, anomalies or organic materials that could indicate the presence of drugs,” a CBP spokesperson told SIGNAL Media.
The representative said the agency is looking to invest in emerging capabilities such as operator health resilience and performance improvement; autonomous systems to reduce the number of operators; artificial intelligence to automate workflows; and data communications.
According to the 2020 Combating Illicit Drugs in the Mail U.S. Postal Service strategy, the agency is also expanding its search for nonintrusive drug-detection capabilities.
In fiscal year 2020, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service seized 124,000 pounds of illegal narcotics in inbound U.S. mail.
In terms of total arrests, 92.4% of fentanyl analogue trafficking offenders were U.S. citizens, according to the FY 2022 U.S. Sentencing Commission report.
The Opioid Detection challenge, sponsored by the DHS S&T, the CBP, the Postal Inspection Service and the Office of National Drug Control Policy, hosted a global competition with a $1.55 million award for rapid detection tools.
Thermo Fisher Scientific offers a variety of additional drug-detection tools and technologies to help combat the fentanyl crisis, such as the Tox Explorer Collection recently augmented with fentanyl analogues.
The U.S. Coast Guard, while also using rapid response test strips, is seeking smaller handheld detection innovations. There is also a growing interest in capabilities that work with and without network connection, according to a spokesperson.
Hazardous materials teams are greatly relying on MX908 devices, which are high-pressure mass spectrometer technologies. According to David DiGregorio, former director of the Massachusetts Department of Fire Services, hazardous materials emergency response, they are a great resource due to their ability to “pick up the backbone of fentanyl” in the case where a specific analogue is not in the device’s library.
International collaboration and cooperation are vital for the mission, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
Operation SpecTor, announced earlier this year, involved a partnership between the Department of Justice and its Joint Criminal Opioid and Darknet Enforcement team. Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Brazil, the United Kingdom and Switzerland also played key roles in the operation.
Consequently, Europol and other law enforcement agencies arrested 288 suspects guilty of buying or dealing drugs on “Monopoly Market,” an illegal online marketplace. A Department of Justice press release also announced the seizure of “117 firearms, 850 kilograms (about 1,874 pounds) of drugs—including 64 kilograms of fentanyl or fentanyl-laced narcotics—and $53.4 million in cash and virtual currencies.”
“The availability of dangerous substances like fentanyl on dark net marketplaces is helping to fuel the crisis that has claimed far too many American lives,” stated Christopher Wray, director of the FBI. “That’s why we will continue to join forces with our law enforcement partners around the globe.”
Still, all detection depends on having a “chemical footprint” in a database. Without it, new iterations of the substance stay undetected.
Artificial Intelligence for Criminal Intelligence
Finding opioids on U.S. soil is mission success for traffickers.
“The way that we should be approaching this problem is not by trying to interdict our way out of it, because we never will,” said Nick Reese, co-founder of Frontier Foundry and former deputy director for emerging technology policy at the Department of Homeland Security.
“The technology side of this, is [artificial intelligence] has come to a place now where we could have an AI [artificial intelligence] algorithm, an AI system that could generatively work against itself to find some of the most optimal routes into the United States,” Reese said.
Training an AI model would only demand information that is already available.
“We have intelligence reports, we have Customs and Border data, all this data exists, and so what we’re really doing is taking that data and using AI for what AI is really good at, which is processing that data into something we can use,” Reese explained.
Still, this would demand new skills for a new way of fighting against crime.
“This is not like a human out of the loop thing here, this would be a tool to help humans make better decisions with data that we have,” Reese added.
Once these logistical pathways are identified, resources can be optimized.
“We should start positioning our forces to cut off access to those strategic entry points,” Reese told SIGNAL Media in an interview.
According to this consultant and veteran of the fight against drugs, using technology to interdict far from U.S. borders is the goal.
“If Customs and Border Protection made a seizure, that is a failure because it should ... have never gotten there, and that’s where we need to focus,” Reese said.
