El Chapo Guzmán’s sons charged with smuggling fentanyl into the US

• El Chapo’s sons have been charged with smuggling fentanyl into the US.
• They created large laboratories to produce the drug cheaply.
• Fentanyl is a major problem in the United States.

Despite the fact that Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán is not free to command the Sinaloa Cartel, his children are and they have created a network of laboratories to produce the the most dangerous drug in the United States. Now El Chapo’s sons have been charged with smuggling it into the US.

The United States has had serious problems with fentanyl, which is a very cheap and very lethal drug. The Biden administration has targeted Mexican drug traffickers who are bringing it into the country.

El Chapo’s sons charged with smuggling fentanyl into the US

With Sinaloa Cartel kingpin El Chapo Guzmán serving a life sentence in prison, his sons have steered the family business towards fentanyl trafficking and established a network of laboratories that produce vast quantities of the cheap and deadly drug that is trafficked into the United States, prosecutors disclosed in a recent indictment.

Although El Chapo’s trial in the United States revolved around cocaine trafficking, the case against his sons exposes the inner workings of a cartel undergoing a generational change as it works to «to manufacture the most potent fentanyl and to sell it in the United States at the lowest price,” according to the indictment unsealed April 14 in Manhattan.

With El Chapo in jail, his sons are in charge of producing and distributing fentanyl

Synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, currently kill more Americans each year than were killed in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, leading some politicians to argue that the cartels should be labeled terrorist organizations.

“The problem with fentanyl, as some people at the State Department told me, has to be repositioned. It’s not a drug problem; it’s a poisoning problem,” said Alejandro Hope, a security analyst from Mexico who died last Friday.

The fentanyl epidemic in the US began 20 years ago

The foundation for the fentanyl epidemic in the United States was laid more than 20 years ago, when doctors began over-prescribing the synthetic opioid oxycodone. As US authorities cracked down on prescriptions for that drug, users switched from oxycodone to heroin, which the Sinaloa Cartel supplied.

But making their own fentanyl, which is much more powerful and versatile than heroin, in small, hidden labs, was a game changer. The cartel went from its first makeshift fentanyl lab to a network of labs located in the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa in less than a decade.

A single batch of fentanyl can end up in large numbers of counterfeit pills

A single “batch” produced by a cartel can press fentanyl into 100,000 counterfeit pills every day to fool Americans into thinking they are taking Xanax, Percocet, or oxycodone. The pills are smuggled across the border to supply what El Chapo’s son Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, said are «streets of drug addicts,» according to the indictment cited by the AP.

Fentanyl is so cheap to produce that the cartel makes huge profits, even selling the drug for 50 cents a pill. According to prosecutors, the drug’s potency makes it particularly dangerous. The narcotic dose of fentanyl is so close to the lethal dose that a pill intended to guarantee the high of a habituated user can easily kill a less experienced person.