[Balsam Lake, Wis.] – This week, Adam Jarchow will be in Arizona to meet with law enforcement and local officials who are on the ground in Yuma dealing with a border crisis that has become exponentially more difficult given the Biden Administration’s failure to secure our southern border. As part of the visit, Jarchow will discuss the crossing of fentanyl and other drugs, whose damaging effects are ravaging Wisconsin.

Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid, similar to morphine, and 50 to 100 times more potent. In the medical field, fentanyl is used as a tool to treat pain. For drug dealers, it’s a cheap additive to other drugs to give them higher potency for less cost. In Fiscal Year 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) seized more than 10,000 pounds of fentanyl along the southern border. That’s enough fentanyl to kill 2.4 billion people, or almost a third of the world’s population – and that’s just what they were able to seize.

How fentanyl has negatively impacted our communities:

  • United States Customs and Border Patrol reported “a 1,066 percent increase in fentanyl and a 98 percent increase in cocaine seized” in 2021.
  • A Stanford Medicine report projects that the United States will surpass over 1.2 million opioid-related deaths this year.
  • In 2021, Milwaukee County alone had 643 overdose deaths – 80% were fentanyl related
  • In Racine County, during the 2021 calendar year, fentanyl-related deaths were up 20%
  • In 2021, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) arrested 40 people in a drug operation that spanned Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana, seizing 183 pounds of fentanyl
  • In 2020, the La Crosse Police Department seized $28,000 worth of fentanyl, or 140 grams – the lethal dose is .2 grams
  • In 2017, Waukesha County Sheriff Eric Severson testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs that “the greatest impact on the safety of our community as it relates to ‘Border Insecurity,’ is the ease of bringing controlled substances into our community by way of the Mexican-American border.”

Adam Jarchow released the following statement on his visit to the southern border:

“Every state can be considered a border state given the speed and relentless spread of drugs into our communities coming from the southern border. The border itself is a complete mess, and the southern states that serve as our first line of defense receive little to no help from the Biden Administration. We know for a fact that many of the drugs that plague our Wisconsin communities, including fentanyl, come across the southern border. I look forward to meeting with the frontline leaders dealing with this crisis and discussing how the next Attorney General of Wisconsin can play a role in taking necessary action against the current administration’s despicable open borders agenda.”

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