While it may not be the most wide­ly con­sumed drug in Flori­da, the num­ber of fa­tal­i­ties caused by fen­tanyl has prompt­ed a large-scale se­cu­ri­ty re­sponse across sev­er­al ter­ri­to­ries.

Speak­ing with re­porters at the Drug En­force­ment Ad­min­is­tra­tion’s (DEA) Mi­a­mi lab­o­ra­to­ry on Mon­day, di­rec­tor Allen Cat­ter­ton said the po­ten­cy of fen­tanyl and its pop­u­lar­i­ty among ad­dicts pose a ma­jor threat to the US.

DEA of­fi­cials es­ti­mat­ed that fen­tanyl makes up on­ly 20 per cent of drugs seized an­nu­al­ly in Flori­da, while co­caine re­mains the most wide­ly con­fis­cat­ed nar­cot­ic.

Cat­ter­ton said while he pri­mar­i­ly over­sees sci­en­tif­ic process­es by test­ing con­fis­cat­ed drugs, analysing and record­ing a drug’s chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion can go a long way in un­der­stand­ing the lat­est trends with drug car­tels, es­pe­cial­ly when re­gion­al part­ners in the Caribbean log their own find­ings to com­pare.

Re­fer­ring to a gas chro­mato­graph and a nu­clear mag­net­ic res­o­nance ma­chine, which dis­sects and iden­ti­fies the chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion at a mol­e­c­u­lar scale, he said, “If the Caribbean is us­ing this method and some­thing comes up in terms of trends, know­ing the trends and know­ing how quick­ly these changes are hap­pen­ing can save lives.”

Cat­ter­ton said this in­te­grat­ed ap­proach for part­ners out­side of the US works well, as sam­ples tak­en from seized drug ship­ments in T&T are sent to his lab­o­ra­to­ry for test­ing.

This, he said, gives in­ves­ti­ga­tors a wider scope of un­der­stand­ing what drugs from dif­fer­ent ter­ri­to­ries look like.

Con­tact­ed for com­ment, Min­is­ter of Home­land Se­cu­ri­ty Roger Alexan­der said he un­der­stood that fen­tanyl had not grown to wide­spread pop­u­lar­i­ty as oth­er drugs lo­cal­ly, but was con­cerned about a small but grow­ing trend.

Re­fer­ring to his ex­pe­ri­ences as a po­lice­man in the North East­ern Di­vi­sion, see­ing first­hand the dev­as­ta­tion caused by drug ad­dic­tion, he said new syn­thet­ic drugs re­quired an ag­gres­sive, tar­get­ed cam­paign.

He al­so raised con­cern over the will­ing­ness of some young peo­ple to ex­per­i­ment with syn­thet­ic drug use like pills, fen­tanyl, and “hy­brid drugs.”

“What we re­alise hap­pen­ing is the youth now seem to have this great in­ter­est in every­thing that is ab­nor­mal, mean­ing they want to test the mol­ly (pills), mol­ly mixed with co­caine, or co­caine mixed with fen­tanyl.

“There’s some­thing to use to get where you want to go.”

Alexan­der, how­ev­er, ad­mit­ted that de­spite the ef­forts of T&T’s se­cu­ri­ty agen­cies, the coun­try has “strug­gled” with counter-traf­fick­ing mea­sures, es­pe­cial­ly giv­en the close­ness to main­land South Amer­i­ca.

He, how­ev­er, com­mend­ed the US for the on­go­ing sup­port through op­er­a­tions, train­ing, and foren­sic sup­port.

In terms of co­caine, Cat­ter­ton said that sam­ples test­ed have not re­vealed any ma­jor changes in the make-up, to sug­gest that drug traf­fick­ers were do­ing any­thing dif­fer­ent, but not­ed that Caribbean coun­tries may sub­mit sam­ples of drugs which show it was di­lut­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly.

One DEA of­fi­cial said the Ba­hamas was the main trans­ship­ment point of drugs in­to Flori­da, giv­en their close­ness.

The of­fi­cial said that a kilo­gram of co­caine in Mi­a­mi is worth an es­ti­mat­ed US $15,000 to $25,000.

He not­ed that of­fi­cials study the price of these drugs to gauge how read­i­ly they are avail­able on the street, as more ex­pen­sive prices sug­gest­ed that there was a short­age.