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WASHINGTON -- Mexican drug cartels are flooding the U.S. market with fake prescription pills that contain fentanyl, leading to thousands of overdoses and deaths, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

At a press conference Thursday afternoon, DEA Administrator Anne Milgram, JD, said that one morning this past May, the parents of a 15-year-old high school freshman in Idaho "found their son in his bedroom. He wasn't breathing. Despite starting CPR right away and immediately calling for help, their son died of a fentanyl overdose."

The boy's death was caused by one pill that he purchased on Snapchat -- "a pill he thought was a prescription oxycodone," she continued. "It looked like a prescription oxycodone pill, but it was not. It was actually a fake pill containing a deadly dose of fentanyl."

Deaths such as this one are happening every day across the U.S., Milgram said. "We know that these overdose deaths are directly caused by Mexican drug cartels that are flooding the United States with millions of fake pills" containing large quantities of fentanyl powder. "The Mexican drug networks get chemicals largely from China, and then they mass produce -- often in industrial labs -- these deadly substances in Mexico and then they pump this poison into the United States. And they are killing tens of thousands of Americans."

"What is equally troubling is that the cartels have harnessed the perfect drug delivery tool -- social media applications that are available on every single smartphone in the United States," she said, adding that "85% of all Americans have smartphones ... When you open Snapchat, when you open Facebook, when you open Instagram, when you open TikTok, when you open YouTube, the drug traffickers and the criminal networks are there waiting for you."

The cartels "target people of all ages: a curious teenager ordering a pill online, a college student trying a pill from a friend, an elderly neighbor searching online for a painkiller," said Milgram. They use social media because "it's widely accessible, it's easy to use, and drug traffickers can hide their identities ... And most importantly, the sites permit the sale of these fake counterfeit pills every day to go unchecked."

"These criminal drug networks are misrepresenting what they're selling," she added. "People think they're buying real Xanax pills, real Adderall pills, real oxycodone using online platforms that they trust, when in reality, they're getting deadly fentanyl in pills that look just like the real thing."

To attack the problem, "this past Tuesday, just 2 days ago, DEA completed a public safety surge -- our second one since August -- to target the most dangerous drug traffickers and drug trafficking networks that are pushing deadly drugs in our country," said Milgram. "Our investigations revealed that these networks are directly linked to 39 overdose deaths, and 76 of our investigations involved criminal drug activity on Facebook and Facebook Messenger, on Snapchat, on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube and on other social media platforms."

In total, from September 29 to December 14, the agency seized more than 8.4 million fake pills, over 5,400 pounds of methamphetamines, and hundreds of pounds each of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, "often in the same places we seized the fentanyl," she said. And 2 days before the press conference, "DEA agents in Arizona seized approximately 1.7 million pills and 13 pounds of fentanyl in a single operation. I'm confident that the DEA agents and the Task Force officers have prevented a significant number of overdoses and overdose deaths with just that seizure."

On September 27, the agency issued its first public safety alert in 6 years in order to warn people about the fake pills. Up to that point in 2021, the DEA had seized 9.5 million fake pills, more than in the previous 2 years combined.

Milgram urged the public to be a part of the solution. "Know the dangers -- and the accessibility -- of deadly drugs online," she said. "Never take medicine that wasn't prescribed personally to you and filled by a licensed pharmacist. Spread the word that 'one pill can kill.'"

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