MEXICO CITY — Mexican soldiers seized greater than a half million fentanyl pills in a raid on what the military’s announcement Wednesday called the most important synthetic drug lab found so far.
The military said the outdoor lab was discovered in Culiacan, the capital of the northern state of Sinaloa. Sinaloa is home to the drug cartel of the identical name.
Soldiers raided the lab Tuesday and located almost 630,000 pills that appear to contain the synthetic opioid fentanyl. In addition they reported seizing 282 kilos of powdered fentanyl and about 220 kilos of suspected methamphetamines.
“That is the highest-capacity synthetic drug production lab on record during this administration,” the military said in an announcement.
Mexican drug cartels produce the opioid from precursor chemicals shipped from China, after which press it into pills counterfeited to seem like Xanax, Percocet or Oxycodone. People often take the pills without knowing they contain fentanyl and may suffer deadly overdoses.
The bust got here on the identical day that the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on the massive variety of U.S. fentanyl overdoses that occur annually, currently around 70,000.
The committee’s chair, Sen. Bob Menendez, a Democrat from Latest Jersey, called on Mexico to do more.
“This implies asking Mexico to do more to disrupt the criminal organizations from producing and trafficking fentanyl, although a politicized judiciary and incidents of Mexican security forces colluding with drug cartels will make that difficult,” he said.
