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Peacekeeper missile testing — courtesy Wikipedia
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On April 26, 2018, around 10:30 am two men in a semi truck were stopped for erratic driving near Kearney, NE on I-80. They were acting suspicious, so the truck was searched, revealing secret compartments containing 118 pounds of fentanyl.
Authorities estimated there was enough fentanyl to kill approximately twenty-seven million people, nearly 10 percent of the U.S. population.
This isn’t the first time such a large amount of fentanyl has been seized. One hundred pounds was seized in New Jersey in January of 2018. The two men involved are now in jail.
Let us look at what could have happened that day in late April in Kearney, Nebraska. What if the men in the truck decided to run for it, thinking they could lure the police car along side and run it off the road. A high speed chase evolves with the perpetrators getting on state highway 44 going south off of I-80 towards the Platte River. They lose control of the truck going over the Platte River bridge, vault the guard rail, and slam into the shallow river. The trailer bursts into pieces allowing 43 packages of fentanyl to go into the Platte River.
Paper bags take 5 X the water to make and 7 X the fuel to transport than plastic bags
The packages release their deadly contents as they float along the Platte River to the Missouri River. Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis, Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and the Gulf of Mexico are all downstream from Kearney. Nearly three million people in those cities are at risk. Thousands more living along the rivers could die. Farmers could use it on crops, endangering millions of people eating those crops. Millions of birds, including half a million sand hill cranes could die. Billions of fish, including those in the Gulf of Mexico, could be wiped out.
Imagine the Mexican cartels have decided to bring in fentanyl over the southern border of the U.S. I can’t imagine they haven’t thought about it or done it already. They are using a small plane flying low over the Arizona border. It crashes in a wind storm, part of a dry cool front moving west, near I-10. The hundred pound bag of fentanyl breaks open and powdered fentanyl is carried across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, killing thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, before it disperses enough to not be deadly.
Now imagine if that plane were carrying carfentanil, elephant tranquilizer, a drug 100 times more potent than fentanyl. The winds could be deadly all the way to the East Coast, causing approximately 100 million people to overdose on opioids. That 118 pound seizure in Kearney, Nebraska would be able to kill 2.7 billion people, one third of the population of the world, if it were carfentanil.
In fact, the routine check of a carbon monoxide alarm guided Canadian authorities to 92 pounds of carfentanil in the basement of a Pickering, Canada home. More sleuthing uncovered a shipment of printer cartridges from China shipped to Vancouver that contained 2.2 of pounds of carfentanil so pure it would have yielded 50 million fatal doses. That’s enough to kill every one in Canada and 14 million Americans to boot.
Great way to carry your groceries; + trash, dirty clothes, food prep waste, garden clippings, used cat litter, etc.
Real, actual weapons of mass destruction, more deadly than dozens of nuclear weapons, are reaching the shores of the United States; and nobody talks about it. While 4 ounces of gunpowder in a sealed pipe is considered a weapon of mass destruction, it seems silly that nobody is talking about the megadeath this drug represents. Why aren’t alarm bells going off? Does our government even realize the danger these drugs represent? If it does, nothing is being said about it. I’m sure the local law enforcement is proud to have made these interceptions, but no higher government authority has mentioned the implications of such huge quantities of a drug. It has been compared to nerve gas agents in its lethality per volume. We bombed Syria for using such a substance on its own people.
It’s bad enough if the drug is distributed. It will kill hundreds, maybe thousands, from overdose. The accidental dispersal of such large amounts needs to be given some thought because it could kill millions of innocent people. Victims will just sit or lie down and go to sleep forever. The dosages could be such that no amount of naloxone will bring them back.
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Eastern Seaboard — courtesy Wikimedia
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You can’t stop there. what if this drug is deliberately used as a terror weapon? Carfentanil costs about $2,700 per kilo from China. A small plane can be rigged to fly like a drone with off-the-shelf technology. A simple device to stir up the powder and release it gradually is attached to the underside of the wings on each side. Total cargo weight is about 100 pounds of drug and distribution equipment and 100 pounds of drone automation. When the wind is blowing gently onto shore, it starts flying north and east of Boston, down the coast and includes Manhattan Island, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington D.C. It crashes after about 600 miles by running out of fuel or getting shot down, but not before millions are dead. The drugs and plane would cost less than $250,000.
This is an existential threat, not only to the U.S., but to the world. Someone needs to start talking about how to deal with it.
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