Fentanyl – Jake Braun

In fact, we have not. Outside of a tribal setting, these rituals still take place in a dorm room, house party, or deserted parking lot surrounded by classmates and accompanied by chest-thumping music. Aside from the location and religious aspects, the rite of passage continues.

Americans normalized weed to such a degree since it hit mainstream culture in the 1960s that no president since Bill Clinton has had to spend time explaining whether they inhaled or not. Obviously with every action there is a reaction. The U.S. government’s reaction to reefer madness in the 1960s and 1970s was swift and fierce. The anti–Vietnam War protesters could be seen openly smoking marijuana on the nightly news at events like Woodstock. Flower Power turned to chaos in the late 1960s as Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F.

Kennedy were assassinated. Drug culture was scapegoated by mainstream society. President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs” after taking office in the 1970s, but his “war” did little to curb America’s seemingly insatiable appetite for pot.7 This war on drugs, however, successfully created a market dynamic with unparalleled economic opportunities for any criminal organization that could capitalize on the new market. The war on drugs imposed costs too high for any domestic distributor of marijuana to scale up production and meet demand in the United States.

Anyone who tried would be caught and jailed for many years. Their crops would be destroyed and equipment confiscated. Marijuana simply required too much farmland for an American producer to reliably serve the market. Thousands of small-scale domestic producers served local markets using hydroponics or secluded plots of land.

These growers were routinely discovered and arrested. It didn’t take the cartels long to realize the American market could not be serviced by a domestic producer. They had been dabbling in ganja smuggling since the 1937 criminalization of the plant. The smugglers had none other than the U.S. government to thank for eradicating all its American competitors. Inevitably the Golden Triangle dons scaled to serve this vast market of users with seemingly unlimited resources to expend on ganja. However, the pot provider required several critical assets.

It required significant financial resources, a vast, inexpensive labor pool; a distribution network in the United States; and the ability to operate outside the reach of U.S.

3 Putin’s Long Arms 4 Fentanyl: Entering the Ring 5 A Mass Poisoning: Zach 6 Sinaloa 7 Narco-Capitalism 8 Byzantium 9 The Digital Arsenal of Democracy 10 Operation Gallant Phoenix 11 The Agent 12 Mexico City 13 Blue Lotus 14 To the Gates of Hell Index About the Author OceanofPDF.com Acknowledgments I would like to thank the following people without whose support I would not be able to have completed this book, or honestly much else in life: My mother Teresa, father Denny, and brothers Mike and Joe.

I want to thank Joe in particular for his in-depth research and technical review and editing of the book. As well as Alex, Cordi and, of course, Jena. Morgan Ryan, Jane Holl Lute, Doug Lute, Ali Mayorkas, John Tien, Mary Ellen Callahan, PJ Lechleitner, Troy Miller, Ken Wainstein, Tom Bush, Matthew Swenson, Janene Corrado, Eric Hysen, Fernando Lujan, Jorge Comas, Coqui Baez, Katie Tobin, Karson Stevenson, Frank Taylor, Hafsah Lak, John Cohen, Phil Groven, Mary Pat Bonner, Bob Fenton, Liz Sherwood- Randall, and Ambassador Cathy Russell Those, along with Joe, who spent countless hours reviewing and editing the book like Mathew Brodman, Maya Worman, Marsha Espinosa, and Admiral Brian Penoyer The crew that came up the ranks with me at DHS, the White House and many other fascets of my life like Chloe Himmel, Nate Snyder, Fayrouz Saad, Chris Derusha, Jake Heller, Phil Stupak, Jason Houser, Jaclyn Houser, Mike Garcia, Ben Rohrbaugh, Becca Sharp, Jon Carson, Jay Rowell, Bill Doerrer and Claudia Chavez.

OceanofPDF.com Preface Fentanyl is my insider account of how the fentanyl crisis took center stage in the Joe Biden Administration amid a series of other national security emergencies. It then follows our scramble to respond to the epidemic as Mexican cartels went through their most radical transformation in fifty years. As a senior official in the Biden administration, I worked at both the White House and, separately, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). At DHS, I worked with the team that established and oversaw the counterfentanyl strategy for DHS.

I was also part of the White House National Security Council (NSC) working group that developed the Biden administration’s government-wide strategic plan for combating fentanyl. The NSC fentanyl strategy was the first of its kind for any administration. In the first year of the administration, my colleagues and I rarely slept as the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack, the migrant surges at the border, the Haitian presidential assassination, and, most significantly, the withdrawal from Afghanistan crushed us day in and day out.

As I caught my breath in late 2021, we got word that the United States had just passed the grim milestone of nearly one hundred thousand Americans dying from fentanyl- related causes that year, ten times more overdose fatalities than the most deadly narcotics in the early 2000s, when DHS was created. Consequently, I was tasked to work with the West Wing and seniormost leadership in other agencies to develop a fentanyl strategy.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 8c2a0d48c9adbab2
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 2,435,245 bytes (2.322 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9781529789768, 9789264251847, 9781802206234
• Pages: 274
• Language: English (en)

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• Total Words: 92,300
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