In October, the Drug Enforcement Agency arrested 17 people for drug trafficking, money laundering and other criminal conspiracy charges. The group is accused of having distributed more than 800,000 fentanyl pills throughout the United States. The leader of the ring split his time between two key operational locations: Renton, Washington, and Atlanta.
Why Atlanta? Atlanta is the business and cultural capital of the Southeastern United States, and the primary transport hub for the region. This connectivity and prominence have helped the city’s economy, but they have also attracted the attention of transnational criminal and drug trafficking organizations. With a wide-open Southern border, Atlanta has become a prime target for illicit activity.
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Drug trafficking organizations move large quantities of drugs from Central and South America into the United States, using Atlanta as a hub for funneling methamphetamine, opioids, fentanyl and marijuana across the country. Drugs smuggled across the border and filtered through the city can reach 25% of America’s population within seven hours through the highway system, on their way to destinations such as Charlotte, Charleston, Cincinnati, Jacksonville, Nashville and Raleigh.
That’s just one of the reasons why law enforcement officials have labeled Atlanta the Southeast “hub” for drug trafficking and made it a focal point of anticrime operations. Take Operation Dixie Crystal, for example, operating since 2012, it has prosecuted more than 200 people, seizing more than 20 kilograms of crystal methamphetamine, more than $500,000 and dozens of illegal firearms.
But despite these important efforts, opioid-related deaths have gotten worse and worse over the past four years. In 2023, alone 107,000 Americans were killed by opioids. Fentanyl alone kills more than 200 Americans daily.
Georgia has not been immune from this national trend. Between 2019 and 2021, opioid deaths increased 232% among adults and a shocking 800% among adolescents. Most of these overdose deaths (78%) were the result of fentanyl.
Law enforcement officials say most fentanyl in Georgia and the broader United States is trafficked across the Southern border with Mexico by the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, but the People’s Republic of China is believed to be the ultimate the driving force behind the influx of fentanyl to the United States. Experts say the Chinese government subsidizes the manufacturing and exportation of fentanyl’s precursor materials through tax rebates and other monetary rewards, holds ownership in several companies tied to drug trafficking, and strategically and economically benefits from the crisis. China allegedly supplies the fentanyl precursors to the Mexican cartels, who manufacture the finished product, send the drugs across border checkpoints, transport the materials to hub cities such as Atlanta and ship the substances to their final consumers: American citizens.
The Biden-Harris administration’s soft crime and border policies have emboldened transnational crime organizations to push more drugs across the southern border and throughout the United States, killing people and crippling communities. But this crisis is far from inevitable.
The United States can and should close the open border, increase security measures against illegal immigration and expand Border Patrol resources. Legislation such as the Secure the Border Act, which is currently held up in Congress, would help advance many of these goals.
Federal and state government must also hold China accountable for any complicity in the fentanyl crisis. Congress should work to limit Chinese pharmaceutical imports to reduce vulnerability on corrupted supply chains while demanding transparency for necessary imports, where appropriate. Additionally, state policymakers should work to enhance screening for shipments with potentially hazardous contents.
Unfortunately, the Biden-Harris administration has pursued the opposite agenda. The White House has funneled billions of dollars into nongovernmental organizations that support migration and often embolden crime networks. This money should be reallocated to support local, state and federal law enforcement teams operating in Atlanta and elsewhere, empowering them to more fully combat the public safety and national security threats posed by criminal networks.
While criminal organizations and adversaries abroad continue to exploit Atlanta’s strategic location, law enforcement can only do so much. To decrease overdose deaths and permanently stamp out criminal drug rings — like the one that was busted earlier last month — law enforcement needs Washington to back them up, not undermine them.
Wilson Beaver is a policy adviser at the Heritage Foundation. Sydney Hudson is a member of Heritage’s Young Leaders Program.
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