López Obrador says the U.S. war against drugs has failed

Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Wednesday, March 15th, that the US drug war has failed and proposed banning fentanyl even for medical use, even though very little of the drug leaks out of hospitals into the illicit market.

López Obrador has grappled in recent days with the issue of fentanyl, which has become a major security concern. He has denied that Mexico produces the potent narcotic, which causes some 70,000 overdose deaths in the United States each year.

U.S. authorities estimate that most of the illegal fentanyl is produced in clandestine Mexican laboratories using materials brought in from China. Relatively little of the narcotic is diverted from hospitals, where it is used as an anesthetic for surgeries and other procedures.

But Lopez Obrador said he will ask doctors and experts whether all use of fentanyl could be banned, in order to reduce illicit use.

“We are also going to ask the United States to ban it for medical use,” he said.

Reports of fentanyl vials reaching the illegal market have been few and far between. Most of the illegal fentanyl is processed by Mexican cartels into pills similar to Xanax, oxycodone or Percocet.

Many people who take these pills are unaware that they are ingesting fentanyl.

On Tuesday, Mexico’s Defense Ministry reported that soldiers found 1.83 million illegal fentanyl pills in a stash in Tijuana.

The rise of illegal fentanyl has prompted calls in the United States to label Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations, and some Republicans are even demanding that the government dispatch the armed forces to fight the cartels.

Lopez Obrador has rejected calls to step up the fight against these criminal networks.

“We are not going to be their servants,” he said in reference to the United States. “We are elected in Mexico to protect Mexicans.”

“We have to help each other, but not submit to each other and less to failed strategies,” he declared, adding, in reference to the U.S. anti-drug agency, that “it has been demonstrated that they cannot” with the problem.

TYT Newsroom