The promise: If you legalize marijuana, it will “prevent revenue from the sale of marijuana from going to criminal enterprises, gangs, and cartels.” Oregon voted to legalize the drug in 2014, and now they’re finding they’ve become a magnet for cartels.

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I grew up in Oregon hearing my father, a pilot, talk about the need to be careful where he flew because pot farmers would shoot at planes that got too close to their illegal crops. Deschutes County Detective Dustin Miller said, “Oregon is known for having some of the best marijuana in the United States.” Jackson County, where I grew up, is the largest producer of pot in Oregon. Though the largest city, Medford, has less than 85,000 people, the county grows 8,500 acres of hemp.

Many who were inexperienced jumped into growing it, not knowing what they were doing, and many have gone bankrupt and committed suicide.

The legal pot farms have paved the way for numerous cartels from Mexico and China to blend in, using illegally trafficked workers living in horrible conditions to prepare their unregistered harvests to sell in states where it’s still illegal.

Marijuana itself has its own health risks. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) warns about the use of the substance:

There is growing alarm among healthcare professionals, especially addiction specialists, about looming risks to population health and underappreciated societal costs. Among top concerns are increasing rates of daily heavy use and the development of cannabis addiction, earlier age of initiation of regular cannabis use and impact on cognitive functioning and psychological development, worsening courses of severe mental illness among those with certain familial predispositions (i.e., for schizophrenia)…

Then the NIH mentions another major concern: “…cannabis use among adolescents can act as a gateway to harder drugs such as opioids.”

Opioids include morphine and heroin, and now the synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.

The Harmony Ridge Recovery Center, which offers specialized programs to help individuals detox from fentanyl, is seeing that “the growing trend of lacing marijuana with fentanyl has become more common, particularly among dealers looking to create a stronger, quicker high for users looking for more intense experiences.”

The problem with the synthetic drugs is that it only takes a tiny amount to overdose. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reports “nearly 70% of all drug poisonings and overdose deaths in 2023 involved synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl. All it takes is 2 mg to kill someone.

Even worse, they wrote about another variant:

Carfentanil is a synthetic opioid originally developed for veterinary use, more specifically to tranquilize large animals such as elephants. It is extraordinarily potent and not approved for human use. In fact, it is estimated to be 10,000 times more potent than morphine and 100 times stronger than fentanyl. 

So it only takes .02 mg to kill someone.

No wonder the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that these substances killed 80,000 people in 2023.

Worse than Death?

Beth Warren, an investigative reporter for the Courier Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, said, “We were losing over an average of a person a day to an overdose death. And so I had parents who lost their son to fentanyl asking where all these drugs are coming from, that end up in Louisville, Kentucky.” She joined the DEA on a trip to Mexico in 2019 to learn more about a gang they were tracking, Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG). She said it’s “one of the top two cartels bringing the bulk of the illegal drugs into the U.S. The other one most people have heard of is Sinaloa, once headed by El Chapo.” She and her team turned their intel into a 28-page special section about CJNG. She said, “Their strategy is to go all across the U.S. into unexpected places, not just the major cities.”

Not only are cartels killing their customers, they are wrecking the young lives of their distributors. Ms. Warren said:

The cartels use street gangs in the U.S. to distribute a lot of the drugs, and the street gangs will use teenagers to do some of these revenge killings or some of the deals. So they’ll tell them, ‘if you get caught, you’re only gonna face juvenile time,’ which is not always true. But the juvenile falls for that. And so it’s people who are higher up in the food chain trying to insulate themselves.

She went on to say:

They certainly don’t care about the Americans that end up in prison as long as they’re silent. They don’t care that they’re destroying people’s lives. It’s a business… in their world, people being arrested and some of the drugs being confiscated is just considered part of the cost of doing business.

The National Drug Intelligence Center, which was absorbed into the DEA in 2012, described the crime that cartels foster, writing specifically about “meth” use in Oregon:

Increased abuse of methamphetamine fuels much of the area’s property crime. Methamphetamine abusers often commit identity fraud, property theft, and burglary to obtain money to purchase the drug. Additionally, abusers frequently steal metal from buildings, homes, power companies, and construction sites to sell to scrap companies for cash to support their addiction. Metal thefts include components of bridges…

They went on to detail several violent crimes resulting from drug trafficking, European Times adds money laundering and weapons smuggling to the list, and Warren rounds it out with stories of murder as an intimidation tactic.

Stopping the Cartels

A former Coast Guard pilot and officer wrote to IFA anonymously:

I was on a cutter deployment off Mexico in the late ‘90s with my helicopter crew that intercepted and busted a drug boat with 10+ tons of cocaine (U.S.’s second largest at the time). Interestingly, crew on the drug boat said it was their third run and first time being caught, showing you how vast the oceans are, and porous defenses with limited resources allow such opportunities to transport drugs.

At IFA’s initial Policy and Prayer, Frank Gaffney called fentanyl “a chemical warfare agent used very deliberately by the Chinese Communist Party to kill… Americans.” In addition to China having cartels stationed here, they’re also working with Mexican cartels to get their “weapon” across the border. European Times wrote, “The intricate relationship between Mexican drug cartels and their Chinese enablers poses a severe threat to global security and public health.”

Now that the Trump Administration has designated cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, the Department of Defense (DOD) has destroyed 15 vessels identified as transporting fentanyl or other narcotics in the past two months.

The former Coast Guard pilot and officer reacted to that:

I am happy that the current administration has ratcheted up our engagement strategy to terminate/shoot the narco-terrorist boats, a more effective deterrence!

Lord, we pray for those being harmed by the cartels. We pray for wisdom for Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and all decision makers at the DOD.

Post your prayers for this threat to Americans.

Rich Swingle has presented in 42 nations on six continents, mostly with his own one-man plays. Rich and his bride Joyce Swingle have 41 screen children. They have developed a “singing play” about the Welsh and Asbury Revivals. The Swingles live in New York City. www.RichDrama.com. Photo Credit: DEANewOrleans on X.