The Drug Enforcement Agency – DEA office aiming solely at the opioid crisis and the ways to tackle the out of control drug overdose deaths and the problems being faced because of the drug trafficking through the Mexican border has been set up as per the DEA chief-to-be D. Christopher Evans.
Evans is serving as the Associate Special Agent in Charge for the Detroit Field office and would be moving up to the designation of the Special Agent in Charge for the DEA’s Louisville Division. This new premises would be 22nd premises for DEA, to be used as the field office. The field office is expected to combine the operations of Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee as a network. All of these states were before handled under the umbrella of other field offices.
The 25 year old veteran had joined the Detroit office, which was responsible to watch over the operations in Kentucky. Before that, Evans had worked in Los Angeles as an agent and then supervisor in the border’s constant drug war. Furthermore, he had also served on the DEA Head office working along-side the head of the agency.
His work in both, the Louisville and the Detroit office, was differently as he had to face completely different situations and had to work hard in order to solve them. On the Border, he said that he “would have been looking more at direct contact with the sources, and trying to stem the flow as it comes into the country. [In Louisville], what we’re trying to do is make sure that we can really make an impact with protecting the community. That’s what it’s all about in terms of what’s done in the region, is really what we do to stop the threat to the community, what we do to make sure the people that are trying to prey on the community don’t have the opportunity to do that.”
The high and rapidly increasing rate of deaths caused by the drug overdose have a large contribution from Heroin and Fentanyl. Both these drugs are brought in the U.S. and distributed in it by the Mexican Drug Dealers.
As per an informative documentary, the increase in the kinds of drugs now being produced is because of the growing market of drugs and opioids and the vast use of the drugs all over the U.S. This has, in turn, caused a boom in the Mexican business of drug trading, and a huge increase in the drug related deaths.
“What we’re seeing in the region is more and more of our investigations focus on heroin trafficking, and we’ve seen more instances of Mexican-based sources of supply sending heroin and meth directly from Kentucky and the region,” Evans said. “We really have had an uptick in what we’ve seen in our investigations in terms of the source of supply being Mexico-based, and operating deliveries from California directly into the area. And that’s something which has changed in the last few years.”
“What has changed is, they are increasingly focusing on this area as a place to seek profits,” Evans added. “It’s not that their methodologies have changed so much, as they continue to be imaginative in the ways that they will try to smuggle things in. What we think is different is that the volume of what they’re doing in this region is different, and their focus on trying to make a profit out of the people who we’re here to serve, is what’s different.”
However, Evan is confident in his fight against drugs and lays down importance on the fact that the need to address the opioid crisis from a different perspective is necessary, he says, “What we look to do is to focus our efforts on to really benefit the community, and right now the biggest threat to the community is the opioid crisis, and that’s where we’re going to focus our attention. That does not mean we’ll ignore other things, but we will focus our attention on how we best impact the community to help with the opioid crisis.”