Content Warning: drugs and addiction
Drug cartels are threatening the health and safety of Native American communities by trafficking dangerous, illegal drugs into their territories. The overdose rate for Native Americans in the United States from 2001 to 2021 was 24.2 percentage points higher than the national average. Additionally, from 2022 to 2023, there was a 78% increase in seizures of fentanyl in the states of Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah, states where there is a high concentration of Native Americans. Tribal leaders and former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) members are calling for assistance and attention to this issue.
Drug cartels began targeting Native American communities after discovering that fentanyl would sell for almost twenty times its usual price. Stacey Zinn, resident agent in charge of the DEA in Montana, stated, “[m]embers of the cartel will prey on the Native Community by giving small amounts of drugs for free or have the individuals start selling for the cartels in order to get a payout in drugs.” Agent Zinn discusses how this leads to a vicious cycle where individuals become in debt to the cartels. First, the cartels have taken advantage of the federal government’s inability to coordinate with tribal groups to stop the infiltration of drugs. Second, there is a lack of federal agents able to cover these large terrains. The Northern Cheyenne tribe relies on two Bureau of Indian Affairs (“BIA”) tribal police officers to cover 440,000 acres and 6,000 people, and the Crow Reservation has four to six officers to cover an area the size of Rhode Island. Further, at one point in 2022, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians had one BIA agent for five reservations. The jurisdictional complexities of addressing crimes in tribal territories, the remote geography, and the shortage of law enforcement allow the cartels, specifically the Sinaloa and the Jalisco New Generation cartels, to effectively take over these communities. Tribal leaders report that the cartel members learn to blend into their communities and sometimes even marry into families to sell drugs more easily. Tribal leaders have even described the use of social media to infiltrate the community with promises of wealth and prosperity for vulnerable populations.
In 2022, the Northern Cheyenne tribe sued the Interior Department and the (BIA), alleging in its complaint that “[t]he population of the Reservation is substantially harmed . . .[by] drug-related crime and the resulting impacts to the entire Reservation community” and “[f]or multiple years, no drug enforcement officers were assigned to Northern Cheyenne; when the Tribe attempted to contract a drug enforcement officer position via the ISDEAA [Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act], BIA refused.” In 2023, the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs held an Oversight Hearing titled “Fentanyl in Native Communities: Federal Perspectives on Addressing the Growing Crisis.” The hearing discussed the effect of the fentanyl crisis on Native American populations and the use of The High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (“HIDTA”) Program to combat the flow of illicit drugs by transnational organized crime networks and international drug cartels into tribal lands.
The HIDTA program is a great start, but there must be coordination among federal law enforcement officers and tribal groups to combat the fentanyl epidemic on Native American land. Jamie Azure, Chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians stated, “We can't wait anymore” when he testified to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. Action must be taken now to stop fentanyl from entering Native American lands before more lives are lost to this epidemic.
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