By Robert Dean
Carter County Times
I know people who’ve died from overdoses. I also know people who’ve been saved with a timely Narcan administration. The pollution of fentanyl in street drugs is widespread in America. This isn’t a hot take. People are dying. This is reality.
What’s not rooted in reality, though, is this idea that Venezuela is some major drug trafficking center. We all know that’s a false narrative. Mexico is where the cartels live. Venezuela is where a corrupt government that refuses to play ball with the United States on oil lives. That’s what creates this optical illusion for political theater—when anyone with a working internet connection can tell you the plain truth about where the drugs actually come from.
Despite political rhetoric pointing fingers at Venezuela, the fentanyl crisis is overwhelmingly rooted in Mexico, where major cartels like Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation operate large-scale labs manufacturing fentanyl using precursor chemicals shipped from China and India. These organizations control production, distribution, and smuggling networks that move the drug across the U.S. border—primarily through official ports of entry, not remote desert crossings. According to the DEA’s 2024 National Drug Threat Assessment, nearly 97 percent of the fentanyl seized in the U.S. originates from Mexico, and more than 80 percent of those seizures occur at legal border crossings. Venezuela plays virtually no direct role in this supply chain; the problem is entrenched in Mexico’s criminal economy, not its neighbors.
This isn’t an anti-Mexico statement. I’m pro-immigration. I’m for people living their best lives. As I’ve said before, I’d rather have a family who walked through hell to be my neighbor than the guy down the street who just won the birth lottery. What I’m calling out is the Trump administration’s false narrative that we’re somehow attacking the “war on drugs.” That war has proven over and over to be a pointless war of attrition—and now we’re blaming Venezuela? Nah, bro. That ain’t it. They didn’t make Narcos or Sicario about Argentina, did they?
When a suit starts yapping about “drug traffickers” in Venezuela while ignoring the very real cartel networks operating just across our southern border, the lingo isn’t about saving American lives—it’s setting the stage for regime change. Venezuela’s government, for all its corruption and dysfunction, sits on the largest proven oil reserves in the world—about 18 percent of the global total, according to BP’s 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy. Maduro refuses to play nice with Washington or American energy interests. That’s the common thread in every so-called “intervention” we’ve ever justified: gussy it up as fighting drugs, terrorism, or tyranny, but the prize is always oil.
If this were about saving lives, we’d be investing in treatment, education, and harm reduction, not missiles and PR campaigns. If this were about stopping fentanyl, we’d be working with Mexico and China to crush the chemical supply chain instead of potentially bombing Caracas. We’ve seen this play before—in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and a dozen other countries where our “good intentions” left chaos in their wake. Before you know it, we’re happy to see someone get shoved out the door, the country falls apart, and we stuff our pockets before turning the land back over—only in worse shape than when we found it.
It’s a familiar pattern. Google it. I’d tell you they’d teach this stuff in school, but when we’re still arguing over whether a kid can read Charlotte’s Web or Notes of a Native Son, making sure kids have a solid understanding of political corruption might be a little above the average teacher’s pay grade.
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