AI in the Time of Fentanyl

The story of fentanyl traces a familiar path in the counternarcotics (CN) story in the United States. Its introduction to the US market was once shocking given its power and the swift and tragic affects it laid at the doorsteps of American families. The fight against fentanyl is at an inflection point because it threatens to become a common occurrence. Throughout the CN fight in the US, actions against the supply of narcotics into the US have waxed and waned but the deadly effects on the homeland have only risen. The lethality of fentanyl gives it the imperative to not allow a waning in the efforts to stop its entry into the US. When issues become common occurrence, they lose their immediacy. At DHS, the Department’s mission is to “with honor and integrity...safeguard the American people, our homeland, and our values.” All three of those sacred charges are directly affected by the illicit drug trade and fentanyl is particularly incipient. The security of the border, the safety of the American people and our communities are under direct attack by a narcotics adversary that towers over its predecessors in lethality. This moment of inflection is an opportunity. The rise in fentanyl caused traffickers to find and establish methods and routes to enter the US illegally. It also brought familiar competitors to the market in Mexican drug cartels. These actors have established supply chains, routes, and trusted networks to ensure the continued sale of their product while the brave law enforcement officials at DHS are forced to react to a game traffickers define. We are at a moment where technological development is meeting a mission inflection point. The imperative to action fentanyl for the good of the nation is occurring at the same time as a renewed emphasis on the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI). Using custom-built AI and leveraging direct experience in the CN fight on the ground, new opportunities will be created to change the game in favor of enforcement and interdiction and force the traffickers to respond to our actions. This strategic shift means no less than the life or death of American citizens and improved border security.  

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Deputy Secretary John Tien himself said it in a May 28, 2023 interview where he cited his personal credo of “duty, honor, country” referencing his task from Secretary Mayorkas to dismantle drug cartels.  

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"These cartels are responsible for human smuggling, human trafficking, narcotics trafficking in particular, who are making, shipping and selling dangerous and deadly narcotics"

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In addition to lethality, fentanyl is disrupting the CN mission in other ways. Throughout much of the CN fight in the US, traffickers brought a relatively consistent product through established routes to an eager US market. Those in the US market knew what they were buying, and the traffickers knew how to get it to them. In the case of cocaine, coca plants need specific conditions to grow limiting the locations from which the primary ingredient can be sourced. From those locations, there are a limited number of options to get the product to the US. Once in the US, the customers knew the type of drug they were buying and its potency with a relatively high level of confidence. What has changed historically are the organizations that control the production, trafficking, and distribution of the final product. As control and levels of violence shifted over time, the supply, production, trafficking routes and methods, and the product itself remained the same. Fentanyl is changing that dynamic by offering a product that is not consistent in its potency, can be manufactured anywhere, and is arriving via non-traditional routes. As this combination of ingredients mixes into a truly unappetizing dish, law enforcement and homeland security professionals must find new ways to approach the problem.

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Known Routes

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Every year, the CIA produces an unclassified report that estimates the size of the coca crop in South America. Coca is native to Peru and grows the best in its mountain environments in the east. Cartels pay the farmers far more than they would make on legitimate crops creating an economic need for cartel support to these farming communities. Production of coca leaves most often takes place in the mountains not far from where the leaves are harvested. Once processed into cocaine, the product begins a journey north to the lucrative US market.  

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Getting to the US takes place via land, sea, or air and depends largely on the control the cartel has over a particular piece of geography. Cartels need safe roads, friendly authorities, and reliable border crossing points to get the product to market. More recently, the answer has been a combination of maritime and land crossing. Multiple ton cocaine loads are taken to friendly South American ports such as Tumaco, Colombia or Guayquil, Ecuador where fishermen are paid a small sum to drive a drug-laden panga north to Guatemala or Mexico. The three-day, dogleg trip starts out with a westerly run toward the Galapagos where refueling takes place before a turn north toward the Mexico/Guatemala border. There it arrives in a friendly port where it is broken into smaller loads for the familiar trip north through Mexico and to the US border. There are variations on this route to include arrivals in personally owned vehicles, commercial trucks, tunnels, and drug mules but the process follows this framework. There are incidents of the use of containerized shipping but the collection on these containers is notoriously difficult. But throughout the supply chain, the emphasis is on the control of territory.

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While the product is different, heroin out of Afghanistan follows a similar pattern. Poppy is grown in provinces near Helmand where it is also processed into the final product. The product is smuggled across the border with Iran that is only a border in name and not considered a border by the Baluch people that live there. The journey ends at Chabahar, Iran, which, ironically, is also an Iranian naval base. Drug-laden dhows then make a slow journey to the east coast of Africa. Mozambique emerged as the destination of choice for heroin trafficking from Afghanistan along a maritime route called “the smack track.” In Mozambique traffickers had little to no risk of capture and seizure and plenty of small rural villages where traffickers are happy to move any quantity of drugs, animal products, guns, or people for the right price. The drugs move across Africa to west coast ports such as Guinea-Bissau where they are launched across the Atlantic. Collection on this part of the route is spotty but the presence of Afghan heroin in the US is not. Afghan heroin makes it to the US just like Mexican heroin through its journey is longer.

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A Lethal Threat

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The common thread is that the drug fight we are used to is not the one we are fighting with fentanyl. While the particulars and the specific players may evolve over time, coca is still native to Peru and processed cocaine still must come from there and make its way to the US. Cocaine can sport various levels of purity, but it is largely predictable for both law enforcement and users. Heroin from Afghanistan likewise must move from the source zone to the market. The US is by far the most lucrative drug market in the world, making long journeys through poor regions worth the cost. Fentanyl on the other hand is a different game entirely. Fentanyl can come from anywhere and enter the US through new means such as mail. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) began tracking fentanyl shipments in 2015 and by 2022 they recorded 14,700 pounds of fentanyl seized or over 6,000,000,000 milligrams. According to the US Census Bureau, the population of the US in 2023 is 334,759,654 people. It takes about two milligrams of fentanyl to kill a person if inhaled so 6 billion milligrams will kill the entire US population 8 times over. That statement sounds like hyperbole, but it is real, and it is happening every day a threat on that scale is a threat to American citizens, values, and the homeland.

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The second takeaway is that the routes to which homeland security authorities are accustomed are used for fentanyl while adding new ones. While this alone may not be news, the lesson learned from the cocaine and heroin supply chain is that traffickers rely on trusted networks and geography they control. Denial of either the networks or the geography requires traffickers to move into the open and change their approach leaving them exposed to detection and disruption. The answer is not to try to interdict our way out of the fentanyl fight because while 14,700 pounds (about twice the weight of an elephant) of fentanyl in 2022 is a shocking number, it is just what was seized. The fentanyl trade remains profitable even in the face of a loss of 14,700 pounds of product. As production facilities pop up nearer to the US border and Chinese fentanyl manufacturers take direct to consumer orders online, the answer is not to try to interdict every milligram but to begin to deny traffickers access to their trusted networks and geography. This is where AI can help.

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Long a fixture of the CN fight in the US has been the photo of the law enforcement and political officials in front of a table full of weapons and bails of seized narcotics. This photo is meant to convey success, but it betrays a vulnerability that has always been, and continues to be, exploited by traffickers. Interdictions on land, sea, or air are viewed as proof positive that the US authorities are winning, but the idea that the US will ever interdict enough narcotics loads to make more than a fleeting difference in the behavior of traffickers is a myth. Another symbolic win is the capture of high-profile leaders of cartels or other organizations. These operations make headlines but hardly move the needle on the number of real narcotics entering the US each day and, by extension, the amount of narcotics ending up in the bodies of American citizens. This trend has been difficult for the US to reverse because high-profile arrests and large interdictions translate into publicity and budget dollars. Interdictions are barely viewed as more than a low-level tax on operations for traffickers because they are sending more loads than we interdict with our limited resources by multiple factors. Interdictions at the US border impose the most cost on traffickers but are still a marginal loss for any organization.

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Use Case 1: Force Disposition

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AI can help law enforcement to position its law enforcement resources in the most impactful locations to give our officers the best information possible on how to affect strategic interdictions that will deny the use of critical territory to traffickers. Law enforcement and border forces have considerable data from previous interdictions and intelligence sources that can give a picture of where interdictions happen most frequently. That approach, however, tells a false tale. Instead of seeing where shipments were detected, the value is in seeing the most optimal routes based on a set of conditions. Even more valuable than data on previous interdictions are data on border crossings, disposition of CBP officials, locations of maritime forces, Mexican law enforcement details, distances to major roads, and much more. These data create a picture of what the traffickers need to accomplish their goal, getting their product into the US and to the market. It creates a picture of the critically important villages, roads, border checkpoints, and other geography that helps to avoid detection. An AI system can be created that takes in these data and optimizes routes based on a set of requirements such as avoiding law enforcement and getting to major US cities.  

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AI for route detection and optimization can apply across multiple shipping domains and give officials a chance to do what will hurt the traffickers the most; deny them the safe use of territory. AI allows this approach to be scaled for the first time in history and scaling the denial of strategic geography is an approach that traffickers have not seen. At scale, this strategy forces traffickers to change their tactics and switch to less optimal routes and means of shipment. They will have to find new, perhaps less trusted, networks exposing them to more risk. As the risk compounds, the traffickers must change their behavior and homeland security officers will be ready.

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Use Case 2: Evidence Processing

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Law enforcement officers from DHS risk their lives to serve warrants on high-risk individuals and locations in service of the CN mission. As technology proliferates, the take from these operations has grown at an exponential rate. Traffickers and distributors have phones, laptops, external hard drives, and other devices that hold potentially valuable evidence that can support follow-on operations, indictments, provisional arrest warrants (PAW), extraditions, or other actions that can help to raise the number of successful prosecutions. The challenge is that there is so much data that going through all of it to find those critical pieces of information takes an extremely long time and requires significant manpower. The length of time required to process such large takes may result in missed opportunities and missed opportunities translate into more drugs moving into more American veins. Another significant opportunity for AI to make an impact in real terms is to deploy a custom AI system that can sort large volumes of data in seconds and produce visualizations that give the experienced law enforcement officers better information with which to plan additional operations or for prosecutors to make better cases.  

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AI can enable a reduction in the time between operations by providing useful, digestible, and actionable information derived from huge amounts of data quickly. At the same time, it can contribute to increased information sharing with federal, state, local, and international partners. It can further normalize, standardize, and label the data to be run against historical holdings by analysts to identify more and non-obvious connections. Finally, it can generate reports that can be used to support legal actions such as indictments, PAWs, extraditions, and more.  

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Final Words:  

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Fentanyl is more challenging because it arrives from multiple directions and arrives in some cases through legitimate conveyance such as the US mail or containerized shipping. It also arrives through more traditional narcotics routes from Mexico. Asking law enforcement and customs officials to increase their interdictions given this environment is not realistic. They will, of course, continue to perform bravely and will make interdictions but they will never cross the threshold of causing real change in the behavior of traffickers, particularly those in China who are far from the reach of the US legal system. With the help of advanced technology, homeland security authorities can change the strategic picture and affect the inbound flow of fentanyl into the US in real numbers. Optimizing force disposition with the explicit goal of denying traffickers the use of the most critical and strategic pieces of geography is the first step and AI can be custom built by domain experts to accomplish this task. Pairing this capability with the capability to quickly identify new leads and compile compelling evidence resulting from CN operations creates a strategic advantage for homeland authorities not seen in the history of the CN fight. Fentanyl is at an inflection point at the exact moment when AI has matured to meet the challenge. DHS has held its charge to secure the homeland sacred since its founding in 2002. A threat violent enough to kill all our citizens demands the maximum effort of our very best supported by the best technology available.  

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Interdicting single loads at an irregular pace is not sufficient to change the fentanyl inflection point in our favor. The disruption and ultimate denial of the geography that traffickers depend on will impose a cost that is much harder to recover. It also forces these networks to use less optimal routes, which increases their probability of detection. Geographic denial is possible if operations are planned in the right places and disruption is consistent enough to change behavior. Geographic denial at scale will cause a real reduction in the inbound flow of fentanyl, which is directly equal to a real reduction in the deaths of American citizens. It is time to give the advantage over to our brave law enforcement and border officials who are living the DHS mission statement on the ground every day. Technology is what will confer that advantage. An AI-enabled advantage in the hands of the best and bravest law enforcement and customs officers in the world is truly powerful and it is what the reality of the fight demands.  

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