Remarks as prepared for delivery
Thank you, Bob, for that kind introduction. And thank you for your 40 years of faithful
service in and around law enforcement – both to the people of Minnesota and to
our narcotics officers. Thank you for your commitment to drug enforcement in
the face of naïve criticisms – and thank for your and the Association’s strong
support for me, personally.
I want to thank all of the federal officers who are here
with us today, who do so much to fight opioid trafficking across state lines
and even international lines.
That includes Kristi Johnson of the FBI, Robert Nieves of
DEA, and five officers from the Department of Homeland Security.
And while we are inexpressibly proud of our fabulous federal
officers, we also understand and appreciate the fact that 85 percent of the law
enforcement officers in this country serve at the state and local levels. You are in the trenches every day gathering
the intelligence and making the cases that can lead to national and even
international cases.
We’ve got officers here from Los Angeles to Houston to
Milwaukee to Baltimore. We’ve got
officers from big cities and from rural areas.
We all have different jurisdictions, but we are all united
in one mission.
And so I wanted to be here today on behalf of President
Donald Trump to tell each and every officer here how much we value your work
and to thank you for your service.
I also want to give a special thank you to my friends from
the FOP, the National Sheriffs Association, and the Major County Sheriffs
Association who are here today.
Our shared work has never been more important than it is
right now.
Today we are facing the deadliest drug crisis in American
history. We’ve never seen anything like
it.
The CDC estimates that approximately 72,000 Americans lost
their lives to drug overdoses last year.
That’s highest drug death toll in American history—by far.
It is widely estimated that life expectancy has declined in
the United States in recent years—largely because of drug abuse.
Meanwhile, millions of people are living with the painful
consequences of a family member’s addiction or an addiction of their own.
As you all know, this crisis is being driven primarily by
opioids – prescription painkillers, heroin, and synthetic drugs like
fentanyl. In 2016, opioid overdoses
killed 42,000 Americans—five times the number from 20 years ago.
I personally know people whose families have been torn apart
by drug addiction. These days it is a
safe assumption that most of you do, too.
We also have a serious and growing cocaine problem in this
country. It’s purer, cheaper, and more
available. Cocaine-related deaths have
nearly tripled the United States since 2010.
And our DEA agents in the West tell us that methamphetamine is their
number-one problem.
The situation is daunting and the challenge is great. But we have a unique opportunity to reverse
these trends.
I know that sometimes in the past, you haven’t had the
support that you deserve. You’ve had
politicians that tie your hands, who fail to understand the challenges you
face, and who are in denial about the nature and extent of the problem.
But not this administration.
In the face of an unprecedented crisis we have to take
unprecedented action.
And with President Donald Trump, that is exactly what we are
doing.
President Trump has a comprehensive plan to end what he has
declared to be “a national public health emergency.” The Three legs of our plan include
prevention, enforcement and treatment.
He has improved our prevention efforts by launching a
national awareness campaign about the dangers of opioid abuse—a campaign I
strongly support. In the long run,
getting more and more people to reject use of these drugs in the first place is
the best thing we can do.
He has set the ambitious goal of reducing opioid
prescriptions in America by one-third in three years—a goal we are determined
to achieve. And he is a strong supporter
of our law enforcement efforts.
He has ordered me to seek the death penalty for certain drug
dealers—something no president had done before him.
He recognizes that law enforcement is a component of crime
prevention.
hen we enforce our drug laws, we prevent addiction from
spreading. The work that you do helps
keep drugs out of our country, reduces their availability, drives up their
price, and reduces their purity and addictiveness. That saves lives. Experts tell us supply
creates its own demand.
Under the previous administration, in drug cases, the
Department of Justice directed federal prosecutors not to include in charging
documents the full amount of drugs being dealt if it would trigger certain
mandatory minimum sentences. Prosecutors
were required to leave out facts in order to achieve sentences lighter than
required by law.
That is an improper and dangerous policy. It weakens
enforcement and reduces cooperation.
After they put this directive into place, drug prosecutions
went down by 17 percent. And the average
sentence length for a convicted federal drug trafficking offender decreased 15
percent.
Even if everything were going well, that still wouldn’t make
sense. But we were suffering from the
worst drug crisis in our history.
And so, when I became Attorney General, I restored the
charging policy of this Department to the traditional one that was in place
when I was in trying cases and through much of the Obama Administration.
And in the districts where drug deaths are the highest, we
are now vigorously prosecuting synthetic opioid trafficking cases, even when
the amount is small. It’s called
Operation Synthetic Opioid Surge—or S.O.S.
We are in a desperate fight to curtail the availability and
spread of this killer drug. Synthetic opioids are so strong that there is no
such thing as a small case. Three milligrams
of fentanyl can be fatal. That’s
equivalent to a pinch of salt. Depending
on the purity, you could fit more than 1,000 fatal doses of fentanyl in a
teaspoon.
I want to be clear about this: we are not focusing on users,
but on those supplying them with deadly drugs.
In Manatee County, Florida, in partnership with the Sheriff,
we tried this strategy and it worked.
This past January, they had half the number of overdose deaths as the
previous January.
The Manatee County Sheriff’s Office went from responding to
11 overdose calls a day to an average of one a day. Those are promising results.
We want to replicate those results in the places that have
been hardest hit.
And so I have also sent 10 more prosecutors to help
implement this strategy in ten districts where drug deaths are especially high.
And that is in addition to the 12 prosecutors I sent to
prosecute opioid fraud in drug “hot spot districts.” To help them do that, I have begun a new data
analytics program at the Department called the Opioid Fraud and Abuse Detection
Unit to use data to find opioid-related health care fraud.
This team follows the numbers—like which doctors are writing
opioid prescriptions at a rate that far exceeds their peers; how many of a
doctor's patients have died within 60 days of an opioid prescription;
pharmacies that are dispensing disproportionately large amounts of opioids; and
regional hot spots for opioid issues.
I have also sent more than 300 new federal prosecutors to
our U.S. Attorneys offices across America.
This is the largest surge in prosecutors in decades. You can be sure
drugs, gangs, and related violence will be a priority for them.
And we have also hired more than 400 DEA task force officers
this year alone. That’s a record
increase.
All of these new tools have helped us to deliver results for
the American people.
Since January 2017, we have charged more than 200 doctors
and another 220 other medical personnel for opioid-related crimes. Just sixteen
of those doctors prescribed more than 20.3 million pills illegally.
Last summer we set a record for the largest health care
fraud enforcement action in American history.
This summer, we broke that record.
We coordinated the efforts of more than 1,000 state and
federal law enforcement agents to charge more than 600 defendants—including 76
doctors—with more than $2 billion in fraud.
This was the most doctors, the most medical personnel, the
most fraud, and the most opioid-related fraud defendants we’ve ever charged in
a single enforcement action.
But sadly, these days you don’t have to go to a street
corner or find a crooked doctor to buy drugs.
Many now use a few clicks of a button to go online and have them shipped
from overseas right to their door.
Last July, the Department announced the seizure of the
largest dark net marketplace in history – AlphaBay. This site hosted some 220,000 drug listings
and was responsible for countless synthetic opioid overdoses, including the
tragic death of a 13 year old.
In January we began J-CODE, a new team at the FBI that
focuses specifically on the threat of online opioid sales. They have already begun carrying out
nationwide enforcement actions, arresting dozens of people across the country.
We need to work together on this – on controlled deliveries – so it becomes
clear that internet distribution is no safe path.
Last month I announced charges against a married couple who
we believe were once the most prolific synthetic opioid, fentanyl, traffickers
on the darknet in North America. We had
worked with our partners in Canada to help them indict a man we believe was the
third most prolific darknet synthetic opioid dealer in North America.
The vast majority of the fentanyl in this country was made
in China. And under President Donald
Trump we became the first administration to prosecute Chinese fentanyl
traffickers.
Last October, we announced the first two indictments against
Chinese nationals for trafficking synthetic drugs in the United States.
Last month I announced our third case—a 43-count indictment
against a drug trafficking organization based in Shanghai.
We are interdicting drugs coming into this country at record
levels.
In 2017, Customs and Border Protection seized 63 percent
more cocaine at our borders as they seized just two years before.
Meanwhile, the Coast Guard seized record numbers of drugs:
about half a million pounds total, worth about $6.1 billion. The Coast Guard also helped us arrest more
than 600 alleged drug traffickers.
In just the first three months of 2018, the DEA seized a
total of more than 200 pounds of suspected fentanyl in cases from Detroit to
Boston. Depending on its purity, that
can be enough to kill tens of millions of people.
In 2017, we tripled the number of fentanyl prosecutions at
the federal level.
We are back in the effort at historic levels.
The DEA’s National Prescription Audit shows that in the
first quarter of 2018, opioid prescriptions went down by nearly 12 percent
compared to the first quarter of 2017, when President Trump took office. And that's in addition to a 7 percent decline
in 2017.
And while 2017 saw more overdose deaths than 2016, data for
the last months of the year show that the increases may have slowed.
And by the way: our anti-drug efforts are helping us achieve
our other major priority: reducing violent crime in America.
The day I was sworn in as Attorney General, the President
gave me three clear orders: back the men and women in blue, reduce crime in
America, and dismantle transnational criminal organizations.
By supporting your work, we can accomplish all three.
As surely as night follows day—violence, addiction and death
follow drug activity.
When the drug epidemic was accelerating—so was violent crime
and so was murder. That was no
coincidence.
In 2015, the homicide rate increased by 12 percent
nationally. And it increased again by 8
percent in 2016. Violent crime, rape,
robbery, and assault increased during that time, too.
But preliminary data show that both the violent crime rate
and the homicide rate are beginning to head back down.
Public data from 88 large cities suggest that violent crime
went down in the first quarter of 2018 compared to 2017. Violent crime went down 6.8 percent and murder
is going down in 2018 by 5.5 percent.
We are right to celebrate these accomplishments, but we have
to acknowledge that we still have a lot more work together to do.
That’s why we are going to keep arming you with the tools
that you need to keep drugs out of this community. We are going to keep up this pace.
We are committed to breaking the vicious cycle of drug
abuse, addiction, and overdose that has devastated countless American families.
I have personally stood shoulder-to-shoulder with our narcotics officers and I
know the challenges you face and the malicious forces you confront daily.
And so I want to close by reiterating my deep appreciation
and profound thanks to each one of you: our narcotics officers– federal, state,
local, and tribal – as well as your families, for sacrificing so much and
putting your lives on the line every day so that the rest of us may enjoy the
safety and security you provide.
The work that you do is essential. I believe it.
The Department of Justice believes it. And President Trump believes it.
You can be certain about this: we have your back and you
have our thanks.
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