[police radio chatter].
- If I had one wish,
it would be that the fentanyl would just stop.
There's a lot of other drugs out there,
but this one is the most deadly.
[radio chatter].
It's the most dangerous drug,
illicit drug that I've seen in my career.
And it's not even close.
- Tonight we are getting a glimpse
into the war against fentanyl.
- Officials say they seized more than 6,700 pounds
of the synthetic opioid.
- We don't have anything in our history
that was an immediate killer like fentanyl is.
- 60% of the fentanyl is coming through
the San Diego-Mexico border
or just the contiguous county, Imperial County.
- He's going through withdrawals right now.
- This is like every day, like five or ten a day.
- It's just troubling how often officers are going out.
- In 2019, we had 152 overdose deaths
from fentanyl in San Diego County.
2020, that number went to 462.
And then in one more year, 2021,
we had 817 overdose deaths from fentanyl.
- Fentanyl cases on the rise throughout San Diego County.
Officials say they seized more than 6,700 pounds
of the synthetic opioid.
- We didn't get ahead of fentanyl.
- I'm the field lieutenant.
I work nights, from 4:00 pm to 4:00 am.
I monitor everything that's going on in the city.
And when there's a hot call, something that's high-risk
or a call where we're going to have
a lot of police officers there,
I'll monitor those, or I will actually go to the scenes.
So, from my experience, when somebody overdoses on fentanyl,
they'll drop very soon after they've used.
They may not even know that they took what they took.
When we have little blue M30 pills,
people think that those are pharmaceutical-grade pills,
when in reality they're pressed in somebody's garage
or in a warehouse somewhere.
So, this is a death call.
Usually when we get a call like this,
it's someone who's overdosed.
When you guys got here, medics got here at the same time?
- I showed up with fire. Medics came after.
- Okay. - I'm sorry, fire.
- And who gave the first Narcan?
- I'm not too sure, to be honest with you.
- All of our officers now are issued Narcan
in four-milligram doses.
Narcan's like the miracle drug.
- Right.
- I mean, that's the one chance that they have of survival.
- I thought it was, like, one of those fake OxyContin pills.
- The blue ones?
- Yeah, that's what I thought it was.
- Okay.
- Did you take some? - No.
No, I just smoke weed.
- I'm asking because I'm concerned.
- I just really haven't -- -Do you know if there's any more
of those pills here at all, so we can get rid of them?
- I don't think so. - Okay.
- She went to the bathroom, had her fun,
and pretty soon after that, I called the ambulance.
- Okay. Good for you.
- Unresponsive, and I was like, I'm not gonna [bleep] around.
- So, I'll tell you this. You saved her life.
Okay?
- Thank you.
Thank you. - They can inject it.
They can snort it.
They'll take a piece of tin foil,
they'll put it on there, and they'll light it underneath,
and they'll inhale the burn from that.
A deadly dose of fentanyl is so small that
in that 30-milligram pill,
you just don't know how much actual fentanyl is in there.
- We are the busiest port of entry in the world.
We see over 100,000 travelers inbound from Mexico
to the US every single day.
It really serves as ground zero
when we see narcotic-smuggling trends.
- There's an abundance of fentanyl in Mexico.
So, we think that the cartels now,
they're getting their chemicals from Asia or other places,
then they're building it or making it in labs in Mexico.
- When everything is a chemical that can be brought
from five different countries and then you can make it
in two hours in a hotel room in Tijuana, it's mobile.
This is really where the bigger challenges
are to law enforcement.
- This used to be a warehouse
where drugs and vehicles were stored.
Piñatas were one of the ways they used to move product,
to move drugs from here to the United States.
Putting 10,000 or 20,000 pills in a vehicle for them
is relatively simple to do in compartments.
- It's $1,000 an ounce for powdered fentanyl,
so they don't have to smuggle as much of it to make a profit.
How do you find five ounces on a person,
or even if they're in a car driving, right,
without a K9 alert?
It's frustrating for all of law enforcement.
One way to for sure stop the flow of drugs
is for people in the United States
just to stop using drugs and stop buying drugs.
- These overdose calls are happening all the time.
It's an overdose call.
And it was a friend saying that his friend is overdosing
on an unknown-type drug.
There are a lot of stressors in law enforcement.
They have the machine working on him like that.
It's not good.
Now it seems like we're responding to try
and save people from this, this drug.
- You guys want this? - Can you swap it?
Swap it around? - Yep.
- Because the faster we can get there,
the better the chance that the person survives.
And I imagine it's not looking good.
- What's that? - Not looking good?
- No. - Okay.
- Are we really, in the nation,
treating it like the epidemic emergency it is?
What are we nationally doing to get that message out?
- So, it's an overdose death.
He's not pronounced at this point.
It goes after everyone.
It's not just one demographic.
It's not drug users.
It's not homeless.
It's anyone.
This is something that's out there in our communities.
It's just a shame that we've gotten to this.
[radio chatter].