Drug industry, social media helped fuel fentanyl crisis

The U.S. drug industry played a role in the start of America’s current fentanyl crisis, according to Sherri Hobson, a former assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego.

For years, the U.S. drug industry pushed legal opioids until the U.S. government and state attorneys general cracked down on the drug industry. The legal supply of opioids dried up, but demand from Americans addicted to the drugs did not. Hobson says the Mexican cartels started churning out fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, to fill the void for people addicted to painkillers. 

“It’s very strange to think that the pharmaceutical industry basically set the table for the Mexican cartels to come in and dominate,” Hobson said. 

From legal opioids to deadly fentanyl 

The drug industry pushed oxycodone, hydrocodone and other pain killers for decades, Hobson said. Millions of people became addicted.

“The public was outraged that the pharmaceutical industry was doing this,” Hobson said. “That they lied about, you know, that it wasn’t addictive when it was highly addictive.”

The U.S. government cracked down on the drug industry and many companies were sued by ravaged communities. 

Hobson, who retired in 2020, became very familiar with Mexican cartels in her 30 years as an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego. She said the cartels’ move into fentanyl was entirely predictable. 

“Cartels are very business oriented. They look for profit,” Hobson said. “They look for perpetual power. They’re institutionalized.”

Social media fuels the crisis

Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Anne Milgram agrees the U.S. drug industry bears a lot of the blame for starting the crisis. 

“The opioid epidemic definitely started this arc that we’re on,” Milgram said. 

But she says social media is fueling the fentanyl crisis today. Cartels use social media to organize themselves, to find people who will carry the drug’s over the border from Mexico, and to advertise and sell drugs.

“Whether it’s Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, there are drugs being sold there every single day,” Milgram said.

Social media companies have put out numerous statements promising they are taking steps to combat this. 

Bill Whitaker

Bill Whitaker is an award-winning journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent who has covered major news stories, domestically and across the globe, for more than four decades with CBS News.