Fentanyl trafficking is big business in the Queen City. Feds want to run it dry.
Charlotte’s fentanyl problem has prompted federal attention and intervention.
Officials involved in a U.S. Treasury program rolled out under President Joe Biden met in Charlotte Wednesday to join private and public leaders — from federal agents to sheriffs to bankers — to learn how to better shut down fentanyl traffickers’ business operations.
Charlotte — the country’s second-largest banking center — was one of the first seven U.S. cities the program, called PROTECT, visited since it launched in May. It is focused almost entirely on finding fentanyl dealers and suppliers and severing them from their money.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina has a similar program in place, but the federal involvement will enhance how information is shared between private and public sectors — or between federal agents, sheriffs and bankers, officials said. It is designed to give prosecutors more insight into how dealers move money, from quick ATM deposits to big bank account transfers.
Fentanyl has killed 37,000 North Carolinans in the last two decades, according to N.C. Department of Justice data.
The highly addictive and lethal synthetic opioid has flooded communities around Charlotte and overwhelmed local jails, police departments, courts and even classrooms, The Charlotte Observer previously reported.
Grassroots organizations, like the nonprofit Fentanyl Victims Network of North Carolina, tackle the trickle-down effect of fentanyl’s pervasiveness.
“A person like me — a person with a dead kid — I’m worried about getting dealers off the street,” said Barb Walsh, the executive director of the nonprofit.
The U.S. Treasury Department exists in a different sphere, she said, but those spheres can’t stay separate for much longer.
“If there’s nobody else at the national level trying to help,” she said, “then what we’re doing won’t matter.”
Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo, in an interview with The Charlotte Observer, said the department is focused on cutting the drug off at its source.
“If you are a drug dealer or if you are someone who’s running a distribution network,” he said, “you should know, and your family should know that we’re going to come after the money you are making by selling these drugs into these communities and killing our local citizens.”
