The report said Mexican cartels began operating on Indian reservations where law enforcement was lacking, flooding Montana with fentanyl and methamphetamine.
“They know who to choose,” said Stephanie Iron Shooter, director of American Indian Health for the Montana Department of Health and Human Services. he told NBC News.
“Just like any other prey-versus-predator situation, that’s the way it is.”
Drug traffickers discovered that notoriously deadly fentanyl was selling for nearly 20 times more in the remote Big Sky Country, a population of 1.2 million spread over 150,000 square miles of rugged terrain. did.
They would first target Native Americans by distributing drugs and turning them into addicts, said former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Stacey Ginn.
“The cartel is going to send out advance troops and individuals to find out who is distributing small amounts to this reservation and who they can get their hands on,” Jin said. He first investigated a Mexican cartel from Texas and then tracked it to Montana.
“And when they do that, they own them. We’ve seen it time and time again.”
Montana’s vast remoteness works in their favor, and law enforcement already struggles to cover its extensive territory.
Additional challenges are added when human trafficking occurs on Native American land. There, local and state authorities are prohibited from arresting tribal members, and underfunded and understaffed tribal forces are largely prohibited from arresting outsiders on reservations.
Loopholes in the law provide security for cartels to operate in Montana, but the demand for drugs makes it even more attractive to traffickers.
NBC reports that counterfeit fentanyl pills, which can be made in Mexico for less than 25 cents, sell for $3 to $5 in cities like Seattle and Denver, where drug markets are more established, but in remote parts of Montana. It sells for up to $100.
The perfect storm makes the cartel’s 1,300-mile journey from the southern border well worth it.
“The profits are just out of this world,” Jin told the outlet.
The drug crisis is hitting Native American communities hard, who make up less than 7% of Montana’s population. Census data shows.
In the decade ending in 2020, the overdose death rate for Native Americans was more than twice that of white Montana residents.
From 2017 to 2020, Montana’s opioid overdose death rate nearly tripled, with nearly eight drug-related deaths per 100,000 people reported that year. State Department of Health and Human Services.
“It looks like fentanyl is raining on our reservation right now,” Marvin Weatherwax Jr., who serves on the Blackfeet Tribal Business Council and represents Montana’s 15th Congressional District, told NBC. told.
Some desperate tribes have tried to fight back despite limited resources.
The Northern Cheyenne Nation has formed its own vigilante group, People’s Camp, to combat the surge in violent crime and drug trafficking plaguing the community.
In 2022, the tribe filed a lawsuit against the Department of the Interior and its Bureau of Indian Affairs, alleging that the federal government failed to provide adequate law enforcement officers and violated its duty to protect the safety of reservation residents.
