A 51-year-old Methuen man was arrested Thursday with more than 100 grams of fentanyl and nearly $19,000 in cash — another poison peddler taken off the streets by local cops because the feds won't secure the border that lets this stuff pour in.
Jose Jorge Villar already had a warrant out of Lowell District Court for three additional fentanyl trafficking charges when police from Tewksbury, Methuen, and Billerica took him down at a Tewksbury hotel, the Boston Herald reported. Cops seized 101.8 grams of suspected fentanyl, 24.4 grams of suspected crack cocaine, and $19,000 from his vehicle. He now faces two counts of trafficking fentanyl and one count of trafficking cocaine.
This is what enforcement looks like when Washington sits on its hands. Three local departments had to pool resources to catch a man already wanted on multiple trafficking charges. The fentanyl he was moving kills Americans by the tens of thousands every year — and every gram traces back to cartels that operate freely because the southern border remains wide open and the federal government refuses to shut it down.
Acting Methuen Police Chief James Moore got it right: "Drug trafficking does not stop at municipal boundaries, and neither should our efforts to combat it." The same logic applies at the national level. Trafficking doesn't stop at the Rio Grande either. But try getting anyone in Washington to act on that.
The drug devastation cuts across every community. At Cornell University's Chi Phi fraternity, someone overdosed on ketamine the night before a woman was allegedly drugged with the same substance and gang-raped at the same house, TMZ reported. A drug-related arrest was made the morning of the alleged assault. Cornell president Michael Kotlikoff praised the school's sexual assault task force for ushering in "substantial changes in education, prevention, and support." Two of the seven accused men were expelled. The drugs, meanwhile, keep showing up.
Merrimack Valley or the Ivy League — the poison doesn't discriminate. Local cops make the busts. Washington makes the excuses. Villar was already wanted on three trafficking charges when he was caught with enough fentanyl to kill a small city. How he kept operating long enough to accumulate them is a question nobody in the federal government will answer.
