Drug cartels are targeting Montana

Illegal drugs have long come up from Mexico into more remote parts of the United States, including large swaths of the sparsely populated Northwest U.S. But there is increasing evidence that one state in particular, Montana, is being heavily targeted by Mexican drug cartels in an effort to push their product.

A new investigation from NBC News found that the cartels have descended on Montana's rural areas in order to sell drugs, particularly opioids. Many of the cartels are specifically targeting the state's six Native American reservations, where "pills can be sold for 20 times the price they get in urban centers closer to the border," NBC said.

While Native American populations have long struggled with substance abuse issues, NBC's investigation sheds light on how the cartels are taking advantage of Montana's Indigenous groups to drive their profits — all while Montanans are suffering as a result.

What did NBC's investigation find?

Many areas of Montana have "become awash with drugs, particularly its Indian reservations, where tribal leaders say crime and overdoses are surging," NBC said. The outlet identified several reasons as to why Mexico's drug trafficking in the state is so pervasive. For one, many cartel members have "formed relationships with Indigenous women as a way of establishing themselves within communities to sell drugs," tribal leaders said to NBC. Many times, the cartel turns Native Americans into dealers themselves by "giving away an initial supply of drugs and turning them into addicts indebted to the cartels."

For many years, methamphetamines were the predominant illegal drug used by Montanans. However, new restrictions in the mid-2000s led to meth houses across the state being shut down. Mexican cartels "saw an opportunity and began capitalizing, law enforcement officials said, flooding the U.S. with a super potent form of meth and targeting indigenous communities in particular," said NBC. From there, opioids — particularly fentanyl — gradually replaced meth as the substance of choice for the cartels in Montana, largely because it was "even cheaper to produce and far more deadly."

Indeed, data from the Montana Department of Health and Human Services shows that the state's death rate from opioid overdoses tripled between 2017 and 2020, from 2.7 deaths per 100,000 residents to 7.3 deaths. This represents a "statistically significant increase and brings the death rate in 2019-2020 back up to the former 'peak' seen in 2009-2010," the department said. Montana's Native American population also had "consistently higher drug poisoning death rates" than white Montanans during this time.

A big part of the problem with stopping these drugs is that Native reservations are "sovereign nations where local law enforcement is restricted from operating without an agreement with the tribe," said NBC. And even when tribal leaders do put guidelines in place to enforce drug laws, "local and state authorities are often barred from arresting tribal members" and reservation police officers are "largely prohibited from arresting outsiders on the reservation."

Montana is in a "perpetual state of emergency," Marvin Weatherwax Jr., a Blackfeet Reservation leader and member of the Montana House of Representatives, said in an interview with NBC . The drug problem is "pretty much wiping out a generation," Weatherwax added. "It's as if fentanyl is raining on our reservation."

"Drugs in other cities are saturated, you have multiple cartels," Stacy Zinn, the former Drug Enforcement Agency officer in charge of Montana, said to NBC. "Up here in Montana, it's pretty much wide-open space and territory for [cartels] to grab."

How is Montana combating its drug problem?

While rare, there have been some large cartel busts in Montana. One notable instance involved the shutdown of a "ring that federal prosecutors said brought at least 2,000 pounds of meth and 700,000 fentanyl-laced pills into Montana from Mexico over three years," NBC said. The man behind the ring was eventually sentenced to eight years in prison, and his arrest led to the cartel leader himself being charged and sentenced to 17 years behind bars.

But massive busts like this are few and far between.

As law enforcement continues to try and stop the cartel, leaders from the Northern Cheyenne tribe are suing the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs for allegedly not providing adequate police protection. "We’re not asking very much from the government. We are asking for basic law enforcement to help our people," Serena Wetherelt, the tribe's president, said to NBC.