US President-elect Donald Trump has announced that he will nominate Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister to lead the DEA drug enforcement agency.
Washington, 1 December 2024 (Lusa) – US President-elect Donald Trump has announced that he will nominate Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister to lead the DEA drug enforcement agency.
Chronister has been sheriff in that county for 32 years and has been involved in initiatives to combat drugs and human trafficking, Trump said in a statement on Saturday.
The nomination must be confirmed by the Senate.
“As DEA Administrator, Chad will work with our great Attorney General, Pam Bondi, to secure the border, stop the flow of fentanyl and other illegal drugs from the southern border [with Mexico] and SAVE LIVES,” Trump said.
Trump has made anti-fentanyl policy a central plank of his proposals for his next term, to the point of making the survival of the Mexico-US-Canada trade agreement dependent on reducing the illegal flow of this drug.
The opioid epidemic was triggered at the turn of the millennium by the uncontrolled prescription of these drugs to treat pain, which led to record levels of addiction and more than 100,000 deaths per year in 2021 and 2022 alone, a number that fell to 81,000 in 2023.
The emergence of fentanyl, which is synthetic and has the same effect in tiny quantities, makes illegal trafficking much harder to detect and overdoses more common.
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