Thursday, the Justice Department released a presser detailing the 192-month sentence for a Jamaican national for his role in a fraudulent sweepstakes scheme targeting the elderly. The DOJ missed the opportunity to address foreign money schemes that continue to rise.

41-year-old Damone Oakly of St. James Parish, Jamaica, after being extradited to the United States in 2022, pleaded guilty the following July to two counts of mail and wire fraud.

From 2010 to 2019, he targeted the elderly through the mail, text messages and phone calls, falsely claiming they had won millions of dollars and luxury vehicles. The winners would have to simply pay taxes and fees to claim their prices.

The DOJ states that Oakley would instruct his victims to purchase electronics, clothing and jewelry as well, which were forwarded to Florida and, ultimately, to his address in Jamaica.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars were lost from the victims as a result of the Jamaican national’s criminal actions.

Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton characterized the crime as “prey[ing] on vulnerable and elderly” in the release, focusing much of the attention on the victim rather than the fact these schemes have become fairly common throughout the US.

The US Postal Inspection Services (USPIS) Criminal Investigation Group, Inspector Eric Shen, stated that scammers now operate “beyond our borders [and] felt with they could operate with impunity. Those days are gone.” The Post Inspector’s plan is to track down scammers with the Department of Justice.

Still, others believe in bipartisan legislation through the Enablers Act. The law would expand the Bank Secrecy Act in order to place anti-money laundering checks on corporate and trust formations that sideskip the American financial system.

In July, Gary Kalman of Transparency International US, a “dark money” corruption watchdog, told Townhall about these small to large foreign rackets.

“There’s a lot of dirty money coming into the United States from what you would normally consider to be high-risk countries, largely African, South American [and] Asian countries,” said Kalman.

He told the outlet that “kleptocrats” essentially steal state money off of taxes and public coffers and utilized “sophisticated investment strategies,” run[ning] it through a bunch of secrecy jurisdictions, set up a bunch of anonymous companies…”

It’s actually a big part of the Sinaloa Cartel’s heroin and methamphetamine stranglehold over dozens of US states, operating through a series of so-called “shell” companies. Some of these companies are even owned by citizens, such as the notorious building in Delaware, noted by The Washington Free Beacon.

Human trafficking is another aspect. As of 2018, the Polaris Project reported 6,000 illicit massage businesses in the US, with more than 70% without ownership.

Kalman said the key is to attack the “kingpins.” They are the top of military in South American countries, drug lords and cartel leaders. Through these illegal business operations, the gangs operating south of the border do not necessarily need a foot in the door.

DEA: Big Pharma Execs Who Called Southerners ‘Pillbillies’ Failed To Stop Suspicious Opioid Orders For A DECADE

The criminal help is already here domestically, regardless of the border crisis. This is an adjacent matter to secure the US financial system from predatory foreign nationals.

Related: Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Office Covers for CCP, Epstein-Tied Influence Operation

While announcing his presidential bid in 2024, former President, Donald J. Trump called for death sentences for drug dealers. Drug overdoses have skyrocketed and accelerated over the past decade. A record-high 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, with fentanyl overdoses accounting for a large percentage of those deaths.

Trump spoke in a subdued, professional tone and largely focused on policy. A number of conservative pundits have commented that Tuesday’s speech was Trump’s ‘most presidential sounding speech,’ which happen to be his formal announcement of his 2024 Presidential campaign.

Trump hit in many important issues during Tuesday’s presidential announcement, though he placed significant emphasis on drug overdoses and the border crisis which has only exasperated the flow of deadly drugs into the United States.

The president argued that drug dealers who sell hard drugs like fentanyl will be responsible for dozens, potentially hundreds of deaths. Thus, the punishment for being caught dealing such drugs should carry the same penalty as a first-degree homicide charge.

“We are going to be asking that everyone who sells drugs/who gets caught selling drugs to receive the death penalty for their heinous acts,” announced former President Trump. “I don’t like to say it, and I’m not sure if the American public is ready for it.”

Death penalty for drug dealers #Trump2024 pic.twitter.com/INnyevZdWy

— National File (@NationalFile) November 17, 2022

Many of Trump’s advisories have suggested that the American public in fact is not ready for such a statement to be made, and that these comments were “not nice.” Regardless, Trump insisted on continuing, “they kill 500 people each on average.”

Trump recalled a discussion with President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China. President Xi insisted that drugs were not an issue in China because of something called a “quick trial.”

Xi explains to Trump that when a drug dealer is caught in China, they are seen in front of a courtroom immediately and subsequently executed on the same day, thus referred to as a “quick trial.”

Some supporters have argued that maybe Trump may have come off too stringent sentencing all drug dealers to death. Specifically, the question seems to be if the same harsh penalties should apply to marijuana dealers as they would to heroin dealers.

RELATED: Billionaire Leftist And DeSantis Megadonor Voices Support For DeSantis To End Populism By Running Against Trump 

Trump-endorsed Ohio Senate nominee J.D. Vance blasted his Democrat opponent Tim Ryan for being bankrolled by big pharma “blood money” during Monday night’s debate, the last between the two men before voters head to the polls in the 2022 midterms.

On the debate stage, Tim Ryan tried to cough over J.D. Vance’s blood money statement, seemingly to avoid having to address the repercussions of Big Pharma’s deadly pill pushing in the State of Ohio. Along with others in the Rust Belt and Appalachian regions, Ohio has been among those hardest hit by the opioid epidemic, which was directly engineered by Big Pharma.

Tim Ryan’s campaign commercials “are paid for by pharmaceutical blood money,” J.D. Vance told the people of Ohio as Ryan giggled in the background.

“Tim Ryan received tens of thousands of dollars from the very companies that have profited off of this epidemic,” Vance went on, as Ryan tried to cough over his words.

Throughout his Trump-endorsed campaign for U.S. Senate, J.D. Vance, channeling the America First populism that has showcased the nation’s forgotten men and women, has cited the lethal prescription drug epidemic as a major catalyst behind middle America’s downfall.

Watch J.D. Vance call out Tim Ryan for taking Big Pharma “blood money” below:

JD Vance: Tim Ryan’s commercials “are paid for by pharmaceutical blood money…” pic.twitter.com/7FxuMxRY5P

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) October 17, 2022

A career politician who’s held public office for nearly all of the 21st Century, Tim Ryan has taken over $27,000 from the same opioid distributors that helped wreck rural Ohio and other corners of America.

Unphased by the death and destruction wrought by their multi-billion dollar legal drug industry, a top executive at one of the pro-Ryan Big Pharma corporations, AmerisourceBergen, mocked Ohio’s opiate addicts as “pill-billies.”

In company emails, the same executive made fun of a town in neighboring Kentucky that had been ravaged by his corporation’s drug distribution, dubbing the community “Oxycontinville.”

On top of pounding Ohio with highly addictive, deadly pain pills, the Big Pharma corporations backing Tim Ryan’s campaign are among those responsible for ferrying lethal COVID jabs into hospitals and doctors’ offices by the hundreds of thousands.

McKesson, a backer of Tim Ryan’s, boasts that they’ve distributed nearly one billion doses of the COVID-19 jab – the deadliest “vaccine” in human history. 

Ohio: Trump Energizes Crowd At Ohio Rally, Throws Support Behind JD Vance, Disses Mitch McConnell

Two men arrested for trafficking fentanyl in California were released after only spending several days in jail, according to Fox News. Jose Zendejas and Benito Madrigal were arrested on Friday after a traffic stop revealed that the pair possessed approximately 150,000 fentanyl pills. The pair was initially booked on “charges of possession, transportation and selling of illegal drugs,” according to the report.

NEW: The two men who were arrested with 150,000 fentanyl pills in Tulare, CA on Friday have been released from custody on their own recognizance as a result of a court order from a judge following a "risk assessment". The Sheriff "strongly disagrees" with their release. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/KIdIQNCTR9

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) June 28, 2022

A statement released by the Tulare County (CA) Sheriff’s Office explained the process by which detainees are either kept in custody or released. “All inmates booked…are sent through what is known as the Risk Assessment Process…That ‘Risk Assessment’ is then sent to a judge with the court, who, then determines whether or not the individual arrested is held on bail or if they are to be released.”

Sheriff Mike Boudreaux expressed his disagreement with the judge’s decision to release the two men. “California’s system of justice is failing us all,” Boudreaux said.

We've learned that Tulare Co. Court Commissioner Mikki Verissimo signed the order to release the men. Sheriff Mike Boudreaux says on @FoxNews that "California's system of justice is failing us all", and that when he found out about the release of the men, he was "infuriated". pic.twitter.com/Aby74ZvjvA

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) June 28, 2022

According to the Fox News article, the amount of fentanyl seized in this bust is “enough to potentially kill several million people.”

It is unclear where the drugs came from, as the two men who were arrested were from Washington State. Often, fentanyl is made in Mexico and China, but now is made in several other countries such as India, according to a 2020 report by the DEA. It is believed that much of the fentanyl in America comes over the southern border. Smaller amounts even come across the northern border from Canada.

The proliferation of fentanyl into the United States has led to many overdose deaths in recent years. In 2021 alone, over 70,000 deaths were attributed to synthetic opioids, which includes fentanyl. During the Covid lockdowns of 2020, an unprecedented number of Americans died of drug overdoses.

Republicans in Washington have been urging the Biden Administration to act on the border crisis. A letter from the Republican Oversight Committee listed some disturbing statistics. According to the CDC, “the U.S. recorded its highest ever number of drug-overdose deaths in a 12-month period from April 2020 to April 2021. These 100,306 deaths represent a nearly 29 percent increase from deaths recorded in the same period a year earlier.”

RELATED: New York: Crack Users Welcome At Nation’s First ‘Safe Injection Site’ Where Addicts Can Use Illegal Drugs 

Over 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported Wednesday. Overdose fatalities, which already reached record highs in 2020, increased by 15 percent in 2021.

Last year’s numbers translate to roughly one overdose death every five minutes in the United States. In order to come up with a total, the CDC reviews death certificates and then makes an estimate to account for delayed and incomplete reporting.

U.S. drug overdose deaths have been steadily increasing since the 1990’s, fueled largely by abuse of prescription opioids. In recent years, illicit fentanyl has been killing Americans at a higher rate than heroin and prescription opioids.

Last year, overdoses involving fentanyl and other synthetic opioids surpassed 71,000, up 23 percent from the year before. Deaths involving cocaine usage also spiked by 23 percent, as did deaths involving meth and other stimulants, which jumped by 34 percent.

Overdose deaths can often be attributed to more than one substance. Drugs such as cocaine can sometimes be cut with lethal amounts of fentanyl, the latter of which is cheap to produce.

Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, called the latest numbers “truly staggering.”

“The net effect is that we have many more people, including those who use drugs occasionally and even adolescents, exposed to these potent substances that can cause someone to overdose even with a relatively small exposure,” Volkow said in a statement.

Experts believe the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated America’s drug crisis, as lockdowns further isolated those struggling with addiction and made treatment options more difficult.

RELATED: Big Pharma Executives Mocked West Virginia ‘Pillbillies’ During Height of Opioid Epidemic

A group calling themselves the “Drug User Liberation Front” is handing out free, hard drugs on the streets of Vancouver with the help of a city council member. The city has long been an epicenter of Canada’s national struggle with drug abuse and was an early adopter of so-called “safe injection sites”, which are gaining popularity in U.S. cities. Vancouver is now moving to decriminalize the possession of hard drugs, including heroin and meth, despite a massive uptick in drug crime and overdoses in recent years.

The Drug User Liberation Front claims to purchase and test drugs like heroin and meth from “trusted” dark web dealers in an effort to keep tainted doses off the street. After what adoring reports from corporate media outlets have described as a “rigorous testing process”, the group redistributes what they say is a “safe supply” of the still highly lethal drugs on the streets to users for free.  The group claims that it is an important harm reduction tactic in a city plagued by drug crime and abuse. 

In addition to handing out the drugs on the streets, the group, which is illegal under Canadian law, is managing to supply their packaged and labeled drugs to addicts outside of the city. Just this month, a report stated that The Drug User Liberation Front, also known as DULF, distributed at least 17 grams of various hard to drugs to different “drug user groups” across British Columbia.

Despite the illegality of DULF’s scheme, police have reportedly looked the other way and at times denied they know about the group’s existence. DULF has even had the help of a sitting Vancouver City Council Member, Jean Swanson, of the openly socialist Coalition of Progressive Educators (COPE).

Swanson has even publicly worked with the group to hand out drugs on the streets of Vancouver and says that other members of the city council support offering hard drugs to addicts. These members wouldn’t go as far to be seen doing it publicly, however.

In addition, the Vancouver City Council recently passed a resolution that requested an exemption from federal drug laws. It was also among the first municipalities to adopt needle exchange programs in which IV drug users are given clean needles at local, often taxpayer-funded facilities. More recently has played a pioneering role in so-called “safe injection” and “consumption sites” where drug users can freely use drugs.

The safe injection and consumption sites have become a hot-button political issue in Canada as the spreads around the country. In the US, similar facilities have slowly rolled out over the last year, with New York City opening up the first American safe injection sites this past December. On-site overdoses ensued on the first day of operation.

Mayor Bill DeBlasio was present for the opening of the nation’s first “safe injection sites” in New York City on Tuesday. People are free to use any and all illegal substances within the designated centers, including heroin, crack-cocaine and methamphetamine, among several other drugs. Five people overdosed at just one of the clinics on opening day, according to the New York Post.

“Overdose Prevention Centers are a safe and effective way to address the opioid crisis. I’m proud to show cities in this country that after decades of failure, a smarter approach is possible,” de Blasio said in a statement. The city opened two “Overdose Prevention Centers” on Tuesday, New York Harm Reduction Educators on E. 126th Street in Harlem and Washington Heights’ CORNER Project on W. 180th Street. Both centers are nonprofits.

The centers opened as de Blasio has just four weeks remaining in his final term as mayor. Clean needles will be provided for users, but they will be required to bring their own drugs. The sites will also be equipped with medications that can reverse opioid overdoses, such as Naloxone. Users can shoot up under the supervision of medical personnel, who can administer aid if necessary.

While the centers were originally designed for users of intravenous drugs, the nod has since been given to those who smoke crack cocaine, a drug popularized by Hunter Biden. Businesses have complained about the large presence of drug users.

Smoking crack sanctioned at NYC 'safe injection sites,' driving business away https://t.co/QuFuVyQK81 pic.twitter.com/QqlQWA2tZN

— New York Post (@nypost) December 2, 2021

The two Manhattan locations were chosen based on “health need and depth of program experience,” according to the Health Department. 85 users injected various drugs at the East Harlem center on Tuesday, resulting in five overdoses after users injected drugs laced with fentanyl.

“We have had some overdoses today,” Kailin See, senior director of programs at New York Harm Reduction Educators, told the New York Post. 2,000 New Yorkers died of drug overdoses in 2020, the highest total since the city started tracking in 2000. Opioids account for a bulk of the city’s fatalities, a trend that is mirrored in most of the country’s big cities. A city Health Department study claims the sites could save as many as 130 lives a year.

Philadelphia had previously moved to establish such sites in 2018 and would have become the first city to have them. However, the Trump Administration sued the nonprofit connected with the move, a group called “Safehouse”, in 2019. A U.S. District Court judge initially ruled that Safehouse would not violate federal law, but this was appealed by then-U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain. A panel of Third Circuit Court of Appeals judges then overturned the decision, agreeing with McSwain’s assertion that the proposed sites would violate the “crack house statute” in the federal Controlled Substances Act. The statute is designed to outlaw any site where drug use is its primary function.

The push to get similar sites in Philadelphia is alive and well, however, as are drives for similar measures in numerous other cities. “NYC’s overdose prevention centers are a significant step forward in harm reduction, and we applaud all involved,” said Safehouse board vice president Ronda Goldfein. “In Philadelphia, we remain focused on legal federal authority for Safehouse and other communities that hope to offer overdose prevention.”

Seattle has signed off on plans to create similar sites, though they have yet to become operational. San Francisco, Austin and Portland are among other cities where injection sites have been discussed.

A former investigator with the DEA has testified that three of the country’s leading drug distributors repeatedly failed to stop suspicious orders for opioids for over a decade.

James Rafalski, the former investigator with the DEA, made the claims during the fourth week of a trial of the nation’s three biggest pharmaceutical companies, AmerisourceBergen, McKesson, and Health Inc, who are defending themselves against Cabell County in West Virginia and the city of Huntington, who allege that they are responsible for fueling the fires of the opioid epidemic.

Huntington and Cabell are seeking around $2.6 billion in compensation to address the impact that the opioid crisis has had on their community. “We intend to prove the simple truth that the distributor defendants sold a mountain of opioid pills into our community, fueling the opioid epidemic,” said Paul Farrell, a lawyer for Cabell County.

The drug companies in the trial insist that they were simply middlemen, and were not responsible for the insanely high levels of opioids that flooded West Virginia during the last decade, with some pharmacies receiving over 100,000 pills per month at the peak of distribution. Instead, they pinned the blame on the DEA for not cracking down on suspicious opioid vendors, rather than it being their responsibility to stop the orders from going through in the first place.

However, Rafalski said that the “systemic [failure to act] was widespread” within the pharmaceutical companies, as they did not properly report the suspiciously large orders of opioids to the DEA for over a decade as was their ethical responsibility. Rafalski said on Wednesday that before 2007, orders would be flagged that looked suspicious, but would still ship the orders regardless, only reporting them to the DEA at a later date. Farrell added that the drug companies then never pulled the fire alarm overall, despite numerous warnings about the orders. “This should have been blocked,” he said.

Rafalski’s testimony echoed the findings of a 2018 congressional investigation into “pill dumping” by the companies in West Virginia. Cabell County and Huntington are not the only local governments to have filed lawsuits against the pharmaceutical companies, with more than 3000 of them across the country having done so. The trial currently taking place at the federal courthouse in Charleston is seemingly just the first in a long line.

National File reported earlier this month that executives at AmerisourceBergen shared numerous emails making fun of the victims of the opioid epidemic, repeatedly sharing parody song lyrics mocking them:

In one email, Zimmerman shared a parody version of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” entitled “The Beverly Pillbillies,” the lyrics of which make fun of a “poor mountaineer” addicted to opioids who drives down to Florida to get his fix. Another song, “Oxycontinville,” which parodied the famous Jimmy Buffett song “Margaritaville,” had a similar lyrical theme, but the trip instead ended in Kentucky.

In a third email, one member of Zimmerman’s team responded to the new regulations brought by Kentucky against the distribution of opioids. “One of the hillbilly’s [sic] must have learned how to read :-),” the team member wrote, with no sense of irony regarding her own typographical error. Zimmerman apologized in court for the content of the emails, including the term “pillbillies,” but he claimed that that term was meant to refer to the opioid dealers, not the users themselves. He added that he shouldn’t have sent the offending email, but the corporate culture of AmerisourceBergen was of the “highest caliber.”

A massive drug bust targeting the infamous Sinaloa Cartel in the wealthy DC suburbs nabbed millions of dollars in cash and resulted in the seizure of thousands of pounds of lethal narcotics bound for America’s streets. According to authorities in Loudoun County, Virginia, where the largest of busts took place, the murderous Mexican cartel had enough fentanyl on hand to twice kill every man, woman, and child in the county of nearly half a million people.

Through an investigation dating back to 2017 and concluding in 2020, authorities directly connected drug traffickers in the wealthy DC suburbs with the Sinaloa Cartel of Mexico, an infamous crime syndicate once led by Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman . The massive law enforcement effort, dubbed Operation Angels Envy, remained under wraps until this week when its conclusion was announced publicly. Officials say the investigation eventually stretched across 7 states, with authorities seizing enough drugs to cause deaths of genocidal proportions.

Just over one year ago, in February of 2020, the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office executed the largest drug bust in county history as part of Operation Angels Envy, Sheriff Mike Chapman announced this week. In total, county authorities and their federal partners say they seized more than 50 kilograms of cocaine, 2 kilograms of fentanyl, 1 kilogram of heroin, 6 pounds of marijuana, 150 grams of crack cocaine, 7 guns, and more than $1.4 million in cash as part of the historic drug bust, in total carrying an estimated street value of $6.5 million.

“We seized enough fentanyl to kill every man, woman, and child in Loudoun County two times over,” said Sheriff Chapman. “Much like these drugs having a far-reaching impact in our country, I am proud to say the work of our detectives in Loudoun County in combination with other DEA Task Force members had an even further impact on the operations of the Sinaloa Cartel,” a statement from the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office attributed to Chapman read. “Our law enforcement community must continue to fight this scourge and protect our citizens,” it continued.

Across the DC region as a whole, with portions of the law enforcement operation reportedly stretching into Maryland and the District, a total of 33 individuals were charged, and authorities seized a total of 473 pounds of methamphetamine, 42 kilograms of fentanyl, 9 kilograms of heroin, 129 kilograms of cocaine, 5,100 pounds of other drugs, over $5.3 million in American currency, 114 firearms, and over $700,000 worth of jewelry and vehicles.

According to law enforcement, the total of 42 kilograms of fentanyl seized from the Sinaloa Cartel could have killed as many as 21 million Americans, with most of the supply streaming into the United States through the unsecured southern border with Mexico.

Executives at one of America’s leading drug distributors shared emails mocking “pillbillies” during the height of the nation’s opioid epidemic.

The emails, dating from 2011 and 2012, were shared during the trial of three of the country’s biggest drug distributors in Charleston, West Virginia. AmerisourceBergen, McKesson, and Health Inc are currently defending themselves against a lawsuit brought by the city of Huntington and Cabell County, which has claimed that they are responsible for fuelling the opioid epidemic.

Huntington and Cabell are seeking around $2.6 billion in compensation to address the impact that the opioid crisis has had on their community. “We intend to prove the simple truth that the distributor defendants sold a mountain of opioid pills into our community, fueling the opioid epidemic,” said Paul Farrell, a lawyer for Cabell County.

Farrell put the emails forth on Thursday, when Chris Zimmerman, the executive for AmerisourceBergen, took the stand for the second day. In one email, Zimmerman shared a parody version of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” entitled “The Beverly Pillbillies,” the lyrics of which make fun of a “poor mountaineer” addicted to opioids who drives down to Florida to get his fix. Another song, “Oxycontinville,” parodied the famous Jimmy Buffett song “Margaritaville,” had a similar lyrical theme, but the trip instead ended in Kentucky.

In a third email, one member of Zimmerman’s team responded to the new regulations brought by Kentucky against the distribution of opioids. “One of the hillbilly’s [sic] must have learned how to read :-),” the team member wrote, with no sense of irony regarding her own typographical error. Zimmerman apologized in court for the content of the emails, including the term “pillbillies,” but he claimed that that term was meant to refer to the opioid dealers, not the users themselves. He added that he shouldn’t have sent the offending email, but the corporate culture of AmerisourceBergen was of the “highest caliber.”

However, Farrell claimed that this was simply not true, and the emails instead demonstrated “a pattern of conduct by those people charged with protecting our community,” noting that they were “disparaging hillbillies.” Further emails that weren’t permitted to be introduced by the court show Zimmerman claiming that a “mass exodus of pillbillies” would be heading north following a crackdown on opioids in Florida in 2011.

The drug companies in the trial continue to insist that they were simply middlemen, and were not responsible for the insanely high levels of opioids that flooded West Virginia during the last decade, with some pharmacies receiving over 100,000 pills per month at the peak of distribution. Instead, they pinned the blame on the DEA for not cracking down on suspicious vendors, rather than it being their responsibility to stop the shipments from going through in the first place.