Sultan Meghji, Frontier Foundry CEO and former Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation CIO, wants the government to use artificial intelligence packages to stop fentanyl at the border.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Customs and Border Protection Agency (CBP) can leverage the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to identify the trucks, boats, and planes trying to sneak fentanyl into the country.
We must use this technology at the border and ports of entry (where nearly 85% of America’s fentanyl comes into the country,) when we have access to every vehicle coming in.

That’s a good step, to the extent such packages actually can be useful in combatting fentanyl entry in to our nation. It is, though, at best a third step.

Better would be to use artificial intelligence packages—again, to the extent they prove useful—to intercept and stop fentanyl precursor and constituent chemicals from entering Mexico, thereby starving the drug cartels of these ingredients. Additionally, use these packages, if they actually work, to prevent those precursors and constituents from leaving the People’s Republic of China, these chemicals’ primary source, from leaving the PRC at all.

Those moves would interfere with Mexico’s participation in the drug trade, and they would greatly inhibit the PRC’s ability to continue its Opium War Redux against the US.