Mark Lamb, sheriff of Pinal County, AZ, noted on Wednesday’s edition of the Breitbart News Daily podcast with host Alex Marlow that China supplies transnational criminal cartels based in Mexico with most essential ingredients required to produce fentanyl.

“Centuries ago, there were the Opium Wars that literally almost brought a dynasty to its knees, and I think that China is now exacting that same fate on the West [and] on America,” Lamb stated. “They’re bringing in the majority of the precursors that it takes to create the fentanyl. They give it to the cartels in Mexico, and then Mexico is producing the product that they’re transporting into Arizona and into America.”

Breitbart News reported on the rising numbers of overdose deaths — many related to fentanyl — over recent years. The number of overdose deaths in America rose nearly 15 percent in the year following the Biden administration’s installation, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Drug overdose deaths have been increasing nearly every year since 1999, according to data from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a subsidiary of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The federal bureaucracy estimated the number of overdose deaths to be 91,799 in 2020. The bureaucracy’s estimated number of domestic overdose deaths for the twelve-month period ending in January 2021 is 95,452. The following twelve-month period ending in January 2022 reached 108,769.

Lamb said drug and human smuggling dramatically increased immediately after the Biden administration took the White House. He linked border insecurity to the trafficking of fentanyl and other illicit drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border.

“In 2020, we saw a very reduced amount of people coming into this country,” he stated. “As a matter of fact, I’m not even on the border. I’m 50 miles off the border, and I was having as many apprehensions as people on the border were having. That all changed in 2021, and you can put the pieces of the puzzle together, but overnight, the communication lines stopped and the flow of humans and drugs into this country started going out of control. The train was off the tracks.”

Lamb shared his experience as a law enforcement professional of the volume of human trafficking across the southern border.

He remarked, “A couple of weeks ago, we had five traffic stops in one shift on human-load vehicles — 27 bodies between those five cars — if I sent my guys out every single day — 20 guys — we’d probably have 20-plus traffic stops of human-loaded vehicles. These are people that are being smuggled into America, into extortion, into the sex trade here in America, along with drugs and all these other things, and that is just not the American Way.”

He shared an anecdote of a migrant woman having dozens of “morning-after pills” on her person in anticipation of repeated rapes during her border-crossing migration.

“We caught a woman out in the desert and we asked her — she had a baggie full of pills, with 50 pills — and we said, ‘What are these pills?'” Lamb recalled. “We thought maybe they were fentanyl … and she said, ‘I know I was going to get raped multiple times when I crossed the border. These are morning-after pills.’ Where did we get in this country where we lost our moral compass so badly that we put politics in front of people because, politically, you think that aligns with you to have open borders? We allow women and children — women to be raped and children to be used as pawns — it’s just not the America that I know.”

Lamb is featured in Turning Point USA’s new documentary series, Border Battle.

Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.