Speaking at the U.S. District Court in Concord on Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a surge in federal enforcement efforts around synthetic opioids.
Sessions said he's sending an additional prosecutor to ten districts across the country that've been hardest hit by the opioid crisis. New Hampshire is one of them.
"Our goal is to reduce crime, reduce fentanyl, reduce deaths in this country," Sessions said. "We are not going to stand by while deaths continue to go up."
The goal is to aggressively go after synthetic opioid dealers on all levels, not just the most high-profile cases involving large amounts of the drugs.
Prosecutors will coordinate with a special operations team from the Drug Enforcement Agency to trace street-level arrests to large scale distributors. The AG is calling this Operation Synthetic Opioid Surge, or S.O.S.
After the visit to New Hampshire, Sessions is heading to Portland, Maine, where he will talk more about the drug crisis Friday.
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