Slate: Border Patrol Official Accused of Demanding “Fentanyl Lollipops” for Work Trip on a Helicopter

A new whistleblower report first covered by NBC News alleges that the Customs and Border Protection agency’s chief medical officer, whose name is Alexander Eastman, demanded that his staff find him “fentanyl lollipops” for a work trip of dubious necessity:

Eastman spent copious hours of his and Office of the Chief Medical Officer staff time directing the OCMO staff to urgently help him procure fentanyl lollipops, a Schedule II narcotic, so that he could bring them on the CBP Air and Marine Operations helicopter on which he would be a passenger in New York City.

Fentanyl lollipops are indeed fruit-flavored doses of fentanyl on sticks, which can be legally prescribed in medical settings. (Surprisingly, they don’t appear to have featured in any urban-legend Halloween panics.) As to why a border patrol doctor had to be on a helicopter in New York City in the first place, Eastman’s case was (allegedly) that he needed to be on hand in case anyone from CBP’s Air and Marine Operations unit got hurt while helping provide security at a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly:

The report, submitted to the chairs of several congressional oversight committees and the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general by a nonprofit called the Government Accountability Project, notes that it “strains credulity” to believe that a fentanyl-equipped CBP helicopter would be necessary to treat a hypothetical patient at the U.N. given the “concentration of medical trauma resources” that are already otherwise available in midtown Manhattan.

Eastman and CBP have not responded to the report, which places his alleged misbehavior in the context of other allegations about mismanagement of medical services by CBP officials and a contractor employed by DHS to provide care. The quality of such services has been under internal and external scrutiny since May 2023, when an 8-year-old girl named Anadith Danay Reyes Alvarez died in Border Patrol custody after staffers at a holding facility repeatedly denied her family’s requests for medical attention.

While the smuggling of fentanyl into the United States is often cited by politicians as a reason to expel undocumented migrants attempting to claim asylum after crossing the U.S.–Mexico border, records show that the large majority of fentanyl smuggling arrests and prosecutions involve American citizens attempting to surreptitiously bring the drug through official ports of entry.