U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling on drug crisis, ‘Number one threat facing the state.’

The opioid crisis is “the No. 1 threat facing the state,” U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said on Boston Herald Radio Tuesday.

A multi-pronged approach targeting drug dealers, pushing prevention efforts and getting addicts into rehabilitation is key in finding a solution, Lelling said.

“The people who are addicted to opioids need help, they need social services, they need rehabilitation, and they need compassion. They don’t necessarily need to be prosecuted, right? So we’re better at that than we used to be,” Lelling said.

Lelling also drew a connection between illegal immigration and drug crime. The deadly narcotic fentanyl is trafficked into the country from Mexico, China or the Dominican Republic, according to Lelling. He added that a “high percentage” of fentanyl traffickers are in Lawrence and entered the country illegally.

“When people come illegally through a porous border, you have no idea who they are,” said Lelling, who added that Lawrence cops help to arrest illegal drug dealers. He called the city a “regional hub for fentanyl distribution.”

“If you had a better functioning immigration system, the drug traffickers who we are picking up in a lot of these cases wouldn’t even be in the United States in the first place to commit those crimes,” Lelling said.

Legal marijuana also poses a risk to public safety, Lelling said, citing police concerns about marijuana-related crimes such as driving stoned and underage use.

Lelling said marijuana that’s available on the street is much stronger now than it used to be, especially with people consuming Canadian weed, which is easily accessible in New England.

“I’m very concerned about an increase in underage usage. … When the age limit for marijuana is 21, you’re going to have underage smoking,” said Lelling.

“It is accepted mainstream science that marijuana has negative effects on adolescent brain development. Everyone knows this,” Lelling said.

Advocates for marijuana legalization downplayed those concerns, which was effective in making the drug more widely available, Lelling said.

School-aged children in Massachusetts are also vaping, which could mean using marijuana or e-liquids containing nicotine. Lelling said school resource officers are, “seizing vaping devices, those cartridges, all the paraphernalia for that all day long. They have boxes of it. And it’s almost impossible to tell what is being used, you know, is there a drug involved, is there not a drug involved?”

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey also has taken an aggressive effort to stop kids from using vapes, often speaking out about the dangers of the smoking devices. Last year, Healey announced an investigation into Juul Labs over concerns of marketing practices that draw minors to their products.

The state’s war on drugs is far from over, and Lelling said, “I’m not going to sit here and say the war on drugs is a success of the last 30 years. But if we hadn’t waged it, the alternative would be worse.”

Across the nation, other drugs are being decriminalized, a point of concern for Lelling. Voters in Denver, Colo., recently approved the decriminalization of hallucinogenic mushrooms.

“There are serious social costs to legalizing these kinds of drugs,” Lelling said.