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Fresh off a visit to Mexico City this month, Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.) said that stopping fentanyl from flowing into the United States means stopping the chemicals used to manufacture the illicit drug when they arrive at Mexican ports.

That’s because the synthetic opioid — which is driving record overdose deaths in the U.S. — is more difficult to track once it reaches the drug cartels that produce it.

Supply side: “Whereas with methamphetamine, you can kind of look for the labs, and they’re fairly easy to identify, but the [fentanyl] pill presses are not, and they can be set up very easily,” Bera, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Indo-Pacific Subcommittee, told Carmen.

That’s why more forceful approaches such as bombing fentanyl labs in Mexico, which some Republican lawmakers and GOP presidential candidates have proposed, would be ineffective in disrupting the flow of the drug, according to Bera.

Next steps: “I think we can all agree that we should try to target and identify the precursor elements; we should see if there’s a system by which we can track some of these elements as well,” he said. Bera wants to talk to the Drug Enforcement Administration and the White House about the possibility of tracking where raw materials came from when law enforcement busts a fentanyl ring, he said.

Still, that won’t stop the drug-overdose crisis.

Demand side: “We do have to double our efforts to educate the public and think about the public health side of this,” Bera said.

That means tackling the loneliness, despair and anguish driving people to use substances, he said.

“We do have to do an education campaign to make sure folks are not experimenting with pills in high school and so forth because they don’t know what that could be laced with,” Bera said.