Drug-related deaths skyrocketed under the Biden-Harris administration, the New York Times admitted Friday, underscoring the lack of border security.
The story is significant because Vice President Kamala Harris, seeking to distance herself from the administration and thereby undermining her campaign, will travel to Arizona on Friday to survey the southern border invasion that fuels the drug-related death epidemic.
Drug overdose deaths rose from 2019 to 2022, according to the latest data from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), with 107,941 drug overdose deaths reported in 2022.
Although the Times’s Maia Szalavitz urged readers to “focus on the drivers of demand, not supply” of the epidemic (aka the southern border), Szalavitz reported that “[l]ast year over 70,000 Americans died from taking drug mixtures that contained fentanyl or other synthetic opioids”:
Combating this problem is deeply challenging, for several reasons.
Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids are much cheaper and easier to make than heroin. To produce heroin, cartels need many acres of suitable land to grow poppies, hundreds of farmers and laborers to plant and harvest them, dozens of small, secure processing plants to turn raw opium into heroin, numerous guards and enforcers for protection and smugglers to get the product into the United States. To produce fentanyl, they need a few chemists in a lab, some commercially available substances and some distributors; it is often simply sent through the mail.
The amount needed to provide everyone in the United States who uses fentanyl with a year’s supply would require only a single trailer truckload of pure drug. To deliver the same amount for heroin would require six trailer truckloads. Consider that the U.S.-Mexico border is crossed daily by some 20,000 trucks, 200,000 cars, 100,000 pedestrians and a huge number of flights, trains and boats. The difference in the size and weight of fentanyl, compared to heroin, makes significantly interrupting the supply at the border nearly impossible.
During Harris’s tour of the southern border, her first since 2021, she will tout new plans to create detection machines for fentanyl at border entry ports, leading voters to perhaps question why she does not direct DHS to implement the new idea today.
Harris will visit the southern border invasion after Fox News polling on Thursday found more Arizona voters (15 points) trust former President Donald Trump over Harris to handle the border crisis. Trump leads Harris overall by 3 percentage points among likely Arizona voters (51-48 percent).
Trump has promised to implement the death penalty for drug traffickers and smugglers. He also vowed to “impose a total naval embargo on cartels” and demand the U.S. military “inflict maximum damage on cartel leadership and operations” by designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations in order to “choke off their access to the global financial system”.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
