Why Does America Tolerate and Encourage Our Fentanyl Crisis in Many Ways? – New Bedford Guide

After 2,996 people died on September 11, 2001, America spent trillions of dollars and lost 2,459 soldiers fighting in Afghanistan for 20 years. Approximately 100,000 Americans die each year from drug overdoses, largely from the fentanyl that floods the U.S.-Mexico border. According to John Hopkins, 1 in 3 adults knows someone who has died from an overdose (we all know someone who struggles or has struggled with addiction). Why did America go to war for fewer than 3,000 deaths on 9/11, but seem to not only ignore but in many ways fuel the fentanyl epidemic that kills 30 times as many people each year? The answer is simple: politics and money.

When it comes to politics, both political parties share the blame – we can debate who gets the most blame. Republicans push a costly and failed “War on Drugs” that only seems to benefit district attorneys’ offices and police departments who share the money and seized assets for future budgets – the perfect incentive to ensure the “war” continues. Democrats want a wide open border to add future Democratic voters. Democratic politicians in many states offer free hotels, food, transportation, jobs, driver’s licenses and college tuition, which encourages millions of illegal border crossers each year. While most come to America for a better life, many come to transport drugs. The drug cartels have a massive and constant stream of drug shipments that transport fentanyl, a drug 100 times more addictive and far cheaper than heroin, across the border every day. Law enforcement gets bigger budgets, Democrats get their voters, and Americans lose countless friends and family members to the poison.

When it comes to making money off the fentanyl crisis, both political parties want cheap labor to fuel corporate profits. It’s been known for decades that immigrants are doing the heavy lifting in the fish processing plants here in New Bedford, and it’s been replicated in dozens of industries across the country.

Drug treatment centers that are rarely successful receive huge amounts of government money for an addiction problem that creates a constant stream of repeat customers. Governments are good at throwing money at problems while American voters think that spending money will solve them, so both the politicians and the problems remain. In reality, spending more rarely solves complex problems like addiction, but it does create an industry that gets rich by “solving” them. Talk to any drug addict, for example, and they will tell a story about how they have been to drug treatment centers many times, often dozens of times, at a cost of thousands of dollars each time. Only one in 10 fentanyl addicts will ever be able to get off fentanyl – the rest die prematurely. Politicians will virtuously point out how they got more money for a 10% success rate while drug treatment lobbyists write checks to those politicians. It is a vicious cycle in which billions of taxpayer dollars flow into a largely unsolvable problem and much of that money flows back to the politicians. Where is the incentive to solve the problem?

In my opinion, there are obvious solutions to the crisis, but Americans are not interested in the solutions. China (the source of fentanyl) and Mexico (the primary producer and distributor of fentanyl) are the keys to stopping the flow of a drug that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. Holding these two countries accountable in a real way, both financially and militarily, is the key to ending the supply, but that can only be effective if America ends the massive demand for these drugs. Cartels simply supply a demand. Stop the demand and the incentive for cartels to make money goes away. Stop the incentive for cheap labor and the border crisis goes away. Focusing on mental health (sexual abuse, PDSD, loss of a loved one, etc.) – the root cause of addiction, is the only way to truly solve the addiction problem and the demand, but that is a complex problem with even more complex solutions.