News/Commentary

Fentanyl blamed for teen overdose deaths doubling in 3 years, but report ignores Biden border crisis

March 26, 2023 | | Print Article

The Hill, an establishment outlet, is out with a report claiming that teen overdose deaths have doubled in recent years because of fentanyl, but critics say this analysis misses one key but highly relevant factor.

“Teen overdose deaths have doubled in three years, an alarming trend amid a historic decline in drug and alcohol use among high school students,” the report reads.

“The main reason is fentanyl. Teens consume the powerful opioid unwittingly, packaged in counterfeit pills tailored to resemble less potent prescription medications. Drug traffickers lace pills with fentanyl to boost the black-market high. Dangerously addictive, fentanyl can be lethal, especially to children experimenting with drugs,” it continues.

Part of the problem, the piece notes, is that fentanyl is lethal even at the tiniest doses.

“Fentanyl, it’s just a different beast. And it’s so deadly. You have a milligram of fentanyl being equivalent to 50 milligrams of heroin, being equivalent to 100 milligrams of morphine. And right now, fentanyl is creeping into everything,” Dr. Hoover Adger Jr. of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine told The Hill.

“If you magically removed fentanyl from the drug supply, these deaths would absolutely plummet,” Dr. Michael Toce of Harvard Medical School added.

Another big problem part of the problem is that fentanyl is being snuck into other products, like marijuana, for example.

“Fentanyl has crept into so many things. I have patients who think they’re taking marijuana, but it’s marijuana laced with fentanyl. I have patients who think they’re taking medicine. It’s in pill form, they’re pressed, they look just like regulated medications. Kids think what they’re getting is safe,” Adger explained.

Therefore, they have no clue that they’re effectively buying poison.

“These kids aren’t trying to kill themselves. It’s in ecstasy, molly, these party drugs. Stimulants. Depressants. … It’s in all kinds of pills, and most people don’t know it. The traffickers have done a really good job at making it look like the pills the kids want,” Linda Richter, the vice president of prevention research and analysis at the nonprofit Partnership to End Addiction, said to The Hill.

Now, none of this analysis is wrong. It’s just that it’s missing one crucial factor: the border.

The fact is that the majority of fentanyl is entering the U.S. from the southern border.

“Most fentanyl is being smuggled into the U.S. along the southern border, often in vehicles driven by American citizens, as cartels and other criminal groups in Mexico have turned the production of the synthetic opioid into a clandestine industry that has become the primary source of fentanyl in the U.S.,” CBS News reported in February.

What’s unclear is who exactly is bringing it over. The Biden administration claims for its part that illegal aliens have nothing to do with the trafficking of fentanyl.

During a briefing last month, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas reportedly alleged that it was “unequivocally false that fentanyl is being brought to the United States by non-citizens encountered in between the ports of entry who are making claims of credible fear and seeking asylum.”

But that was a false statement.

Indeed, according to the libertarian Cato Institute, “In 2021, U.S. citizens were 86.3 percent of convicted fentanyl drug traffickers,” meaning the remaining 13.7 percent were non-citizens and thus likely illegal aliens.

The key point is that the border IS being used to traffic fentanyl, among other drugs and substances, and unfortunately, this administration is doing virtually nothing about it, though that’s not what the administration claims.

Pressed about the border crisis during an exchange last August, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre alleged that the administration is “securing the border” from fentanyl.

Listen:

“We know how the fentanyl is coming into the country; it’s coming right across the southern border. The DEA administrator says so. So when is the President going to do something more to stop this?” Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked her at one point.

“The fact is that we’re, you know, we are securing the border. The fact is that we are securing record levels of funding from DHS so they can stop illicit drugs from entering into the country. The fact that it’s not just drug traffickers that we’re dealing with as well; we’re stopping — stopping financiers. This is what’s happening with this — under this administration,” she replied.

Yet for some reason, the number of fentanyl deaths keeps increasing …

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Vivek Saxena
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