While the majority of fentanyl is seized at the U.S.-Mexico border, 93 percent of those seizures happened at legal crossing points last year. More than 86 percent of people sentenced for trafficking fentanyl in 2023 were U.S. citizens, and almost all fentanyl is smuggled for U.S. consumers.
Democrats’ and Republicans’ shared focus on fentanyl trafficking at the U.S.-Mexico border as the sole root of the overdose crisis is dangerously myopic. It fails to address the myriad causes or advance any much-needed solutions. Indeed, the U.S. is grappling with a serious public health crisis, as the country faces more than 100,000 deaths per year from drug overdoses, two-thirds of which are due to synthetic opioids like fentanyl. Twenty-seven thousand pounds of fentanyl were seized at the border last year, up from just 4,600 pounds in 2020. But militarizing the border — and promoting rhetoric that demonizes immigrants — will not save any lives.
Experts caution that it is difficult to attribute such data to any singular source; we need more studies over a longer period of time to determine what’s driving the plunge. Still, we can look to several recent developments as possible culprits: In December 2022, Biden signed the bipartisan Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (MAT) Act, which removed the bureaucratic hurdles facing doctors who need to prescribe buprenorphine for opioid addiction treatment. Prior to the MAT Act in 2020, less than 6 percent of doctors were allowed to prescribe buprenorphine. Meanwhile, a naloxone nasal spray that can reverse opioid overdoses and save lives was approved to be sold as an over-the-counter medicine in March 2023. It has since become much more readily available.
This is a good start, but doctors are still calling for increased funding for addiction treatment and harm reduction services. Rural areas, as well as Black and Native American communities, especially face substantial barriers to accessing quality health care. Currently, Congress is considering a bipartisan bill, the Modernizing Opioid Treatment Access Act, which would expand access to methadone, a prescription drug used to treat opioid addictions. Unlike in several European countries, methadone is only obtainable in the United States at designated opioid treatment clinics and must be taken on-site — creating an unnecessary hurdle for those who live miles away from the closest clinic. Addiction recovery advocates also point toward the need for expanded telemedicine options, mobile methadone clinics and robust drug education campaigns as necessary tools to fight the overdose crisis.
There’s definitely more than should be done but let’s examine how the article is framing what Harris said at the debate. “Harris noted that she supported a bipartisan border bill, which would have “put 1,500 more border agents on the border” to help “stem the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States.” She added, “I know there are so many families watching tonight who have been personally affected by the surge of fentanyl in our country.”” is what the article says. This makes it seem like she was saying that the new border agents would have stopped the fentanyl and that without them it would flow across.
But here’s what she actually said about the border bill “And that bill would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border to help those folks who are working there right now over time trying to do their job. It would have allowed us to stem the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States. I know there are so many families watching tonight who have been personally affected by the surge of fentanyl in our country. That bill would have put more resources to allow us to prosecute transnational criminal organizations for trafficking.” This is her saying not that the border agents would have stemmed the fentanyl coming across the border, like the article frames, but that the border bill itself would have done that which makes sense since it includes money for investment of tech that makes it easier to detect fentanyl at legal border crossings.
Should she be better on this and be talking more about how fentanyl comes in almost exclusively through legal border crossings and through US citizens? Yes. But she was NOT saying that the border agents themselves would have done it. The framing of the article on her words is just wrong.
Thanks, that’s a valid critique of the article. The money for detections, the increase in asylum officers, and increase in judges to improve processing were the only good parts of the bill to me.
The other aspects of the bill are concerning and don’t solve the underlying issues of either immigration (pathway to citizenship) or the opioid crisis (addressing the demand, which the doctors mentioned in the Truthout article talk about):
Increasing expansion for ICE, border patrol, and the is bad and does not help. The bill would further restrict help for those seeking asylum by worsening asylum rules and allowing for border shutdowns, leading to more deportation of those seeking asylum. The bill does not improve or expand a pathway to citizenship for immigrants, which will allow for the continuation of our two-tier immigration system and exploitation of the labor of illegal immigrants, instead of simply giving them a pathway for citizenship.
The opioid crisis isn’t something you address with immigration, it’s something that can only be addressed throughout access to health care and social services.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/02/29/fact-sheet-impact-of-bipartisan-border-agreement-funding-on-border-operations/
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-the-bipartisan-border-deal-would-transform-the-u-s-immigration-system
The bill definitely has far more bad than good. I just didn’t appreciate Truthout cutting out the context to the quote from Harris. Taking quotes out of context or, like Truthout is doing here, introducing your own context to it by cutting out large parts of the sentence and joining two sentences together to make something appear different than it actually is, is not good journalism.
I agree, those kind of things should be called out for any news outlet, we should have high standards across the board. I still consider independent news outlets to be more genuine and factual than contemporary news outlets, but I’m glad this is a community where we can point out discrepancies and discuss the reality of the situation more in depth in the comments