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.
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
This shit pisses me off. Fix our damn healthcare system for fuck sakes.
We don’t fund the mental health services needed.
We fuck over chronic pain patients treating them like addicts.
Many are disabled on both sides. We expect them to fill out paper work with every “I” dotted and “T” crossed. You screw up once? Now you start over. Many places that could offer real help just won’t take state aide because they take forever to pay.
If you do have a job, even below the poverty line but just enough to have insurance, welcome to ridiculous copays and deductibles.
It pains me when I’ve seen someone making progress with mental or physical therapy as a path to coping but fall due to one paperwork or appointment mistake withdrawing those services without a safety net.
They won’t treat the root cause for many by just going single payer and de-privatizing health care. Need something to campaign on to funnel more cash to our military complex.
Harris is still better on this issue, it’s just important to recognize the reality about immigration and the opioid crisis in order to have real solutions.
Trump is literally using Hitlerian rhetoric about immigrants, mass deportations mean concentration camps. It’s insane how little the media mentions the reality of what mass deportations would look like if implemented
focus on fentanyl trafficking at the U.S.-Mexico border as the sole root of the overdose crisis is dangerously myopic
I’m gonna need a citation for this “sole root” claim. I have not heard either candidates claim that Mexico was the sole source of a drug that was originally manufactured and distributed by the American Sackler family through their American Purdue Pharma company.
Harris calls for increased border agents, but I don’t recall her or any member of her team ever saying anything that would link trafficking of any narcotics to immigrants.
Maybe they meant “sole focus on addressing”? Cause I’ve also not heard either candidate address the myriad of problems with the US pharmaceutical companies and the individuals who run them, other than the occasional reference to predatory pricing which has been, at best, an attempt to drain the ocean with a teacup.
Either way, in our current climate of politicized sensationsm reporting, this deminishes the legitimacy of the article for me.
An increase of CBP officers and funding is not inherently anti-immigration. It’s the usage of those agents and funds that makes that determination.
a drug that was originally manufactured and distributed by the American Sackler family through their American Purdue Pharma company.
Purdue doesn’t make fentanyl, they make oxycontin. People rarely overdose on prescription oxycontin as the dosage is consistent and most addicts understand their tolerance. Fentanyl is a different story, it’s so strong and the margin of error is so small that people overdose on it way easier.
You seem to have a similar myopic view of the crisis but instead of evil Mexican immigrants and drug cartels being the sole problem it’s the evil sackler family. Both those only look at the supply side of the problem, which in my opinion is unsolvable. Trying to control the supply of a highly desirable product is a losing battle, especially with fentanyl where you can hide enough of it to kill an elephant in your sock. In order to solve this problem we need to look at the demand side, both getting current addicts off fentanyl and on to safer substances and also addressing the pain that this society is causing that makes people turn to drugs.
Purdue doesn’t make fentanyl, they make oxycontin.
Doh! You are absolutely right. That was a mixup on my end. Thanks for catching that.
You seem to have a similar myopic view of the crisis but instead of evil Mexican immigrants and drug cartels being the sole problem it’s the evil sackler family.
It was not my intent to suggest that the problem lies solely on the supply side. I was responding to the subject of the article and not attempting to share my views on the broader and more complex topic of drug use, regulation, abuse, addiction, and the ancillary topics associated with them.
In order to solve this problem we need to look at the demand side
I agree and by (wrongly) referencing the Sacklers, my intent was to highlight how America is not addressing other factors contributing to the problem of drug addiction. Problems like how the pharmaceutical industry has a financial incentive to create addicts.
"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. "
We aren’t concerned about the fentanyl that gets caught, we’re concerned about the fentanyl that DOESN’T.
In Portland at least there is a very well documented pipeline involving fentanyl being run by Honduran nationals:
Then address the root cause of the demand as doctors recommend, not blame it on immigrants or immigration as if that will solve the issue
We are working on that. Portlands largest problems started with decriminalization and following that the fentanyl crisis boomed.
We’ve rolled that back as of 9/1 but it’s going to take time for enforcement. Looks like it is working though:
https://www.koin.com/news/portland/33-arrested-during-east-portland-police-mission/
33 arrests, 3 of them qualified for deflection programs, 1 declined and would rather be arrested.
B/s that this issue began in 2021 after we decriminalized drugs via ballot measure in 2020. This issue started with people cooking meth out in the sticks here back in the 2000s and has flipped flopped between that and opiods since then in a cat and mouse game between dealers and the law.
Throwing these people in jail over the last 20 years hasn’t fixed anything, and the state refused to even implement M110 by funding treatment centers before pointing to it and saying “it’s not working!” Now they’ve repealed it, and nothing has changed.
The meth problem has been around for ages, and while the new forms of meth have also been a problem, we didn’t have open air fentanyl drug markets before 110.
No just open-air heroin markets and before that open-air Oxy/Vicodin/Percocet markets. Nothing has changed in decades except the brand name of the drug.
Not really, not to that degree. You didn’t have people taking over buildings in downtown to set up drug markets before 110:
That’s not addressing the root cause. Decriminalization wasn’t the issue. Not also providing free and readily available access to mental health and addiction social services was the issue.
Quotes
With the backing of psychologists and other health-care professionals, the law decriminalized the use and possession of up to 10 days’ worth of narcotics or other drugs for individuals’ own use. (Dealers still go to jail.) Instead of facing prison time and criminal records, users who are caught by police go before a local three-person commission for the dissuasion of drug addiction, a panel typically composed of a lawyer plus some combination of a physician, psychologist, social worker or other health-care professional with expertise in drug addiction.
The commission assesses whether the individual is addicted and suggests treatment as needed. Nonaddicted individuals may receive a warning or a fine. However, the commission can decide to suspend enforcement of these penalties for six months if the individual agrees to get help—an information session, motivational interview or brief intervention—targeted to his or her pattern of drug use. If that happens and the person doesn’t appear before the commission again during the six-month period, the case is closed.
Shifting from a criminal approach to a public health one—the so-called Portugal model—has had dramatic results. According to a New York Times analysis, the number of heroin users in Portugal has dropped from about 100,000 before the law to just 25,000 today. Portugal now has the lowest drug-related death rate in Western Europe, with a mortality rate a tenth of Britain’s and a fiftieth of the United States’. The number of HIV diagnoses caused by injection drug use has plummeted by more than 90 percent. Delegates from the United States and other nations—including APA’s Amanda Clinton, PhD, senior director for international affairs—arrive regularly to see the model firsthand.
“You cannot work with people when they’re afraid of being caught and going to prison,” says psychologist Francisco Miranda Rodrigues, president of the Ordem dos Psicólogos Portugueses. “It’s not possible to have an effective health program if people are hiding the problem.”
The problem wasn’t that there was no care, the problem was it was not mandatory.
Here’s how it “worked”:
You got caught with drugs, you got a $100 ticket.
The ticket was waived if you called a toll free number to ask about getting help.
You didn’t ACTUALLY have to enter treatment, all you had to do was call the number.
Of the 16,000 people ticketed, only 134 called the number. :(
There was no enforcement.
Of the folks who did get help, the help they wanted was needle exchanges and naloxone to continue enabling their addiction.
This is why 110 had to go away. But we’re less than a month in since repeal.
Yeah, that was also part of the problem. Not that they need to be forced or coerced, but they need incentives for engaging with the programs, like the fees being waived only if they stick with the program, and also a financial incentive to complete the program on top of that.
Yup. People here kept rolling out “But, but… Portugal…”
Completely ignoring the fact that Portugal had both positive and negative incentives to enter treatment. And socialized health care.
Oh, and they’re also re-thinking their program.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/07/portugal-drugs-decriminalization-heroin-crack/
Because it is incredibly successful in Portugal. And no, they are not ‘rethinking decriminalization,’ I can’t find a single Portuguese or even European article to back that up, that NY Times Article is not good.
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20 years of Portuguese drug policy - developments, challenges and the quest for human rights
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How Portugal eased its opioid epidemic, while U.S. drug deaths skyrocketed
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Why Portland failed where Portugal succeeded in decriminalizing drugs
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From Portugal to Portland: How Drug Decriminalization is Playing Out in Two Different Countries
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Drug decriminalisation: grounding policy in evidence - The Lancet
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That link just says he fled there, not that he was smuggling from there they the Southern border…
They are smuggling here from Honduras to the I-5 corridor.
Only one of those mention coming thru the Southern border, and that just says they’re investigating if it comes thru Mexico…
Your sources aren’t backing up your claim, just that a single digit number of people from Honduras were caught with Fentanyl in Oregon.
Like. Why smuggle it to Mexico to smuggle to Oregon?
Why not straight to Oregon?
You do know where Honduras is compared to Portland, right? They’re bringing the drugs up I-5 which means crossing the border.
p.s. L.A. and San Francisco too:
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/tenderloin-heroin-drugs-hondurans-dea-san-francisco/
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/san-francisco-drug-trade-honduras/
You do know where Honduras is compared to Portland, right?
Yes, it’s in South America …
But it’s kind of racist to say a Honduran national can only smuggle drugs from their home country.
They’re bringing the drugs up I-5 which means crossing the border.
Maybe. But for some reason you’re having difficulty providing any kind of source that actually backs that up
On the third attempt, you’ve completely thrown Portland out of the discussion.
Hondurans arrested in L.A., San Fransisco, Portland, Seattle. That’s the exact definition of a “pipeline”.
Hondurans arrested in L.A., San Fransisco, Portland, Seattle. That’s the exact definition of a “pipeline”.
No. That is kind of the definition of racism tho, assuming that they’re all connected because they came from the same South American country.
