LAS VEGAS — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump must make the fight against fentanyl a priority, recovery experts and law enforcement officials in battleground states told The Washington Post.
Federal officials said in May that nearly 300 Americans die each day from taking illegal opioids, synthetic painkillers almost all of which originate in China and have been streaming in large quantities across the southern US border in recent years.
Wednesday was National Fentanyl Prevention Awareness Day, established to bring attention to the crisis.
According to an analysis of drug-related death data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), battleground states such as North Carolina, Michigan, Virginia and Arizona are on track to see more than 1,000 fentanyl-related deaths each in 2023.
According to Sheriff Blake Andis of Washington County, Virginia, who is supporting Republican candidate Hun Kao in this year’s U.S. Senate election, the influx of opioids is “expanding.”
“Especially since the Biden administration and the open border, we’ve seen an increase in fentanyl and methamphetamine overdoses and they’re on our streets,” Andis told the Post. “And because methamphetamine is now so plentiful, the street price has gone down and what you used to buy by the ounce, you can now buy by the kilo.”
The CDC figures for March were: show While fentanyl-related deaths are down compared to the same period last year, some states are increasing, with Nevada seeing a 23.27% increase from a year ago.
Republicans have argued that open border issues are a factor in the fentanyl crisis, but the Democratic 2024 platform “Final” version Still calling Biden the candidate, he touted the Biden administration’s anti-drug efforts and promised more and better measures in a “second term” Biden administration.
Hannah Maldavin, a senior spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, told The Washington Post in an email that the platform was passed before Biden dropped out of the race. She said the document “lays out a vision for the progressive policies we can build on as a nation.”
The Republican platform calls for increased border security across the board and a “closure of the region’s waters” by the U.S. Navy to stop fentanyl arriving by boat.
Democratic National Committee spokesman Mardavin said Harris “has spoken many times about border security and the successful steps her administration has taken to curb fentanyl coming into the country.”
An anti-drug group set up digital billboards in Chicago this week declaring synthetic opioid drugs “weapons of mass destruction” and raising the issue of fentanyl to delegates at the Democratic National Convention.
Jim Routt, founder of Akron, Ohio-based Families Against Fentanyl, told the Post, “Thousands of American families across the country are living a veritable nightmare with loved ones addicted to illicit fentanyl laced in pills or street drugs — and, yes, many of us live in battleground states.”
“Families like mine want our leaders to treat this as the biggest crisis facing our country, because it is,” he added.
Dr. Mark Siegel, a prominent New York physician and professor at New York University Langone Medical Center, told The Washington Post that more needs to be done by the government to stop the influx of fentanyl.
“Our open borders are creating the next generation of opioid addicts, many of whom will die. National awareness days like these are so important, but they’re not enough. The DEA has their hands full, as do Customs and Border Protection agents. It takes all of us,” said Siegel, an internal medicine specialist.
“The fentanyl problem is growing. Originally conceived as a long-term treatment for cancer and terminal pain, (fentanyl patches) have morphed into an extremely powerful killer drug that is often mixed with other drugs. Mexico’s poppy fields are drying up and 10-foot labs producing fentanyl are being built,” he said.
Detective Dale LaBombard of Livingston County, Michigan, said the opioid problem runs deep.
“I basically work on narcotics. That’s what I’m assigned to do,” he told The Post. “We’ve seen a tremendous increase in the opioid problem over the last few years. We’re seeing more and more fentanyl, carfentanil, xylazine.”
Mike Rogers, a former congressman and Republican Senate candidate in Michigan, also linked the open border situation, which has resulted in “10 million illegal immigrants flooding into this country,” to the drug crisis.
“Michigan is allowing organized crime drug cartels to operate in the Southeast because of Democratic policies,” he told The Post.
Law enforcement leaders in Wisconsin say their communities are also being affected by synthetic opioids.
“The border crisis is affecting the entire country because of fentanyl and illegal immigration,” Dodge County Sheriff Dale Schmidt, a Republican, told The Post while attending a press conference with J.D. Vance in Milwaukee last week.
“The number of people dying from fentanyl is unprecedented,” Schmidt said with exasperation.
“[It] “We have incredible amounts of fentanyl coming across the border,” he continued. Dodge County had the third-highest fentanyl death rate in the state in 2021.
Schmidt’s sparsely populated county has seen 38 fentanyl-related deaths in one year.
“You can’t build a wall around Dodge County,” the sheriff joked.
Of course, the opioid crisis is hitting communities outside of battleground states too. “The majority of these deadly pills are coming into the United States across our southern border, exacerbated by the Biden-Harris Administration’s failures in border control,” said Republican Senator Holly Schepisi of New Jersey.
Scott H. Silverman, an addiction counselor in San Diego, called on both Harris and Trump to put more emphasis on the opioid issue.
“The chemicals used to make synthetic fentanyl are crossing our border and entering communities across the country,” he told the Post. “So, on behalf of the American people, I call on both presidential candidates to make this a top priority and demonstrate how they will work to stop this crisis.”
Silverman, author of “The Opioid Epidemic,” said his optimism is tempered by his work with politicians.
“My experience dealing with legislative leaders has been that they do the bare minimum they have to do, and once that’s in place, they feel they’ve done everything they need to do,” he said.
Silverman said the government should tackle the opioid crisis “with tools very similar to those the federal government used with COVID-19: real-time data, education, prevention, and putting resources where they are needed most.”
— Additional reporting by Victoria Churchill George Caldwell, Anthony Miragliotta, Amy Sikma and Kelly Jane Torrance.
