OPINION:
Young people all over the country are dying from fentanyl-laced pills, but don’t worry.
The Biden administration is coming to the rescue.
This past week, the White House announced a new crash program to get antidotes quickly to people who take an overdose of opiates. They are making sure that schools and airplanes will have plenty of naloxone, which rapidly reverses an overdose.
Isn’t that nice of them? It’s a lot like torpedoing a boat, running the survivors over in the water and then throwing life preservers to some of them who are about to drown.
More than 109,000 Americans a year die from drug overdoses, 70% of which are linked to fentanyl.
That’s the Chinese-origin synthetic drug that is pouring over the open border, courtesy of President Biden, who abolished border security on his first day in office in January 2021.
The opioid overdose problem did not begin with Mr. Biden. During the Trump administration, it got worse each year, reaching 70,630 in 2019 and jumping by 32% to 93,331 in 2020, worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic. And that was with a fairly secure border.
Since then, with an open border, the Mexican drug cartels have had a field day, trafficking millions of illegal aliens and deadly drugs while more than 100,000 Americans have been dying each year, beginning with 107,622 overdose deaths in 2021.
If any enemy had declared war on the United States and inflicted these kinds of casualties, we would be bombing them back into the Stone Age.
Instead, the Biden administration is winking at the human flood, along with the perps Mexico and China, while coming up with Band-Aid solutions instead of addressing root causes.
One of the root causes is the deliberate, systematic destruction of marriage-based families, but that’s a topic for another column.
The cartels obtain cheap chemicals from China. Then they insert the synthetic opiate into counterfeit versions of Oxycontin, Vicodin, Xanax, Percocet, Adderall and other legal drugs, and ship the pills all over America.
Fentanyl is 50 times as strong as heroin and 100 times as strong as morphine. As little as 2 milligrams can be lethal.
In 2015, the Food and Drug Administration approved sales of Narcan, the most widely used naloxone product. Last year, the agency approved over-the-counter sales of both Narcan and another drug, RiVive.
Naloxone really is a miracle drug. First responders such as police, firefighters and EMTs routinely carry it and have saved many lives. Making it more widely available, even at taxpayer expense, is a good idea.
A better idea would be to make it so it isn’t desperately necessary. But that would take securing the border, going to war with the drug cartels and getting tough with China. The Biden administration shows no inclination to do any of this.
Instead, Vice President Kamala Harris, Mr. Biden’s border czar, says we have to cure all the “root causes” in Central and South America before we can do anything about illegal immigration or the border.
In its announcement of the naloxone program, the White House said: “We must come together. In memory of those we have lost and to protect those at risk of overdose, the administration is refocusing the Nation’s attention on the devastation caused by illicit fentanyl, reaffirming our collective commitment to beating this crisis, and doubling down on efforts to empower all Americans to save lives.”
Could the fact that this is an election year and President Biden is behind in the polls help explain the “refocusing” going on here?
For nearly four years, he has not only allowed but encouraged an invasion of 8 million to 10 million illegal aliens and untold numbers of drug dealers, sex traffickers and terrorist cells.
Now, he’s doubling down on letting us dispense drugs ourselves to save some lives.
Over the years, Democrats’ mismanagement of our once self-governing nation has intensified. They have made cities unlivable and deliberately created intergenerational dependency on the state.
The pattern is clear: Create bad policy that results in a subsequent “crisis.” Then, introduce more measures that make it worse or to cover up the damage you’ve done.
In every case, government gets bigger and more intrusive to pick up the pieces while the private sector shrinks.
Getting more naloxone in the hands of more people is a good idea. But don’t mistake it for benevolence. It’s part of the overhaul that Democrats need to do if they are to compete in November.
Right now, they have the biggest drug pusher in American history — a visibly senile man — at the top of their ticket.
• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.
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