Editor’s Note: The following article is part of our “Debunking the Lies” campaign. Leading up to the election we aim to publish articles refuting mainstream lies told about immigrants, migrants, and refugees.
Particularly in this election year, it is important to separate truth from outright lies. Fear and anger are deliberately stoked to promote agendas that have the express purpose of confusing and dividing us. Below are common lies told about immigrants and the fentanyl crisis in the United States.
Lie #10: “Their radical open-border policies [Biden administration] have allowed for this flood of illicit fentanyl to enter our nation, and the increase in crime rates, as a result of their soft-on-crime policies, have resulted in a lack of proper resources for police departments and local prosecutors to tackle the fentanyl crisis”. – Republican Congressman John Duarte who is running for reelection.
The Truth: Undocumented workers are not the source of fentanyl entering the U.S.U.S. citizens account for the vast majority of trafficking of illegal drugs into the U.S.—a fact acknowledged even by the conservative Cato Institute.
The North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994 had much more to do with illegal drug entries to the U.S. Data shows that most fentanyl enters the U.S. through the southern border, specifically via Ports of Entry, not smuggled through deserts or over border wall fences. It turns out trucks and travelers are the principal source for entry of fentanyl to the U.S. Between 1994 and 2001, the number of trucks crossing into the U.S. from Mexico nearly doubled, reaching around 4.3 million per year. U.S. border officials only inspected about 10 percent of these trucks.
The best solution is not to have more funding for law enforcement. More than 130 addiction medicine specialists, outreach groups, and organizations have released a roadmap opposing spending on law enforcement personnel, overtime, or equipment. Instead, they advocate for focusing on public health interventions and supportive services rather than approaches that encourage criminalization or incarceration.
Lie: “We’re losing 300,000 people a year to fentanyl that comes through our border. We had it down to the lowest number and now it’s worse than it’s ever been.”
The truth: There have been 100,000 to 110,000 drug overdose deaths per year, with opioids (which include fentanyl) accounting for 81,000. Fentanyl deaths started to climb in the 1990s and continued to worsen during Trump’s presidency and for a time afterward, though now they are declining.
Any needless loss of life is lamentable and must be prevented. 81,000 fentanyl deaths in a year is a national tragedy that we need to address, but not by shoot-from-the-hip John Wayne approaches.
We need to get down to the root causes of why we have a drug problem in the U.S. and how to solve it once and for all. Please look for and read the next article in this series on the unrestricted flow of military-grade weapons to Mexico and the cartels and how this has fueled the fentanyl crisis and violence on both sides of the border.
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