It’s not lost on anybody including the corporate media that fentanyl, the synthetic opioid making its rounds in U.S. cities, is increasingly threatening the lives of Americans. Severely lacking from the media coverage of record-high fentanyl overdoses, however, is honesty about what exactly is causing streams of the dangerous substance to enter the U.S. unnoticed: President Joe Biden’s unsecured border.
The Department of Justice announced on Wednesday that the Drug Enforcement Administration “seized more than 10.2 million fentanyl pills and approximately 980 pounds of fentanyl powder during the period of May 23 through Sept. 8, 2022.”
“That is enough to kill 36 million Americans,” Attorney General Merrick Garland explained at a press conference.
Health departments all around the country have declared the rapid rise in fentanyl deaths a public health crisis.
Dr. Brian Hurley, the medical director of the Substance Abuse Prevention and Control division of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, warned fentanyl is now the culprit of the “worst overdose epidemic in United States history.”
Press coverage of this latest opioid crisis development has largely focused on how Americans are losing their children, brothers, sisters, and friends to rainbow-colored pills that resemble candy.
“She thought she was taking a prescription drug that gets prescribed to people from doctors. So to her, that her friends were doing it, well, it comes from a doctor so you know, should be OK on that and not knowing that it was laced with fentanyl,” Silvia Martinez, a Wichita Falls, Texas, mom whose 19-year-old daughter died of a fentanyl overdose, told “Good Morning America.”
Martinez’s story, unfortunately, is not uncommon. Fentanyl was responsible for the most drug overdose deaths in the U.S., more than 71,000, in 2021 and continues to play a large role in the drug-related deaths Americans see in articles every day.
All of sudden, everyone wants to talk about the prevalence of fentanyl overdoses, especially accidental ones in Americans under 30 years old, but no one wants to talk about the border crisis that’s causing it.
It is no secret that drug cartels are the primary means by which the illicit and fatal pills are making their way into Americans’ hands. Even the DEA admits that the rise in fentanyl deaths in the U.S. is directly linked to cartel activity at the nation’s southern border.
“The men and women of the DEA are relentlessly working to stop the trafficking of rainbow fentanyl and defeat the Mexican drug cartels that are responsible for the vast majority of the fentanyl that is being trafficked in the United States,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in a recent statement.
The corporate media, DOJ, and DEA fail to admit, however, that it’s under Biden’s lax border policies that drug activity has only increased.
In August alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized more than 2,200 pounds of fentanyl. That’s the highest recorded fentanyl seizure total per month since CBP began tracking the data in 2019.
More than 90 percent of those seizures were at “legal border crossings and interior vehicle checkpoints.” In addition to what authorities do catch, more of the fentanyl entering the U.S. at alarming rates is likely being smuggled over by people who evade apprehension by overwhelmed and frustrated border officials via covert passageways and illegal crossings.
Thanks to Biden’s dismantling of the Trump administration’s border security measures and the White House’s continued reluctance to admit its role in the border crisis, cartels are emboldened to not only continue their drug operations but expand their black market influence further.
As Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson recently reported, these criminal organizations have begun “a gradual takeover of the Mexican state” which includes becoming involved in “industrial agriculture, port operations, migrant smuggling, human trafficking, and even the control and distribution of water in drought-stricken parts of the country.”
Yet, the corporate media and Democrats conveniently gloss over the role the Biden administration plays in encouraging this vast criminal enterprise.
Just this week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer warned that “rainbow fentanyl” targeted at young Americans is “really worrisome and really dangerous.” As a result, Schumer is asking for $290 million in taxpayer dollars to go towards overdose response teams across the country.
Instead of addressing the border-induced drug crisis’s root causes, something Biden’s border czar Vice President Kamala Harris claims to know something about, Schumer wants to pour millions into a temporary fix.
There’s no denying that the ubiquity of fentanyl is a cause for concern but until the Biden administration, Congress, and federal agencies get serious about securing the border, the U.S. is doomed to a raging and deadly drug crisis that has no end.
