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.
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.
Doh! You are absolutely right. That was a mixup on my end. Thanks for catching that.
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.
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.