One hundred thousand dead.
In just a single year, 2021, that many Americans died from drug overdoses and two thirds died from a single drug: fentanyl. What is more frightening is that the annual number of those killed by the drug has risen every year for the last seven years.
What will the next year’s death toll add up to?
It is a frightful question that eludes experts and skirts scrutiny from lawmakers. New reporting from the Washington Post details a government-wide failure to tackle the deadliest drug-induced scourge in American history. This is a story that spans the Pacific Ocean, more than a decade of time and involves failures from presidential administrations from both parties – failures that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
In the decade prior to fentanyl’s rapid spread in 2015, the Bush and Obama administrations made key decisions that would make addressing the current problem a woeful task. The opioid crisis traces its roots to the early 2000s when pharmaceutical companies played fast and loose with prescriptions to opioids, like oxycodone. The Bush Administration was preoccupied with the War on Terror, and the Obama Administration pointedly de-emphasized drug abuse, stripping the “drug czar” of its rank and booting the position from the Cabinet. Budget cuts plagued the Drug Enforcement Administration.
By the time President Trump took office in 2017, the fentanyl crisis was beginning to boil over. His administration declared fentanyl’s spread a national emergency, explicitly named China as culpable, and raised awareness of the drug’s deadly spread. But little changed. The Trump Administration’s policies, and the Biden Administration’s after, were largely rhetorical in nature: highlighting the dangers of the drug while in pursuit of other policy goals. In Trump’s case, it was to help make a case for a border wall, and in Biden’s case it was to deflect from the disastrous mess at the border under his watch.
Beyond partisan dynamics, the international dynamic is perhaps even more fraught. U.S.-Mexico cooperation on drug policy is arguably at its nadir. The Post ties this to the 2018 election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO), saying:
“Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was critical of his country’s drug war partnership with the United States and argued that it burdened Mexico unfairly and fueled violence. Once López Obrador took office in December 2018, security and counternarcotics relationships with the United States had gone cold. He was distrustful of the DEA and the access U.S. agents had cultivated across the Mexican government.”
Whether U.S. officials will use the carrot or the stick on Mexico, as President Trump did, remains to be seen.
Add to that the growing tension between the U.S. and China, the source of the chemicals needed for the cartel-supervised production in Mexico. President Trump lambasted China for its facilitating role, but the public condemnation resulted in functionally no action on China’s part. So far, the Biden Administration has remained silent on this front. China’s role in the fentanyl crisis is often acknowledged but only in passing, as it was in the Post’s piece.
One hundred thousand dead.
The fentanyl crisis is not an easy one to solve, and while that may cause some policymakers to tread carefully, that ought not to allow kicking the can down the road. Seeking a silver bullet will prove a fool’s errand. But one hundred thousand deaths in a single year demands a rigorous response willing to incorporate an array of solutions implemented swiftly.
