Just as with illegal immigration, the costs of fentanyl borne by everyday communities will transform American politics.
Just as with illegal immigration, the costs of fentanyl borne by everyday communities will transform American politics.
P olitical earthquakes occur when the tectonic plates of elite and popular opinion begin grinding against one another. Nearly two decades ago, the shifts on immigration were just being noticed. Political elites were in a rush to welcome and regularize the enormous influx of illegal immigration through a combination of amnesty, guest-worker programs, and expanded legal immigration. They were happy with the changes that illegal immigration had brought to American society. It made labor-intensive service more affordable. Upwardly mobile families could afford to eat out more and hire babysitters and house-cleaners. But popular opinion roared back, eventually frightening Congress into giving up on comprehensive immigration reform in 2006. And it continued roaring until it delivered Donald Trump to the White House.
An omniscient news watcher could have seen the popular anger building up in countless “local news” stories, the sorts of tragedies with political import that don’t make it into the front section of the New York Times. I can’t forget one from my hometown. Everyone in town knew that illegal immigration from Guatemala was simply tolerated, until a horrible crime was committed. The immigrants not only resided in the country illegally, but they often packed into their apartments illegally. They were hired illegally. Because there were so few women in town to match up with them, they tended to a slightly more riotous lifestyle of permanent bachelors when off the clock.
Then one day in 2009, a young girl and her mother were walking out of a dance class when a Ford F-350 pickup truck spun out of a left-hand turn, jumped the curb, and rammed them into the building they had just left. Eight-year-old Kayla Donohue died instantly. Her mother, Lori, died at a hospital hours later. The driver, Zacaria Conces-Garcia, had a blood-alcohol level more than twice the legal limit. ICE served a detainer on Conces-Garcia, a Guatemalan national, after the crash. That was the drill. Two years earlier, in the same town, another undocumented immigrant from Guatemala was charged with sexually abusing a child. Only then did law enforcement broach the idea of deportation. Kayla was buried in the same coffin as her mother, wrapped in her mother’s arms.
It took years for this anger to translate itself into politics, to take arguments from the fringe of politics and reformulate them for the mainstream, to navigate or tear down the thicket of taboos that guarded against its expression, and to find politicians willing to champion policies that address it. And I suspect it is about to happen again.
If I had to bet, the next tectonic shift is coming on the issue of drugs. The overwhelming attitude of political elites toward drugs is that the drug war was a huge misbegotten adventure. The effect of bringing the police down on black American communities during the crack epidemic is seen as racist, even if many black Americans wanted more policing at the time. “Just say no!” and other public-awareness campaigns in the 1980s and ’90s are seen as embarrassments. Elite opinion is horrified by its own hypocrisy in tolerating illegal drug use among elites while punishing it (usually only as an aggravating factor) among violent criminals. But it seeks to resolve this hypocrisy through more decriminalization.
Meanwhile, Americans are dying of drug overdoses at unprecedented and appalling rates. Drug deaths have been rising almost continuously for 20 years. The numbers are just staggering. Over 100,000 Americans die annually of drug overdoses. The U.S. has roughly 20 times the rate of overdose deaths as the global average. As Robert VerBruggen writes, “If you randomly picked 100,000 Americans at the beginning of 2020, about 30 of them would have overdosed by the end of the year.” Contrast this with gunshot wounds, which have become less lethal over the same time period. That means the lethality of the drugs themselves is outpacing the medical innovations and best practices that are saving lives elsewhere.
Most troubling, teen overdose deaths are increasing the fastest. One recent story out of Los Angeles involves a 15-year-old girl who died inside her school’s bathroom after taking what she thought was Percocet but was in fact a counterfeit laced with fentanyl. These tragedies are building into a giant litany of grief, and anger.
Even recently legalized drugs will come under new scrutiny. Marijuana, now with much higher THC levels than was the case in the 1970s or ’80s, is increasingly fingered as part of the rise of psychosis in adult users and even teens.
You can see the first political alarm bell in the candidacy of Blake Masters, who throughout his campaign has connected the chaos at the border to the appalling trafficking of fentanyl from Mexico into the United States.
It’s not confined to one state, or one class. Georgia sees the same rise in teen synthetic-opioid overdoses that is happening in California.
We live in a country in which the declining share of people who do become parents tend to invest incredible amounts of time, energy, and money protecting their kids from harms, real and imagined. How long until they ask for more protection from this threat? It may take only one or two more headline stories that break out, maybe even among the children of the political elite themselves.
Ultimately, Americans are going to face a very stark choice. A society that wants to softly tolerate drug dealers effectively writes off 100,000 dead as junkies and biowaste, and tens of thousands of others suffering from depression and psychosis as burnouts. Or it can take the fight to the people profiting from this misery.
The first drug war was hampered by the entanglements and priorities of the Cold War. No such obstacle exists this time. And in fact, America’s interest in a stable Mexican government may reinforce America’s coming response to the cartels.