The presidential candidates talk tough, but their proposals to address the crisis wouldn’t work.
A policy response to the problem of fentanyl featured prominently in yesterday’s GOP primary debate in Miami. Ron DeSantis spoke of how the “elites in D.C. don’t give a damn about what’s going on in this country. They don’t care that we have tens of thousands of opioid deaths, that the fentanyl’s pouring in. They are not taking the type of action we need to.”
As I noted on the liveblog yesterday, one wonders whether the “elites in D.C.” include the man who was president of these United States from 2017 to 2021, when the problem of fentanyl got much worse. But more importantly than the politics, the candidates’ answers about how to solve the problem of fentanyl suggest that they aren’t taking the problem very seriously either.
Nikki Haley noted the death toll of 75,000 Americans from synthetic drugs. She said her solution was to “go to the source”: “It is the reason why we’ll continue to say we will end all normal trade relations with China until they stop murdering Americans. You watch how quick that flow stops.” The second thing she said she’d do is use special forces to fight Mexican cartels. She then turned to her policies to fight illegal immigration and deport illegal immigrants who nonetheless come to the U.S.
Tim Scott said, “We could use the currently available military technology to surveil our southern border to stop fentanyl from crossing our border.” He also said he would put financial sanctions on Mexican cartels. “If you remember the path, the precursors come from China, then they are manufactured in Mexican labs, and then the Mexican cartels bring them across our border. By sanctioning their accounts and eliminating their cash, we starve them of what they need.”
DeSantis gave the most comprehensive answer:
We’re declaring it a national emergency on day one. I’m sending U.S. military to the border. I’m going to stop the invasion cold. I am going to deport people who came illegally and I’m even going to build the border wall and have Mexico pay for it like Donald Trump promised. How are you going to do it? Yeah, Mexico’s not going to fork over money. We’re going to impose fees on the remittances that foreign workers send to foreign countries. We’ll raise billions of dollars, I’ll build a wall. But we are going to designate the cartels to be foreign terrorist organizations or something similar to that and we’re going to authorize the use of deadly force. We’re going to have maritime operations to interdict precursor chemicals going into Mexico. But I’ll tell you this, if someone in the drug cartels is sneaking fentanyl across the border when I’m president, that’s going to be the last thing they do. We’re going to shoot them stone cold dead.
Vivek Ramaswamy agreed on the need to use the military and went a step further, saying that the northern border is as important as the southern border, and the U.S. needs to “build both walls.”
The instinct from all the candidates was to make this a foreign problem. It’s Mexico or China’s fault that fentanyl is in the U.S., and policing the border combined with operations in Mexico to kill cartel leaders will fix the problem. They talk as though getting a better handle on illegal immigration would stop the flow of these drugs. But that’s simply not how the fentanyl flow works.
In the past, most overdose deaths came from drugs that are grown naturally in specific parts of the world. U.S. drug-enforcement operations in Latin America made sense when cocaine, which is derived from plants that are mostly grown in Latin America, was a scourge in the U.S. Heroin, too, is derived from plants. Those used to be the two most lethal illegal drugs in the U.S.
That’s no longer the case. Now synthetic drugs are the most deadly. That includes fentanyl, but also other opioids and meth. Fentanyl has largely replaced heroin, and meth has largely replaced cocaine in the U.S. today.
These synthetic drugs are far more potent than their natural antecedents, significantly cheaper, and much easier to produce. As Jonathan Caulkins and Keith Humphreys write in a paper for the Manhattan Institute:
Producing synthetic drugs is fast, inexpensive, and can be done almost anywhere. Dissemination via the internet of simpler “recipes,” as well as the precursor chemical ingredients, allows almost anyone to learn how to produce them. That means that illegal supply chains can replace seized synthetic drugs more easily than they can replace drugs like heroin or cocaine. Likewise, trafficking organizations that are shut down can swiftly be replaced.
So you can shoot traffickers “stone cold dead,” but that doesn’t really solve the problem. There aren’t geographically defined supply chains of synthetic drugs in the same way there are geographically defined supply chains for heroin or cocaine. Take out one lab, and it’s relatively cheap and easy to start another one somewhere else.
Interdicting supplies at the border is also something of a fool’s errand. Caulkins and Humphreys note that fentanyl’s high potency means that little of it is needed, and total U.S. consumption “could fit comfortably into any one of the 7 million trucks or cargo containers that cross the southern border each year.” They write that one pure pound of fentanyl is enough to make 200,000 laced pills. Law enforcement at the border would be looking for thousands of needles in thousands of haystacks, and a lot of this stuff is just sent through the mail anyway.
The only candidate to mention treatment for people currently struggling with addiction was Chris Christie. He also talked about border security like the others, but he added, “We also need to lower demand.” That’s a good instinct, and treatment is an underdiscussed segment of the drug debate. But he went on to say that fentanyl addiction is “a disease like heart disease, diabetes, or any other disease like cancer that can be treated, should be treated.”
There’s an argument that some addictions should be treated like diseases, but it misses the problems specific to fentanyl. The drug is so potent that even one-time users can overdose on it. People who don’t have a drug problem are nonetheless susceptible to dying from fentanyl; that’s what makes responding to it such a challenge.
What should the U.S. do instead? Caulkins and Humphreys have some ideas. They emphasize the need to maintain and strengthen social stigmas against drug usage. They talk about the need to continue to invest in medications that treat drug addiction and expand ready access to naloxone, the drug that can rescue people who are overdosing.
But they also say that none of their solutions is simple and that the problem is immense. “Such realism is depressing but honest, and honesty is the best foundation for policy,” they write. The Republican candidates should take that advice to heart, even though it might not get much applause on the debate stage.