Both Trump and Harris Would Crack Down on Fentanyl as President
Republicans and Democrats alike agree that the U.S. should do something about fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that is significantly more potent than heroin. It is often found mixed into street drugs, but not because addicts are clamoring for it: Rather, fentanyl is cheaper and easier to manufacture and smuggle, making it an attractive alternative when prohibitionist governments crack down on pain pills.
Unfortunately, neither of the major party seems willing to either admit the government’s own role in making the drug so dangerous, or to pursue an alternative to classic war on drugs policies.
This much was evident from an early answer at last night’s vice presidential debate between Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz.
Vice President Kamala Harris, Vance charged, “said that she wanted to undo all of Donald Trump’s border policies…and what it’s meant is that a lot of fentanyl is coming into our country. I had a mother who struggled with opioid addiction and has gotten clean. I don’t want people who are struggling with addiction to be deprived of their second chance because Kamala Harris let in fentanyl into our communities at record levels. So you’ve got to stop the bleeding.”
This has been a common refrain from Republicans: “She even wants to legalize fentanyl,” Trump said this weekend. (Harris has not said explicitly that she wants to legalize fentanyl, though in a 2019 questionnaire from the American Civil Liberties Union, she supported “decriminalization at the federal level of all drug possession for personal use” and said that “the opioid crisis has reaffirmed the failure of criminalization.”)
“We’re losing 300,000 people a year to fentanyl that comes through our border,” Trump said at a July campaign rally. In reality, the numbers are thankfully far lower: Around 107,000 deaths from synthetic opioids were reported in 2022, of which around 74,000 resulted from fentanyl.
Of course, the vast majority of fentanyl brought into the U.S. is not carried by illegal immigrants or the result of porous borders: From 2019 to 2024, 80.2 percen
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