Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday traveled to the U.S. southern border on Friday where she addressed the nation’s fentanyl crisis.
Harris embraced a mother whose son died of a fentanyl overdose and made her most extensive remarks to date on how she would address border security and immigration reform.
"I will reach across the aisle, and I will embrace common sense approaches and new technologies to get the job done," she said.
Harris said that if she wins the election, she would try to revive a bipartisan agreement that would have provided more funding to hire more border agents and buy more equipment to detect fentanyl. She said her experience as a prosecutor and attorney general gave her experience to tackle the fentanyl problem.
Fentanyl is the main driver of the American overdose crisis which until recently reached record-breaking levels. And there is early evidence that fatal overdoses have peaked and may begin to subside. Nevertheless, preventable overdoses are still responsible for more annual deaths than deaths caused by traffic accidents, suicide, or gun violence.
Fentanyl is an extremely potent, inexpensive, and easy-to-manufacture synthetic opioid. It has thoroughly contaminated the drug supply. Any street narcotic is almost guaranteed to contain fentanyl, including heroin, cocaine or fake pharmaceutical pills. That includes drugs that are purchased legally across the border in Mexico where many Americans migrate to fill prescriptions at a much lower cost.
Fentanyl frequently makes front-page news across the country, but it remains poorly understood by policymakers and the public. There are leading American politicians who continue to conflate the fentanyl problem with illegal immigration when these issues have nothing to do with each other.
Why, despite all of our efforts to raise awareness and billions of dollars of investments, does this emergency keep getting worse?
In his new book “Fentanyl Nation: Toxic Politics and America’s Failed War on Drugs” recovery advocate Ryan Hampton separates the facts from the fiction surrounding fentanyl and shows how overdose deaths are ultimately policy failures. Instead of investing in education, harm reduction, effective treatment, and recovery, we have doubled down on more police, more incarceration, and harsher penalties for those caught in the grip of addiction.
Guest:
Ryan Hampton is a national addiction recovery advocate, author, media commentator, and person in long-term recovery. He has worked with multiple nonprofits nationwide to end overdose and served in leadership capacities for various community organizing initiatives. Hampton is in recovery from a decade of active opioid use and is a leading voice in America's rising recovery movement. He is the author of Unsettled and American Fix—and lives in Nevada with his husband, Sean, and their boxer dog, Quincy. He is currently a Democratic candidate for state assembly.
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*This interview will be recorded on Monday, September 30, 2024.
