I’d like the CIA or the Defense Department or the Congressional Research Service or someone to do a simple study. I’d like to know their best estimate of how many Americans die or effectively have their lives ruined each year as a direct result of the actions of the Sinaloa cartel. I want to know, in particular, how many people are using their heroin and their methamphetamine in this country. And then I’d like to know how many people are being negatively impacted from all sources of these drugs.
And then I’d like to know how many people are dying in this country annually or having their lives effectively ruined by terrorism.
Once this analysis is done, I want them to compare how much money and how many man hours we dedicate to each problem.
Finally, I want to know much time the media spends talking about or writing about both issues.
And, to be clear, solving the drug problem isn’t as simple as taking money away from the so-called War on Terror and putting into the so-called War on Drugs. Mexican drug cartels didn’t make policies that created hundreds of thousands of prescription opioid addicts in this country. Congress, and the executive branch, and the pharmaceutical lobby did that. The cartels are merely responding to an already existing market.
But think about this. Every bundle of heroin that enters your community is an immeasurably bigger threat to your community than any pissed off Islamist. It’s more likely that the doctor down the street who overprescribes opioids will kill people you know than it is that a terrorist will.
Here’s just my county from last year.
Officials for the first time on Wednesday released statistics painting a picture of fatal heroin overdoses in Chester County.
The county saw 24 overdose deaths last year, with victims ranging from 21 to 79 years old. Fourteen were men and 10 were women.
Perhaps most notably, 18 of the fatal overdoses –75 percent– involved both heroin and prescription drugs.
“One clear trend from these statistics is that prescription drug abuse is a gateway to a heroin overdose,” Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan said in a statement.
“People start by using prescription drugs like oxycodone, then switch to heroin because it is cheaper and easier to obtain.”
How many people died in France in these terrorist attacks over the last week? I think the number is about seventeen.
It’s a very serious matter when people storm buildings and slaughter journalists or take and kill hostages in supermarkets. But just from the standpoint of making a rational and clear-eyed threat assessment, the cartels that are shipping heroin and meth into our communities are several orders of magnitude more significant.
And, yet, we can’t even get beds for a fraction of the addicts who need treatment.
