Mexican cartels make billions of dollars a year smuggling drugs into the United States across its weak southwestern border, according to a new Senate report.
“Some experts estimate that Mexican transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), which represent the greatest criminal drug threat in the United States, generate somewhere between $19 and $29 billion per year in U.S. drug sales,” said the report, published by the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. “This profit is enough to motivate the cartels to find a way, any way, to penetrate our borders.”
The report demonstrated a connection between two social issues that have dominated the national political discourse in 2016 — immigration and the heroin epidemic that is sweeping across the country.
“I have reached the inescapable conclusion that our borders remain unsecure and that a key driver of that insecurity is America’s insatiable demand for drugs,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., said in a statement accompanying the release of the report. “It is vital that America as a whole shares the sense of urgency to resolve this public health crisis that is taking the lives of countless Americans and threatening our national security.”
Johnson’s report is largely academic on that front, providing a survey of various attempts to curtail drug use and their respective strengths and weaknesses. “At this juncture, it is far from clear whether the various approaches discussed in this report do more harm than good,” the report said. “However, what is clear is that our current approach to the war on drugs is not working. We have a responsibility to examine the impact of alternative approaches, no matter how controversial.”
Johnson released the report in his official capacity as chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, but the document’s more immediate impact might be felt in his ongoing reelection campaign. Johnson is one of several Republicans running for reelection in states that President Obama won in both of his presidential campaigns.
Some of those lawmakers have used the heroin epidemic as one part of a platform that allows them to take advantage of the factors that propelled Donald Trump to the GOP nomination, without alienating women or moderate voters who are turned off by his aggressive rhetoric on immigration.
“You’ve got to relate back to the people and to their problems and show them that you understand them and that you’re listening, more than ever,” GOP strategist Barry Bennett, a former advisor to Ohio Sen. Rob Portman who went on to help Trump, said while praising such tactics in March.
