One year ago, 27-year-old Amber DeSisti was found frozen outside the Bradford County, Pa., courthouse after she died from an opioid overdose. About a year before, just a few miles away, Ben Kinsman, 28, had been found dead outside his parent’s home after he overdosed and froze on another cold night.
DeSisti’s body had been dumped near a portable toilet; Kinsman appeared to be trying to make it home for help when he died. Their stories are far too common, and they are proof there is a crisis at the southern border that requires integrated security — including a wall, technology, and more personnel.
More than 70,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2017, and more than two-thirds of the deaths involved opioids. Like many people across America, I see the devastating results up close here at home. In early January, nine opioid addicts overdosed and three died in 48 hours in nearby Buffalo, and the school just down the road from me has become known as “Heroin High.”
So, there is indeed a crisis at the Mexico-United States border fueling President Trump’s call for a wall: That’s where most illicit opioids are smuggled in, and it’s created a terrible crisis across America.
Local government officials certainly know it.
Doug McLinko, a Bradford County commissioner from DeSisti and Kinsman’s hometown, told me the vast majority of opioids come to his rural area from Mexico, citing statistics from the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a drug-prohibition enforcement program run by the United States Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Ambassador William Brownfield, assistant secretary of state for international narcotic control and law enforcement affairs, estimates that 90 to 94 percent of all heroin abused in the United States comes from Mexico. Mexican Oxy — pills manufactured south of the border to look like authentic Oxycontin, a popular prescription opioid — is also flowing in.
According to a 2018 Drug Enforcement Administration report, drugs are smuggled across the southern border via personally owned vehicles, tractor trailers, and body carriers. Any solution must address all three inflows — including a wall, more technology, and additional personnel to detect the drugs smuggled through legal ports of entry.
A group of 40 law enforcement officers, including Bradford County Sheriff C.J. Walters, recently signed a Washington Post advertisement supporting a border wall, noting that cutting off overland access would redirect drugs brought in by body carriers to ports of entry, where Mexican cartels transport the bulk of their drugs hidden in vehicles.
This filtering of drug smugglers will carry with it a requirement for additional resources, such as personnel and technology, to check every vehicle at ports of entry. But without a wall, Mexican drug cartels can always easily evade any crackdown at ports of entry by increasing the amount they move with body carriers crossing illegally.
Thankfully, the availability of controlled prescription drugs and overdose deaths from prescription opioids alone has declined significantly with federal and state policy interventions. Unfortunately, however, this reflects the fact that many addicts have been turning to illicit drugs.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, increased demand has caused a 22 percent spike in heroin and a 73 percent increase in fentanyl smuggling across the border. A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis found that overdose deaths linked to fentanyl increased 45 percent from 2016 to 2017. And deaths from Fentanyl alone doubled each year from 2013 to 2016.
The DEA reports that fentanyl can be 50 times as potent as heroin. Quantities as small as 0.25 mg of fentanyl, like a few grains of salt, can be deadly.
Data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection shows the CBP seized 1,485 pounds of fentanyl at the southwest border in the fiscal year 2017, compared to just two pounds seized in all of 2013.
Smaller quantities of fentanyl are also sent directly into the United States from China via the United States Postal Service. These come in frightening concentrations — up to 90 percent.
In most of “flyover country,” this opioid crisis is getting worse. “We’re doing everything we can here at home, but we’re losing the battle,” McLinko told me. “We have to cut off supply, or our county and many like it will collapse under the financial and human toll of this epidemic.”
Some local elected officials like those in Bradford County get it. Others don’t.
Like many leaders in major cities, Michelle Schoeneman, a trustee in my tiny hometown of East Aurora, N.Y., once caused a stir when she proposed opening safe injection sites. Voters rejected her idea, but the mindset is clear: While some, like McLinko, want to fight the war, others want to manage the impact, seemingly without any regard for the surrounding community. As Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein wrote in the New York Times, “When drug users flock to a site, drug dealers follow, bringing with them violence and despair, posing a danger to neighbors and law-abiding visitors.”
McLinko told me that he and other municipal leaders see fewer and fewer addicts calling free help lines and repeated failures of rehabilitation. Profoundly frustrated, many are increasingly focused on cutting supply.
A border wall would be instrumental in doing so.
As for drugs that are entering the country through the U.S. Postal Service, much has already been done. Legislation signed into law by Trump last October focuses resources and training for required screen packages for fentanyl shipped from overseas.
Quite frankly, this was Congress’ most significant bipartisan achievement in 2018, and it’s a profound relief for parents who are scared to death of this epidemic.
With so many mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters lost and families destroyed, this opioid crisis must end. A wall is a key to the solution, and tens of thousands of Amber DeSistis and Ben Kinsmans can be saved if Washington just puts politics aside again.
Michael R. Caputo is a Buffalo-based public affairs consultant, is a WBEN-AM talk radio host, and served as a senior adviser to President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
