The Biden (Obama III) Administration is Awful: This is Its Worst Crime.

Ashley Morabito, who died of an overdose in June 2018 at 24, is one of the 92 people pictured on the Western Pennsylvania billboard shown below. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We earlier wrote:

Our open border is the Democrats’ Number One crime. The size of the immigration rush slams border agents, forcing them away from interdicting drug shipments, even as the migrants themselves, including children, serve as cartel mules bringing illegal immigrants and drugs across the border. It is a coordinated, cartel-run operation serving the Democrats’ goal of expanding the U.S. nonwhite population, with the cartels profiting from moving both people and drugs into the country. Once [here], illegal immigrants move freely throughout the nation, helping boost crime in city after city, aided by government-supported, pro-immigrant, non-profit organizations displaying no concern about Covid or criminal records.


PBS reports that more than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2021, the highest annual death toll ever recorded. Deaths from fentanyl, methamphetamine and cocaine rose sharply. From April 2021 to April 2022, according to the CDC, fentanyl and related synthetic opioids killed 73,000 Americans — 1,400 deaths per week. Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18-45, killing more Americans than gun and auto-related deaths combined.

Most recently, “rainbow fentanyl” looking like candy and cartel-designed to target children and teens – thanks to Biden administration open-border policies — helps cartels put American children on the drug crisis’ front lines.

Worse than Covid

We have heard about — and lived with — so much about Covid. The worst year for U.S. Covid deaths was 2021, when 415,000 died. But for those under 55, the total was “only” 69,500. Opioid deaths for those under 55, by contrast (using 2020 ratios), totaled 87,000.

That means in Covid’s worst year, significantly more people under 55 died from opioids than Covid. Almost as many died from fentanyl alone as from Covid.

These facts aren’t widely known. People vastly underestimate the numbers fentanyl kills. A Rasmussen survey found that fewer than a third of voters (31%) realized American fentanyl deaths in 2021 were over 50,000.

At the same time, people wildly overestimate the number killed by Covid. One Gallup study asked what “percentage of people who have been infected by the coronavirus needed to be hospitalized.” 35% of those asked said that over half of infected people would require hospitalization from Covid. A mere 18% correctly stated that the risk of hospitalization was somewhere between 1%-5%.

In-hospital mortality among patients hospitalized for Covid — the 1% to 5% — decreased from 15% in the June-December 2021 Delta period to 5% in 2022, once Omicron took over.

Covid deaths decline, opioid killings rise, the public remains ignorant. A National Bureau of Economic Research paper found that U.S. media coverage of Covid skewed overwhelmingly negative compared to coverage elsewhere, likely contributing, in the words of the Washington Examiner’s Michael Lee, to the outsize fear Americans hold about Covid’s threat.

Death Now, Death Later

Fentanyl is an illegal drug manufactured in China and Mexico that cartels carry over our open border. It’s overwhelming American law enforcement and health care systems. Besides immediate death, fentanyl crossing our open border induces addiction, homelessness, mental illness. Here’s investigative reporter Leighton Woodhouse:

Lack of meaningful addiction care options for the thousands upon thousands of users who can’t afford private rehabilitation programs, and the absence of laws that would compel treatment for adults who don’t voluntarily make that choice, [means] people who have just suffered a near-death [overdose] experience [go] right back on their streets, alone and without support.

“The system, as it currently exists .   .   .  is a nightmare,” said Rick Ramirez, a retired Los Angeles firefighter. “It keeps snowballing. Enabling people to do what they’re doing, and the lack of a system to help them – in my opinion that’s why you’re seeing this explosion of people on the street.”

Unless a patient asks for drug treatment, an ER doctor has only a 72-hour involuntary psychiatric hold, and even then only if patients are a threat to themselves, to others, or utterly incapable of managing basic living tasks. And once detoxification ends the opioid-induced psychosis, the patient is released. Such a system, Woodhouse says, means treatment reaches only a tiny fraction of the addicts who need help. Understand: people dying from addiction avoid everything that could save them.

To Woodhouse, open-border-supplied drugs mean more addiction, homelessness, and untreated mental illness, inundating cities and suburbs and destroying the lives of thousands of addicts and their families. Everyone in the system — EMTs, psych nurses, ER doctors — knows these truths.

As fentanyl deaths pile up, progressives promote Narcan as the salvation antidote. Narcan acts by binding to the brain's opioid receptors, immediately blocking the drug’s effects. That restores breathing, but throws patients into severe withdrawal. They wake up angry, miserable, and dopesick, “sometimes puking on you,” and often violent. “Everything we do is nonsense,” Woodhouse’s firefighter said. Parents of addicts end up praying daily for their children’s arrest and imprisonment, because freedom is a death sentence.

China’s Opioid Payback?

And then there’s China.

Executive director of The American Coalition Will Coggin was formerly with ChinaOwnsUs.com. In Newsweek, Coggin says thank China for the

dead Americans piling up from drug overdoses. China sends fentanyl to Mexico, where it is trafficked across the border by cartels. China has significant ties to Mexican drug cartels. Chinese actors not only provide fentanyl and related substances to the cartels; they also launder money for the cartels.

Coggin speculates China's communist leaders view fentanyl as payback for the 19th Century Opium Wars, during which Great Britain used its naval power to force its India-grown opium onto the Chinese market, addicting Chinese contrary to its government’s will. Today, fentanyl payback weakens China’s contemporary opponent, with China gaining as young and middle-aged Americans become addicted to and die from made-in-China synthetic opioids.
 

Chinese opium smokers (c. 1880)

 

Related Crime: Crippling the Police

Besides open borders, another Obama/Biden administration gift is consent decrees imposed on “racially unbalanced” city police forces. New Orleans is the current murder capital of the U.S. Comparing homicides to total population, the homicide rate in New Orleans is significantly higher than in any other American city, with homicides up by 46% from this same time last year and up 141% since 2019.

The underfunded and undermanned New Orleans police department operates under a decade-old Obama Justice Department consent decree. Police officers and political leaders, including New Orleans Democratic Mayor LaToya Cantrell, say the department has been hobbled by the decree, leaving it unable to address corruption and other issues. The decree means crackdowns on officers for minor infractions, officers leaving the force more quickly than the city can replace them, and consequently giving criminals the run of the city.

“The criminals are more bolder and more brazen,” said New Orleans Police Superintendent Shaun Ferguson. “They do not believe they will face any consequences for their actions.”

Several other cities including Los Angeles, Seattle, Phoenix, and Cleveland saw a jump in violent crime once their police forces came under Justice Department consent decree restrictions.