Christina Dent, founder of End It For Good, was talking with a supporter of President Trump about how we should handle drugs, and he told her he generally supports the President’s approach to the southern border but doesn’t believe any of his current suggestions—including the death penalty—will stop fentanyl trafficking. That supporter is right, and it’s important to understand why.
The good news? We can change course. Even better—President Trump already knows the real solution.
Let’s walk through the problem together and look at what kinds of interventions could work. Then, you can decide for yourself which of the President’s proposals might actually solve the fentanyl crisis.
Christina talks in-depth with Gerard Gibert about fentanyl and the border on SuperTalk Mississippi. Watch now.
What is Fentanyl?
Fentanyl is a synthetic (lab-created) opioid, about fifty times more potent than heroin. It’s been used in medical settings for decades as an effective pain treatment. Because you don’t have to grow a crop for it, like you do with marijuana or cocaine, fentanyl can be manufactured anywhere.
What Causes a Fentanyl Overdose?
Opioids reduce pain but also slow your breathing. Too much fentanyl can cause breathing to stop entirely, leading to death.
Who Uses Fentanyl?
Thousands of people are given fentanyl safely in hospitals every day—including Christina’s son. You can read that story in Curious*. They’re not overdosing because they use quality-controlled fentanyl dosed accurately. People who get fentanyl from illicit markets are the ones at risk of overdose, because illicit markets have no regulations and no quality control. Dosing is a guess.
Why is Fentanyl in the Illicit Drug Supply?
When drugs are banned, they don’t disappear—they go underground. And that illicit market is massive, worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. For traffickers, the smaller the package, the less likely it is to get detected. Because it’s so much more potent, fentanyl packs the same punch as heroin in just 1/50th of the volume. That’s the difference between a basketball and a marble.
That’s why fentanyl quickly became the drug of choice for smuggling.
Why Are So Many People Dying?
Fentanyl is:
- Extremely potent
- Lethal in high doses
- Abundant in the illicit supply
That’s a deadly combination. It’s the wild west out there—millions of people using drugs with no idea what’s in them, how strong they are, or where they came from. That’s a recipe for a lot of lost lives.
Will a border crackdown help? No. For one, where there is demand, there will always be supply. But three other numbers are crucial to righting the narrative that fentanyl is an immigration problem. According to an analysis of data by CATO Institute:
- In the last 10 years, 88% of fentanyl seized at the border was found at a port of entry.
- In the last 5 years, 80% of people caught with fentanyl at ports of entry were US Citizens.
- For every 12,000 border-crossing immigrants that Border Patrol encounters, they will seize fentanyl from only one.
The fact that most fentanyl enters the US at ports of entry with US citizens makes sense. It’s another response to prohibition. Cartels like to ship higher-potency drugs because they’re less likely to be detected (remember, smuggling something the size of a marble is much less risky than something the size of a basketball). They also prefer to ship those drugs with hired US citizens at legal entry points because it vastly reduces the risk of detection.
So What’s the Solution?
President Trump has offered a few: building a wall, imposing tariffs, and even the death penalty for traffickers.
But the President himself offered the real solution back in 1990, at a luncheon hosted by The Miami Herald where he said, “We’re losing badly the war on drugs. You have to legalize drugs to win that war. You have to take the profit away from these drug czars.”
If we want to get fentanyl off the streets, people have to stop buying illicit drugs. We’ve tried forcing them not to, and even 100 years later, 17% of American adults have used illicit drugs recently. That’s a number twice as high as it was just 20 years ago. That approach has failed miserably.
The President was right back in 1990. Regulating a legal market for drugs is the only way to take the wind out of the economic sails of cartels and bankrupt them.
NYT bestselling author Johann Hari joined us on the End It For Good Podcast to discuss the underground drug market. Listen here:
Ten years ago, most Americans had never even heard of fentanyl. Today, it drives an overdose crisis that takes nearly 100,000 lives every year. We can do better. But only if we’re honest about the problem—and bold enough to change course.
Help us do that.
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