Biden and Trudeau ignore the opiod crisis
Both are more concerned with buying votes than protecting our youth
American deaths from drug overdoses was a growing problem before Joe Biden was elected, with a long term trend of rising mortality from this tragic problem.
The problem has only gotten worse since Biden took office. Drug overdose deaths in 2021 topped 100,000 according to the National Centre for Health Statistics. The dramatic rise is fueled in part by soaring volumes of fentanyl coming into the United States through the country’s southern border. Biden’s decision to curtail the Trump era border enforcement efforts and construction of a barrier have seen the number of migrants coming into the United States rise sharply and with them a massive increase in the volume of illicit drugs. In 2021, the amount of fentanyl seized at the Southern border rose 4,000 percent over only three years with the amount of this toxic drug seized enough to cause the deaths of over 1 million Americans. It is likely the amount of the drug which evaded border patrol agents is a multiple of the amount seized. Drug Cartels are finding Biden’s open border policies create a field day where they can profit from charging migrants for getting them into the United States but compel many of them to act as “mules” carrying drugs into the country.
Canada has not been spared from the scourge of drug related deaths, suffering about 19 deaths a day from fentanyl abuse. Most of the deaths are young people. British Columbia and the Yukon have the worse experience with drug related deaths, while Quebec and the Maritime Provinces have quite low rates.
Canada’s experience parallels that of the United States although our 7,000 annual deaths is somewhat less per capita than that in the United States. Like the Democrat Party government in the United States, the Canadian Liberal Party government espouses “safe injection sites” and is exploring “decriminalization” of drug abuse as a possible solution. No one seems to be asking whether these left wing approaches will materially reduce the abuse of opiods, but common sense suggests it is likely to have the opposite effect. I don’t think more addicts but fewer deaths is a winning formula.
I live in Collingwood, Ontario. I used to think Collingwood and most of the Simcoe Muskoka district comprises an island of sanity where outdoor lifestyles like skiing, cycling and water sports kept our youth entertained and relatively free from drug abuse. Not so today. Not only has our area seen a dramatic rise in opiod related deaths over the past few years, but also now has an opiod related death rate higher than the Provincial average.
134 young people died from drug abuse in our area in 2020 another 132 in the first 9 months of 2021. That total is not materially different from the 434 COVID deaths in our area in the two years since the pandemic began. Our public health officials have been visible with mandates, lockdowns and many other interventions to prevent the spread of COVID during the past 2 years but to my knowledge have done little to curb the growing drug abuse problem. The majority of the COVID deaths were elderly people but the majority of the opiod deaths are our youth.
It seems that there is more political capital in virtue signaling policies that pretend masks and lockdowns reduce COVID risks and no political capital in taking action to curb the opiod pandemic killing our children. Both Trudeau and Biden are willing to squander billions of dollars on policies they pretend prevented COVID deaths while spending little to protect our youth from the scourge of narcotics.