“On the Holmes Front,” with Frank Holmes
America’s open border with Mexico is killing Americans—not just from gangs or human traffickers, and definitely not just in border states.
Maybe the biggest killer cutting down U.S. citizens hitchhiked across the Rio Grande, got smuggled into places like Texas or Arizona, then blew in all directions, plowing over one life, one family, after another.
And it could get even worse in the New Year.
The problem is illegal drugs, especially opioids like fentanyl, floating across the southern border and straight through the veins and arteries of Americans everywhere.
The number of U.S. deaths from overdoses just broke a national record in 2021.
From April 2020 until April 2021, 100,306 people died from overdoses in the U.S., the CDC has reported.
That’s a 30 percent jump since last year, according to official statistics.
“Experts believe the top drivers of overdose deaths are the growing prevalence of deadly fentanyl in the illicit drug supply,” according to the Associated Press, “and the COVID-19 pandemic, which left many drug users socially isolated and unable to get treatment or other support.” If you read that last sentence again, it tells you that COVID-19 lockdown orders kept addicts from getting treatment…so they died.
“More than anything else, what drives opioid-addicted individuals to continue using is that without opioids they will experience severe symptoms of withdrawal,” wrote Andrew Kolodny of Brandeis University. “And maintaining access to treatment is crucial to avoid relapse, especially during the pandemic. Research has shown that social isolation and stress – which became more common during the pandemic – increase the chances of a relapse in someone in recovery.”
Fentanyl is 100 times stronger than morphine, so people get addicted faster, harder, and more completely than any other drug available in mass quantities today.
Once fentanyl has a hold on someone, it can be a very short ride until death.
But where is all this illegal fentanyl coming from? China and Mexico.
The drug starts in China, then gets shipped to Mexico, where it’s brought across the border in caravans and by coyotes smuggling in a record amount of drugs, and a record number of illegals, this year.
From last October through the end of this September, border patrol agents captured 11,201 pounds of fentanyl trying to cross the southern border. That’s more than twice as much as they caught being smuggled across the border in 2020, when they stopped only 4,791 pounds.
“The majority of these seizures have occurred in ports of entry where CBP’s Office of Field Operations has seen a 400 percent increase in fentanyl seizures since 2018,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) wrote in an e-mail to the New York Post.
Authorities say that much fentanyl represents a tidal wave of death.
“One kilogram of fentanyl is equivalent to 500,000 lethal doses, the federal government estimates, meaning the seizures represent 2.5 billion doses prevented from entering the country,” the New York Post reported.
And there’s absolutely no sign of any let up. In fact, agents just arrested a Mexican truck driver for trying to bring the largest shipment of fentanyl and methamphetamine in U.S. history, the AP reports.
“More than 17,500 pounds (7,930 kilograms) of meth and 389 pounds (176 kilograms) of fentanyl were discovered last Thursday hidden inside a tractor-trailer at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in San Diego, according to a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office,” according to a story released on Monday.
That comes just days after agents arrested another man near the Mexican border carrying more than 200 fentanyl pills worth more than $5,000 cash.
It’s great news that the agents stopped so many pounds of drugs from entering the country—but how much of the killer drug managed into come to the U.S. successfully, in spite of the agents’ best efforts?
We won’t know until the death certificates start to pile up.
If we ever needed a clean start to seal the border, it’s the New Year.
But will Biden listen?
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”