There's a reason America has lost more to fentanyl than war. And we're not addressing it

Americans by now know that fentanyl is a scourge that is killing our people by the tens of thousands every year.

In 2021 alone, fentanyl killed 70,000 Americans, The Economist reports.

So destructive is the drug, we’ve taken to defining its grim statistics in apocalyptic terms.

“More Americans will perish this decade alone from imported Mexican drugs than all the combat deaths in all the wars since America’s founding,” historian Victor Davis Hanson writes.

War similes have provoked a martial response from some on the conservative right.

Attacking Mexico won't stop fentanyl

A number of Republican political leaders are calling for the military invasion of Mexican cartels to disrupt the steady flow of synthetic opioids across the border.

Donald Trump has argued recently for drafting “battle plans” and dispatching “special forces” to attack Mexico and wipe out its cartel leaders.

U.S. Reps. Dan Crenshaw of Texas and Mike Waltz of Florida have sponsored a bill that would authorize military force to “put us at war with the cartels,” Politico reports.

Also, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said he would entertain a U.S. invasion of Mexico against its narco-traffickers without even the approval of the Mexican government.

Such impulses are understandable given the destruction fentanyl is doing in this country. But they fail to appreciate just how profoundly fentanyl has changed drug trafficking. If they did understand, they’d know immediately such tactics are futile.

Synthetic opioids begin in labs in China

To begin with, who would you attack?

Fentanyl is not a cash crop like marijuana or opium. The cartels need no vast army of men or expanse of fields or jungle laboratories to cook their dope.

Synthetic opioids begin in thousands of laboratories in China as legal pre-cursor chemicals that can be used for purposes other than illicit drugs.

They are made in China because China is the world’s manufacturing hub for pharmaceuticals, explains Los Angeles journalist Ben Westhoff in a podcast with the National Committee on United States-China Relations.

Those precursor chemicals are shipped to Mexico where the cartels use them to create fentanyl, package them and eventually transport them secretly across the U.S. border through ports of entry.

A fragmented process makes it tough to stop

But it is the nature of fentanyl, or what Brookings Institution fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown calls the “potency to weight ratio” that makes it difficult to control.

The drug is so much more potent than cocaine or heroin that it can be transported in much smaller and undetectable packages, she told the committee on U.S.-China Relations.

Because the starter chemicals are so readily available and because fentanyl is so easy to make, it is being cooked up in huts and basements throughout Mexico, fragmenting the traditional production process into so many parts it is virtually impossible to eradicate.

Fentanyl war: Drug exposes rifts in US-Mexico relationship

Further, there is little prospect of China shutting down the supply of pre-cursor chemicals.

“Structural characteristics of synthetic drugs, including the ease of developing similar, but not scheduled synthetic drugs and their new precursors – increasingly a wide array of dual-use chemicals – pose immense structural obstacles to controlling supply,” writes Felbab-Brown in a Brookings report.

The question shouldn't be 'who do we attack?'

Westhoff said that when he visited Chinese facilities that produce fentanyl pre-cursors and saw the great piles of substances, he began to appreciate the demand.

As he told the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, fentanyl is “50 times stronger than heroin, and it only takes about two grains of rice worth to overdose and die.”

The complications of shutting down chemical supplies from China to Mexico and the vast network of fentanyl production and distribution in Mexico make it almost impossible to attack this problem on the back end.

The most important question in solving this problem is not “Who do we attack?”

The most important question comes on the front end: “Why the despair?”

Why are so many seeking a deadly drug?

Why are so many Americans willing to risk their lives taking a synthetic opioid that in a much shorter time frame has killed more Americans than all our wars combined?

In 2015, Foreign Affairs magazine coined a phrase for a phenomenon emerging in American called “deaths of despair.”

They used it to describe deaths caused by drug overdose, alcoholic liver disease or suicide.

“The inexorable increase in these deaths, together with a slowdown and reversal in the long-standing reduction in deaths from heart disease, led to an astonishing development: life expectancy at birth for Americans declined for three consecutive years, from 2015 through 2017, something that had not happened since the influenza pandemic at the end of World War I,” the magazine reported in 2020.

So what is going on? Why the despair?

Low wages, broken relationships plague us

“There has been a long-term, slow-moving undermining of the white working class in the United States,” writes Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton in Foreign Affairs. “Falling wages and a dearth of good jobs have weakened the basic institutions of working-class life, including marriage, churchgoing, and community.”

“The decline in marriage has contributed significantly to the epidemic of despair among those with less than a four-year college degree.”

“... These trends among less educated Americans – declines in wages, the quality and number of jobs, marriage, and community life – are central in instilling despair, spurring suicide and other self-inflicted harms, such as alcohol and drug abuse.”

The United States is the most powerful nation on earth.

If we want to, we can bomb the cartels in Mexico, with or without Mexico’s permission.

But we are unlikely to make dent in fentanyl trafficking, and we will not have begun to address the larger problem, which is this:

Too many of our countrymen are in despair.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. He can be reached at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Fentanyl has killed more Americans than war. There's a reason for that