GOP senator: Drug demand creating ‘unsecured border’
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/gop-senator-drug-demand-creating-unsecured-border/article/2591612
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., charged Tuesday that “lax” U.S. border security is contributing to the domestic heroin epidemic.
“When I’ve looked at the root cause of our unsecured border, the primary root cause is our insatiable demand for drugs,” Johnson said at a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on the federal response to U.S. drug demand.
Johnson said the illegal drug market has “given rise to drug cartels who… control whatever side, whatever portion of the Mexican side of the border they choose.”
“This is an enormous problem and we have not been winning the war on drugs,” said Johnson.
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Michael Botticelli, director of the Office of the National Drug Control Policy, testified that there has been a “tremendously alarming” increase in deaths associated with heroin and illicit fentanyl, a synthetic opiate used for pain treatment. He said the spike corresponds with “recent increases in poppy cultivation and heroin production in Mexico.” Domestic deaths involving heroin rose from 3,038 in 2010 to 10,574 in 2014.
According to Botticelli’s written testimony, Mexico is the primary supplier of heroin to the United States. The document states heroin production in Mexico rose from an estimated 42 metric tons in 2014 to a potential of 70 metric tons in 2015. Botticelli said the Obama administration is working with the Mexican government to combat the illegal international industry.
“Part of the reason that we are seeing such a dramatic increase in heroin [use] is around the dramatic increase in availability and lower price in many parts of the United States,” testified Botticelli at the hearing.
Sen. Johnson said if the federal government was doing a “better job” at targeting supply chains, “those prices would remain high.”
“We are not making progress on this… we are losing the war,” said Sen. Johnson.
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If the DEA would worry about the illegal drugs and stop targeting the doctors and the hospitals, maybe the could decrease the amount of illegal drugs on US streets. I’m happy that someone finally took notice because IMO, it sure seems like the DEA is taking bribes to let illegal drugs in and purposely causing the opiate prescribing problems to create a huge demand for those deadly drugs. Just maybe the Senate should start looking into the personal financials of the entire US Drug Enforcement Agency including individual agents.
Insights from Chippy3166…always good to see a concerned citizen thinking for himself!
Yes, the Cartels are part of the reason for the War On Patients.
The bigger part is the Social Security Trust Fund.
By law, no Social Security or Medicare payments can be made, if the Fund runs out of money.
Congress diverted nearly all the money in the Fund and spent it on projects to buy votes.
Congress needs a Pain Crisis that goes unseen. If we pain patients kill ourselves to stop the pain, the Fund spends less money on us and depletes slower.
The present scammery works perfectly. CDC invented “substance use disorder”, so as to have a way of denying that the suicides they cause by taking away our meds, are even suicides, and instead, blaming them on the meds we used to take before we died!! That’s truly the kind of chutzpah it takes to murder both your parents, then plead the mercy of the court because you are an orphaned child.
Congressmen will not, willingly, admit their role in depleting the Fund. Many of them insist that we earned our Social Security benefits and will get them…but change the subject quickly to avoid the specifics, of just how much those benefits will have to shrink, to fit the available funds.
So, the full picture is, we have politicians engaging in war upon the American people, which the law defines as treason.
As part of that war upon the people, the politicians are taking away legal pain meds that we need.
The Cartels are stepping into the power vacuum and selling drugs made illegally, to meet the demand.
Cartel activity impedes the politicians’ goal of getting us to die faster and hide how much of our Social Security money was taken. But it also results in a lot of bribe payments. And it supports another illegal business, labor exploitation.
The same cartels that import the drugs illegally, also bring workers in from Mexico and from even-poorer nations farther south. These workers enter the US illegally, and it is, technically, illegal to hire them. More importantly, their status as illegal workers, makes it nearly impossible for them to get any of the protections to which American workers are entitled, by law. The net effect is, the Cartels take advantage of minimum wage laws, by selling labor at a small discount from the minimum wage. But then they only pay the workers, what they would have earned in Mexico. If the workers don’t like losing 80% of their earnings to the Cartels, the Cartel will find one of the corrupt lawmen it bribes to conceal it’s drug activities, and ask that crook to deport the protesting workers as illegal aliens…after confiscating any money they had with them.
That’s almost as lucrative as the drug business. Maybe more so.
In short, the system is massively corrupt.