The Flap Over Biden's Comment About 2 Fentanyl Deaths Obscures Prohibition's Role in Causing Them
Both parties are complicit in the lethal policies that gave us fentanyl disguised as Percocet.
Did President Joe Biden laugh about "a poor mother who lost two kids to fentanyl"? No, he did not. But the context of his controversial remarks reveals bipartisan complicity in the prohibitionist policies that lead to senseless deaths like these.
On Tuesday, the Republican-controlled House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing that was framed as an indictment of the Biden administration's border policies. One of the witnesses was Rebecca Kiessling, a Rochester Hills, Michigan, lawyer whose sons Caleb, 20, and Kyler, 18, died in July 2020 after swallowing counterfeit Percocet pills that contained fentanyl. Although that hazard was created by the war on drugs, Kiessling blames the government for failing to wage that war aggressively enough.
"Law enforcement made it clear to me that this fentanyl came from Mexico," Kiessling said during her tearful, heartbreaking testimony. "I didn't know that my boys were taking anything that could kill them. They didn't think that they were either. They thought that they were safe with pills."
Kiessling urged the government to "do something" about the influx of illicit fentanyl. "If we had Chinese troops lining up along our southern border with weapons aimed at our people, with weapons of mass destruction aimed at our cities, you damn well know you would do something about it," she said. "We have a weather balloon from China going across the country. Nobody died, and everybody's freaking out about it. But 100,000 die every year, and nothing's being done. Not enough is being done….This is a war. Act like it."
Although Kiessling said "this should not be politicized," that is exactly what the Republicans who control the committee were doing, and she lent support to their efforts. "You talk about welcoming those crossing our border, seeking protection," she said. "You're welcoming drug dealers across our border. You're giving them protection. You're not protecting our children."
After the hearing, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Ga.) took that implied criticism of the Biden administration a step further. "Listen to this mother, who lost two children to fentanyl poisoning, tell the truth about both of her son's [sic] murders because of the Biden administrations [sic] refusal to secure our border and stop the Cartel's [sic] from murdering Americans everyday by Chinese fentanyl," Greene wrote on Twitter.
Since Caleb and Kyler Kiessling died six months before Biden took office, of course, it is logically impossible that his border policies had anything to do with their deaths. That's the point Biden was making when he addressed a meeting of House Democrats in Baltimore on Wednesday night.
Greene "was very specific recently, saying that a mom, a poor mother who lost two kids to fentanyl, that I killed her sons," Biden said. "Well, the interesting thing: That fentanyl they took came during the last administration." Then he laughed.
Biden's laughter offended Kiessling. "This is how you speak about the death of my sons?" she said in a Facebook video. "Because a congresswoman misspoke? You mock the loss of my sons? How dare you? What is the matter with you? Almost every Democrat on the committee offered condolences. They at least had the decency to do that. You can't even do that? You have to mock my pain?"
In context, it is clear that Biden, who described Kiessling as "a poor mother who lost two kids to fentanyl," was not mocking her pain or the loss of her sons. He was very clearly mocking Greene. His lighthearted demeanor nevertheless was insensitive and tone-deaf, as Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) pointed out on Twitter.
"@POTUS needs to apologize for this immediately," Lee tweeted. "No person, let alone the president of the United States, laughs when speaking about a mother who lost two sons to fentanyl poisoning."
Other Republicans went further. Jake Schneider, director of rapid response for the Republican National Committee, called Biden "a disgusting person," adding, "Losing children to fentanyl trafficking is never, ever funny. Just vile." Schneider averred that "Biden's laugh at fentanyl deaths for cheap political points exposes the real Joe."
While Lee's take seems about right to me, Schneider himself was trying to score "cheap political points" by hyperbolically claiming that Biden's insensitivity reveals him as "a disgusting person" who "laugh[s] at fentanyl deaths." House Republicans likewise were trying to score "cheap political points" by deploying Kiessling's ordeal as a weapon in their assault on Biden's border policies, which plainly cannot explain the dramatic increase in opioid-related deaths that began more than two decades ago and accelerated during the Trump administration.
This partisan nonsense conceals the reality that Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for policies that have contributed to that trend by making drug use more dangerous. That starts with bipartisan support for prohibition, which creates a black market where the quality and potency of drugs are highly variable and unpredictable. Prohibition also pushes traffickers toward more-potent substances, which are easier to smuggle. Enforcement of prohibition makes drug use riskier still by encouraging substitution of relatively safe products with more hazardous alternatives.
The "opioid crisis" illustrates all three of those phenomena. The crackdown on pain pills replaced legally manufactured, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with iffy black-market products of unknown provenance and composition. Meanwhile, prohibition fostered the rise of fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute. Because fentanyl is a synthetic drug that does not require conspicuous crops, it is easier to produce without attracting attention. It is also much cheaper and much more potent, which makes shipments smaller and easier to conceal. The rise of fentanyl made illegal drugs even more of a crap shoot.
In light of all this, it is not surprising that the government's ham-handed efforts to reduce opioid-related deaths backfired. As Kiessling noted in her testimony, "numbers are going up, not down." Worse, the upward trend in drug-related deaths accelerated after the government succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions, which predictably drove nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes that were much more likely to kill them. The anti-opioid campaign hurt bona fide patients while simultaneously increasing the fentanyl death toll.
Now fentanyl is showing up not only in heroin but also in cocaine, methamphetamine, and ersatz pain pills like the ones that Kiessling's sons took. "My children got fake Percocets that were fentanyl," she said. "There was no Percocet in it at all." Although "they thought that they were safe with pills," they were wrong, because those pills did not contain what they expected. That sort of thing does not happen in a legal market. While Kiessling attributes her sons' deaths to inadequate enforcement of prohibition, it was prohibition that killed them.
Because politicians will never admit their complicity in drug-related deaths, they instead call for more of the same. In his first State of the Union address, Biden promised to "beat the opioid epidemic" by "stop[ping] the flow of illicit drugs" and "working with state and local law enforcement to go after the traffickers." But as always, that was a vain promise, because prohibition plants the seeds of its own defeat.
Prohibition enables traffickers to earn a premium for undertaking the special risks involved in supplying an illegal product. That means they are highly motivated to find ways around whatever roadblocks the government throws up between them and their customers. Given all the places where drugs can be produced and all the ways they can be transported to people who want them, the idea that the government could "stop the flow" if only it made a more determined effort is a fantasy.
As critics of prohibition often point out, the government cannot keep drugs out of correctional facilities, so even turning the entire country into a prison camp would not do the trick. The most that drug warriors can hope to accomplish is to impose costs on traffickers that are high enough to raise retail prices, thereby discouraging consumption.
The basic problem with that strategy, as drug policy scholars such as University of Maryland criminologist Peter Reuter have been pointing out for years, is that illegal drugs acquire most of their value close to the consumer. The cost of replacing destroyed crops and seized shipments is therefore relatively small, a tiny fraction of the "street value" trumpeted by law enforcement agencies. As you get closer to the retail level, the replacement cost rises, but the amount that can be seized at one time falls. That dilemma helps explain why throwing more money at source control and interdiction never seems to have a substantial, lasting effect on drug consumption.
Fentanyl compounds these challenges. Because it is much more potent than heroin, a package weighing less than an ounce can replace one that weighs a couple of pounds. These packages are readily concealed and hard to detect, whether they are sent through the mail or carried over the border.
Focusing on the latter route, Republicans say the problem is that Biden is letting too many people in—a charge that Kiessling echoed. But as Reason's Fiona Harrigan notes, fentanyl coming from Mexico typically is transported through ports of entry, and it is usually carried by U.S. citizens. "In order to smuggle fentanyl through a port of entry," says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, "cartels hire primarily U.S. citizens, who are the least likely to attract heightened scrutiny when crossing into the United States."
Reichlin-Melnick "analyzed every CBP press release and official Twitter post mentioning fentanyl seizures from December 2021 to May 2022," Harrigan writes. "Only two involved people crossing between ports of entry, and of the 42 incidents where CBP mentioned a smuggler's nationality, 33—or 79 percent—involved U.S. citizens."
It is plainly impossible to "stop the flow of illicit drugs" across the border, and even substantially increasing the share of shipments that are seized would entail serious disruptions of trade and travel. Intercepting small packages of fentanyl in the mail is an equally daunting challenge.
Even if the U.S. "managed to stop 100 percent of direct [fentanyl] sales to the US, enterprising dealers [would] simply sell into nations such as the UK, repackage the product, and then resell it into the US," Roger Bate noted in a 2018 American Enterprise Institute report. "Intercepting all packages from the UK and other EU nations to the US will not be possible." And "whether or not drugs are available to the general public via the mail, drug dealers have domestic production and overland and sea routes and other courier services that deliver the product to the US."
Kiessling is understandably frustrated by this situation. "You have to stop it from its source," she told the House committee. But the U.S. government has been trying to do that for more than a century. It has always failed, and it always will, because the effort is doomed by the economics of black markets.
While politicians do not have the power to "stop the flow," they can make matters worse by trying. The deaths of Kiessling's sons are just the tip of that awful iceberg.
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Biden doesn’t give a fuck about any drug problem he can’t blame on pricing by Big Pharma.
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That’s actually a lie often repeated by folks who haven’t read a single page of the asset-forfeiture, prohibition-exporting murder cartel prohibition laws Reagan and Biden pushed from 1980 until after the market crash of 1987 and on through the collapse of South American economies by 1992. That was when Holy War Bush was pushing the death sentence for potheads. Only then did the dupes trouble to vote for the other looter party.
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Pfizer literally doubled their revenues, profits, and cash flow selling Covid shots to the Feds (who had also heavily subsidized, if not fully funded their R&D costs as well) while Biden was trying to mandate or otherwise leverage and coerce as many people as possible to consume multiple doses of the thing, mostly by Exec Order.
Any noises he makes that sound critical of profiteering by “big pharma” are purely for the purpose of a smokescreen, not that he needs it since his pet media outlets have done everything possible to prevent the public from noticing something which publicly traded companies aren’t allowed to conceal.
#DefendBidenAtAllCosts
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Kiessling is using her lawyer skills to deflect blame from her own family.
They thought black market pills were “safe”?
This is me laughing out loud.
I’m not seeing anywhere that the percocet were prescription or they started out with prescriptions and got addicted, either.
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Since Caleb and Kyler Kiessling died six months before Biden took office,
Weird. How did a 20 yr. old, in 2020, die in 1972?
So, what was he laughing at? Is Kamala’s nervous cackle contagious?
Laughter often is contagious.
Caleb and Kyler Kiessling died six months before Biden took office
Still Biden’s fault.
According to wingnut.com not only were all border crossings 2017-now Biden’s fault, the entire fentanyl trade is, the lame COVID response was, the massive welfare spending in 2020 was, and the $900 billion in wasted PPP handouts was Biden’s fault.
It is amazing watching the leftists like you lie about her statement. She was saying Bidens open border policy will lead to more deaths from fentanyl. She used her kids as an example of deaths from fentanyl. You try to ignore the problem to…. defend biden at all costs.
You would think that someone who loves kids the way Pluggo does would be concerned about any threat to the supply side.
Poor Buttplug.
https://cnsnews.com/article/national/terence-p-jeffrey/all-9-states-lowest-unemployment-rates-2022-had-republican
The FEDS have ZERO,NONE,NADDA authority to be regulating Drugs.
And a Constitutional USA would have healthcare that actually WORKS as it did before the Nazi’s took it over.
legislation regarding drug use and abuse is a State level issue
Yea it is a state level issue. So is health care. So is most of what the federal government does.
But in the list of priorities for libertarians, this should be near the bottom. Yet, libertarians like progressives obsess about it.
The libertarian priority should be to get rid of the progressives. Who are mortal enemies of free people everywhere.
Did President Joe Biden laugh about “a poor mother who lost two kids to fentanyl”? No, he did not.
Didn’t think Sullum could be more a despicable gaslighting dickhead. But Biden clearly makes a joke about MTGs accusation then laughs, you know LOL, after saying they died under Trump. Guess Sullum couldn’t bothered to watch the video he posted, just took the word of his progressive butt buddies.
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It was crude and hateful from Biden but that is the guy he has always been. He was a putz as senator. Just found out a friend of my nephews thought he bought adderral (32 years old) and it was laced with Fentanyl. Legalization of most drugs is the solution with perhaps heroin staying illegal (not sure about that one). But Corn Pop is an asshole just like Trump is
Where is the evidence that it is the solution?
And are you going to go full libertarian and regime drug addicts from unemployment, disability, and health insurance? Are you going to remove them from within city limits when they camp on the streets? Or are you going to continue to socialize the costs of drug addiction?
See; Portugal.
Not a good example. 2001-2022, violent crime dropped much less in Portugal than it did in neighboring Spain. Prison population rate between 2001 and 2022 hasn’t changed much in Portugal or neighboring Spain. So, no obvious benefit from decriminalization.
Well, cars also camp on the streets. And gas taxes don’t fully pay for the costs of roads. We’re socializing those costs, too.
Same goes for normal homeless people.
Though I do agree, drug addicts should not recieve govt benefits.
City roads are paid for by property taxes, not cars and not the homeless. Those property owners have passed laws allowing parking and prohibiting sleeping in the streets at night.
What’s the topic here? Union of States or Pockets in Cities?
Keeping scope would be a big step for this Nazi-addled nation and also part of the cure.
If drugs were legal, you could sue the manufacturers if you lost a loved one to an “overdose”, which is usually what the user thought was a normal dose, but of a tainted product. Facing potentially large court settlements, providers have a big financial incentive to produce safe and reliable products. Funny how that works.
Generally true, of course, but there is always the Pinto exception. And there is also the opposite problem of ignorant juries swayed by crying plaintiffs and gun-for-hire “experts” with judges who can’t tell the difference between Daubert and Dilbert.
People overdose even when they know the exact quantities of drugs.
Furthermore, legalization doesn’t mean that drugs can be sold like candy; there works still be a black market.
If drugs were legal, you could sue the manufacturers if you lost a loved one to an “overdose”
Which is exactly why legitimate manufacturers would not sell dangerous drugs of abuse OTC if they were legalized. Those who imagine a post-legalization world in which Merck Crack and Bayer Fentanyl would be on the shelf at Rite Aid next to the aspirin are delusional. There would still be a violent criminal black market for the most dangerous drugs.
Manufacturers could just refuse to sell dangerous drugs to people unless they sign a liability waiver.
“Liability waivers” are worthless.
But such drugs were sold OTC before controls were enacted. Is there any evidence the businesses would’ve voluntarily given up that business?
Sorry, Mr. Van Winkle, things have changed a lot.
Which manufacturer should be held liable for the quality control of black market counterfeit versions of their own legitimate product?
Part of the reason to require a prescription to obtain a drug like Percocet is to ensure that the user has the best possible oversight and professional advise as to what a safe and appropriate dosage is. If someone is prescribed an unreasonable dosage of such a strong drug, the pharmacist filling the order can act as a final verification or can confirm with the doctor that no error was made in the dosage amount (if a dosage gets transcribed as being in grams instead of milligrams, say). This doesn’t eliminate all risks, say if a patient is getting redundant dosages from different docs and filling them at different pharmacies (most often, such behavior likely involves addicts but oversights are possible).
“If we had Chinese troops lining up along our southern border with weapons aimed at our people, with weapons of mass destruction aimed at our cities, you damn well know you would do something about it,”
Actually, we do not know that.
Communist China will never face any negative actions from any Biden.
Remember the old definition of an honest politician?
Once he is bought, he stays bought.
Biden would offer them a path to citizenship.
Why doesn’t she sue the doctor that prescribed the Percocet?
Or the pharmacy that that filled the prescription?
Oh, so that’s why.
Nobody able to form a coherent sentence ever took any of those crappy downers when there was LSD, mescaline or MMDA to be had. As soon as The Kleptocracy conspired with other looter states to make producing harmless psychedelics illegal, drug deaths went through the roof. Even the mystical looters admit this in ALL their charts. Try READING some of those prohibitionist treaties and conventions.
I wonder whether for some of these prohibitionists, drug deaths are Gawd’s punishment of these sinful drug-takers, so they don’t want legalisation.
Show us the evidence that legalizing drugs reduces overdose deaths.
I’m not aware of any studies that compare overdose deaths before and after legalisation of the specific drug.
This review article suggests little if any evidence of overdose reduction, though it’s specifically legalisation of marijuana vs opioid deaths. https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40621-019-0213-z
But this more recent research suggests that there is indeed a reduction:
https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.m4957
Search “the myth of the heroin overdose”. Good history of heroin use before and after the WOD. Heroin is one of the safest drugs ever developed and is pretty much impossible to over dose. But people die using it every day.
“the associations documented cannot be assumed to be causal”
In fact, most likely, it is simply due to uncorrected demographic differences.
Portugal.
Portugal isn’t doing particularly well among European nations
https://www.emcdda.europa.eu/publications/topic-overviews/content/faq-drug-overdose-deaths-in-europe_en
Decriminalization has had no clear benefit in Portugal relative to the rest of the EU.
I’m sure relaxing the war on drugs is going to improve people’s lives.
besides, it’s not just fentanyl that’s killing people , it’s the introduction of animal tranquilizer, xylazine, that’s causing many of these deaths. It’s used on horses and cattle, so even a small dose can cause major breakdown of autonomic systems.
The success of legalizing drugs can be readily witnessed in cities such as Frisco, Portland, and Seattle, where open drug deals are made 24/7 on the streets.
Then the city has to pay for someone to pick up all the dead bodies.
Why did it take an Amendment to the Constitution to outlaw alcohol but not other drugs? All drugs were legal prior to 1914. How many overdose deaths were there then?
We don’t know because addiction wasn’t well understood and records are poor.
But the reason opiates became restricted in 1868 and 1914 was because people saw lots of social problems from opiate addiction. So, for that matter, did the Chinese.
Overdose deaths are not the only problem resulting from widespread opiate use and aren’t the primary reason opiates are restricted.
What’s the problem? The two major negative side effects of legal opiates are constipation and habituation.
The major negative side effects of opiates are the effects people actually take them for: alteration of the brain’s reward system and general suppression of painful stimuli.
Well, the city could just take the costs of cleaning up dead bodies out of the dead people’s estates.
Well the completely broken Jacob just can’t resist defending Biden. But Biden, once again, is acting outside of the “normal parameters” Sullum promised us when he was campaigning for him back in 2020. Biden is an arrogant nasty old fuck and his senility is not making matters any better. He could have easily sent his surrogates out to spin the story but he instead had to get his personal revenge complete with smirking and laughter. Fuck Joe Biden and fuck Jacob Sullum.
The real problem is the wide open southern border. Reason’s flap of the flap about Biden’s ignorant comments are also a diversion from Biden’s poor policies on EVERYTHING. Prohibition is not the problem, We would all be heroin addicts if that was true. This is not alcohol which was widely accepted and used before prohibition. Fentanyl was never legal or widely accepted.
All Biden did was laugh at Republican hypocrisy. There was nothing wrong with laughing at that. That’s not to say he’s blameless in this or any other political area.
I was hoping for a faceplant on the cobblestones in Ukraine
Lost in all this is that the mother has no moral high ground from which to shout at the Drug Warriors from. Her sons were taking illegal pills from, at the very least, a questionable source! Although “licensed” pharmacists and pharmacies are not perfectly safe, they are MUCH safer than buying pills from a “friend” or from an unlicensed street dealer. No doubt the War on Drugs is responsible for almost all of the deaths from illegal drugs and from turf battles and crimes by addicts to pay for their addiction, but why won’t someone PLEASE criticize this mother for playing politics with her sons’ deaths while they were committing a crime – or the sons for killing themselves via unsafe behavior?
She has as much moral high ground as you do. No one has complete control over their older children. One thing I learned early in life, even before I had children, is never criticize another parent, because sooner or later your kids actions will come back to haunt you.
The Flap Over Biden’s Comment About 2 Fentanyl Deaths Obscures The Real Problem The Wide Open Border
“In light of all this, it is not surprising that the government’s ham-handed efforts to reduce opioid-related deaths backfired.”
Backfired? It’s all going exactly according to plan. An endless parade of experts, including the AMA, made it perfectly clear to the CDC et al. that their planned crackdown on pain pills would drive everyone to the black market where fentanyl was ascendant and spike ODs through the ceiling. They did it anyway. There’s no other conclusion than that they intended for the massive wave of ODs to happen. And the knowledge prohibition would fail in it’s mission to drive down drug usage was known long before that, so it’s not even a credible excuse they thought all the dead bodies would save even more.
But why would they want a massive wave of overdoses?
Drug importation is very profitable. Not an inconsequential amount of that revenue is used to bribe cops, lawyers and judges. Everyone wins with prohibition except the customers.
How about me? I laugh at kids who think they can get high off Percocets!
“…so even turning the entire country into a prison camp would not do the trick. ”
Doesn’t mean they’re not gonna try.
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Shitty parent. Two lethally dumbassed kids. Everybody else’s fault.
Biden was probably laughing at a joke from 1983 that he just got.
Well, a fantastic job of whining. Dem plans suck. Repub plans suck. You all suck.
What is proposed? Nothing. Libertarians should be open minded about options, but none are presented. Legalize everything? Ok with me, but a pile of weak-willed people will die.
The Flap Over Biden’s Comment About 2 Fentanyl Deaths Obscures Biden’s Open Borders Role in Causing Them
It ain’t hard, control the border.