This White House Ignores the Overdose Pandemic

BUCK: There are genuine crises that seem to get almost no attention from this White House. And the drug overdose pandemic — and I do think it is fair to call it that — in this country is something that deserves a whole lot more attention, and I think there are some reasons we should explore as to why the media seems so much less interested in this. I mean, first of all, if you’re curious — and I think all of us should be — not only was last year the highest year ever for overdose deaths from drugs in the United States, over a hundred thousand people, and unlike…

Clay and I were just talking about the covid numbers where a lot of people who were either hospitalized or died and listed as covid as the cause, a lot of those instances were not actually from covid. With someone dies from a drug overdose they died from a drug overdose so that’s over a hundred thousand people who are also overwhelming in the age range of 18 to 35, maybe 18 to 45, so you’re losing a lot of people who are early in their lives and there’s a whole series of problems that have all come together here.

The wide-open border, for example. So, last year was the worst ever for fentanyl and general drug overdoses in this country, over a hundred thousand people died. The first five months of 2022, according to the Department of Justice, Clay, more fentanyl seized, which people might say, oh, that means we are doing better law enforcement. That actually, to anyone who understands the drug trade means there’s more fentanyl coming, meaning more of it’s getting into the country too.

You’re not actually stopping the flow. You might be catching more of a larger flow. More fentanyl seized the first five months of 2022 surpassed all of last year. So, we are already, in terms of fentanyl seizures, beyond where we were. So, you can think that that’s because of really aggressive law enforcement or you can think that that’s because the drugs are flowing in in greater numbers. And you look at a state like Oregon where we talked about this briefly last week, the Democrat state of Oregon, run by Democrats, Democrat voters, made drugs effectively legal — fentanyl, cocaine, heroin — for personal possession.

They wouldn’t arrest people for using the stuff out in public. People were shooting up in downtown Portland with heroin needles, clean needle programs, decriminalization, all this. All it has led to is more people dying, more people using, and more destruction of their downtown. What do you think it takes for Democrats to realize that permissiveness is not kindness? It’s not the same thing, that allowing people to destroy themselves is not the same thing as being — as being considerate and sympathetic to your fellow human being.

CLAY: Yeah. And it’s just part and parcel of the rampant lawlessness that we are seeing. And I like to discuss years of life lost. When we are setting these records, over a hundred thousand people dying of drug overdoses, fentanyl overwhelmingly the cause of most of those, you’re talking about people in their twenties, in their thirties, in their forties with their entire lives left to be lived that are dying. And the lawlessness of our southern border is also contributing to the lawlessness that exists all over the country, Buck.

I’m looking right now at a Fox News headline. We’ve talked a lot about homicide increases since 2020, went up 30% in 2020, up again in 2021. We got a lot of cities out there where people are listening to us — L.A.; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Milwaukee; and Atlanta — halfway through the year are all setting pace for record homicide increases again. That’s a wade scope of the country, right? East Coast all the way to the West Coast, the South, the Midwest.

I’m headed to Atlanta here for a Braves game as soon as this thing is over. People in Atlanta are terrified with what is going on in their crime rate. We know, Buck, we’ve talked a lot about all of the issues in L.A., including two cops who got murdered. And I think we have the audio associated with that from the mom who is furious over the situations that have been allowed to exist in these Democrat cities and states and what is going on in terms of the danger to everybody as a result. It’s overwhelmingly difficult to listen to what these people are saying in response to all of that violence. It just is brutal on an absolutely epic level.

BUCK: This all relates back to bad ideas, ideas that were pushed very heavily in 2020, ending — and I think there’s also just a broader tie-in here, Clay, where a lot of the ideas of the left that end up having catastrophic consequences for really everybody in society, just making everything worse, whether it’s defund the police, ending mass incarceration, legalization of the most hard-core drugs, a lot of it starts with an appeal to conservatives’ decency, sympathy, and — I would say — innate kindness.

“Come on, guys, we don’t want to lock people up forever for drugs,” and that then all of a sudden, turns into, “Yeah, so what if we found a gangbanger’s been arrested 15 times for drugs and illegal firearm and maybe he’s been threatening to kill a rival or kill an ex-girlfriend but we want to end mass incarceration so we’re gonna let him go,” and we see what ends up happening.

This is tied in of course to the shooting of the two brave officers, officers who did answer the call, who did go into the gunfire and exchange fire with that gang member who had his gang literally tattooed on his face, right? Just so everyone understands. It’s not really a tough call for Gascon, the district attorney. You know, this isn’t an honor student who got caught up with the wrong crowd one afternoon and did some graffiti somewhere.

There was a hard-core gang member who killed two police officers. But I just… I bring it up because the Democrat appeal — and you hear this in media in the beginning — is, “Come on, don’t you guys want to be nice? Don’t you want to do the nice thing?” and it’s actually not nice in Portland to allow people to do heroin out in the open and to overdose and to choke on their own vomit and die.

That’s actually not a kindness for those people. We should be looking at what actually the results of policies are and we should be trying to promote, yeah, the general warfare but also the individual warfare. You’re not doing people any favors by letting them destroy themselves out in public and make their communities a nightmare for everybody else.

And then you even get into, Clay, these drugs are different than other drugs in the past. I mean, that’s I think another part of it that people need to understand. The cartels make fentanyl pills to look like pharmaceutical grade Percocet, to look like — to look like things that are made by pharma companies that you’ve actually heard of, that doctors would prescribe people and so a kid a 15-year-old, an 18-year-old will take one, dead.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: That’s happening all over the country, and that’s happening day in and day out. The numbers are vast, in every community, large and small. How much time is the Biden administration put into tackling that problem versus how much time had the Biden and the Democrats put into January 6th, for example? But our Democrat is in peril, they shout.

CLAY: Yeah. How much attention have we even seen at the border, period? The only time we’ve seen a story at the border that the Biden administration has commented on or the media has been well to press the Biden administration on, was the ridiculous, made-up story about the Border Patrol agents who were whipping Haitian immigrants even though that clearly is not true. And we talked about it last week that there’s some sort of consequences that are trying to be brought to bear on that issue. But it speaks to the media’s failure to address issues that directly impact massive amounts of the American public on a day-to-day basis.

Again, if you’re in your twenties, thirties, and forties, covid was virtually zero risk to you, but the fentanyl, a massive amounts of drugs coming across your borders and the number of people who couldn’t go to their AA meetings or couldn’t go to church or couldn’t have their normal social encounters that would have helped to keep maybe so much of this depression and anxiety and drug use down, all got taken away from ’em. And we’re still not even discussing all of the long-term consequences of the worst American public policy decision in most of our lifetimes, which was to shut down and allow all of these drugs to run rampant in our streets.

BUCK: And you see the Democrats now in the city of Portland, including a candidate for mayor, are recognizing what has been done as a result. These were decisions that were made — this isn’t just a thing that happened — and it’s true in many other cities when you looked at the crime, the crime in San Francisco. They have similar issues with the open air drug use. Clay, they’re now talking about putting all of the homeless encampments into these tiny homes, essentially, almost like a shack, a prefabricated shack.

And ask now so they’re just gonna create these massive open air homeless encampments with little houses. And then they’re gonna still be dealing with a lot of the same problems, though. They have created an approval of people doing this. They’ve said, “Okay, you want to be doing fentanyl?” Remember, anyone who’s using fentanyl in these places is gonna be often selling it. That’s how they get the money to buy the fentanyl themselves.

They’re gonna be a part of that chain of transmission. And they don’t arrest them and they don’t say enough is enough and communities are being destroyed by them. These are ideas that the left have pushed that are wrong yet again and I just think there needs to be accountability for it. I think Joe Biden — you brought up the border, Clay. The border is wide open. It’s a problem not just because of illegal immigration.

It means that it’s easier than ever to get fentanyl across the border which has killed people that members of this audience are related to, know very well, taught in school all over the country. And there’s no sense of urgency from this White House whatsoever to be able to deal with this. Such a great sense of urgency, though, on climate, for example.

Hundred thousand people a year dying from fentanyl overdoses. Look at how much more time they spend talking about the Green New Deal than about the drug epidemic we have in the country. So, I think it just — it shows you what they care about and the generally — well, actually I was gonna say you can’t even generalize about where these overdoses are happening. It’s all over the country.

CLAY: Everywhere simultaneously, and the failure of the media to hold the Biden administration accountable for this in any way or even write about it or even care about it, especially because of its association with the border is biased incompetence that’s directly costing tens of thousands of lives.