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May 3, 2023 Editor, The News-Gazette: By the end of this week approximately 1,500 people will have overdosed on opioids and died. By the end of next week, 1,500 more people will have done the same, and the week after that, and the week after that.
In the past 23 years, over 1 million people in the United States have died of drug overdoses, almost exclusively opioids, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The number of children under the age of 5 dying from opioid overdoses has increased significantly over the past few years.
The records for all children 5 and younger from the National Fatality Review-Case Reporting System showed that two-fifths of the children who died were infants. Sixty-five percent of those deaths occurred at home. A third of those deaths occurred while supervised by someone who was not a biological parent.
Opioid addiction and abuse have grown into an infinite epidemic and now endangers every aspect of life. Our public health has degraded, our economic output has suffered brazenly and without consequence. Infants are not safe. Yet, we do nothing.
China is the main manufacturer of the ingredients needed to create fentanyl. They are transported to Mexico, where drug cartels produce the drug and smuggle it across the porous border.
The present administration “urged” Mexico and China to act. Both responded that the problem wasn’t with them – it was with our “social decay.”
Every year the seizures of fentanyl increase. The amount that gets past overburdened border enforcement increases. It is the border agents, law enforcement, first responders, doctors, nurses, firefighters and paramedics who are our last line of defense.
It makes no sense that we accept the death of infants as normal. It makes no sense that any parent should worry about leaving their children and having them not be alive when they return home. It makes no sense that this administration has not told both China and Mexico to stop.
We have allowed China to outperform us technologically, militarily, escape accountability, spy on us, out-manufacture us, and now poison us.
Still, we do nothing. It is time to do something. CRAIG CAMPBELL Lexington
