Fentanyl: The new face of the US war on the poor
At an April 14 press conference in Washington, D.C., Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) chief Anne Milgram sounded the alarm about the country’s last declared public enemy number one: four Mexican boys known as “Los Chapitos,” the sons of imprisoned Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Milgram declared El Chapo’s descendants “responsible for the massive influx” into the United States of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, insisting: “Let me be clear that the Chapitos pioneered the production and trade of the deadliest drug our country has encountered. ever had to deal with.”
As if this wasn’t news enough, the DEA chief added some additional alleged trivia, according to which the Chapitos had “fed their enemies alive to tigers, electrocuted them, [and] waterboarded them” – activities such as the US has clearly never committed against its own enemies.
There is no debate about the lethality of fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin. Drug overdoses, most of which are fentanyl-related, now kill more than 100,000 people a year in the US. Entire communities have been destroyed.
And yet it’s curious that the Chapitos are spontaneously responsible for the whole fentanyl epidemic – though the new narrative certainly comes in handy to justify the continued frenzied militarization of the US-Mexico border.
In 2017, a US congressional hearing on fentanyl included testimony from Debra Houry, a director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the national public health agency, who noted that many of those who died of fentanyl overdoses previously were prescribed legal pain-relieving opioids.
As Houry explained, “People who use opioids become addicted to opioids and can then overdose on heroin or fentanyl.”
So it’s hardly shocking that people are dropping like flies from fentanyl, given the unchecked overprescribing of opioids that has epitomized contemporary health care in the U.S.—an arrangement that ultimately has little to do with health and a lot to do with money.
Indeed, it takes a downright sick system to allow the shipment of nine million opioid pills in two years to a single pharmacy in a city of 400, as happened in the state of West Virginia.
And while major players in the US pharmaceutical industry and pharmacy chains have recently been forced to pay token financial compensation for their irresponsible practices that fueled the crisis, there has been no actual acknowledgment of wrongdoing or any serious connection of the deadly points.
In other words, there has been no reappraisal of the pathological capitalist foundations of the US – meaning foolish things like human lives will never be put above corporate profits.
After all, it’s easier to blame the Chapitos.
As might be expected with such an arrangement, the lives of the poor matter the least. And what do you know? The fentanyl crisis has disproportionately affected poor people. A 2020 article published on the website of the National Library of Medicine found that people living below the poverty line have a higher risk of fatal opioid overdoses.
Socioeconomic risk groups also included newly released prisoners, as well as those in precarious housing or with no health insurance. The article noted: “Economic deprivation is a risk factor for opioid overdoses in the United States and contributes to patterns of declining life expectancy that differ from those in most developed countries.”
How’s that for American exceptionalism?
Certainly, in a country in so much pain it makes perfect sense that there should be such a demand for painkillers – and the cheaper the better for the impoverished communities on whose misery the capitalist superstructure is built.
Meanwhile, the more the lower socioeconomic echelons can be criminalized for their poverty and addictions, the more convenient it is to continue the war on the poor that helps keep American society good and submissive.
The fact that U.S. military veterans are twice as likely to die of opioid overdoses pretty well reflects the skewed priorities of a country that could spend trillions on wreaking havoc around the world, but doesn’t even bother to but to take care of his own fighters.
Then, of course, there is the issue of the intersection of socioeconomic and racial oppression against the backdrop of the fentanyl-dominated opioid crisis and drug overdoses in general. According to according to the journal Scientific American, the overall death rate for black people in the US surpassed the death rate for white people for the first time in 2019, with the proliferation of fentanyl yielding a panorama in which “black men over age 55 who survived decades with a heroin addiction die four times higher than people of other races in that age group.”
The CDC reports that the death rate for black people alone increased 44 percent from 2019 to 2020, while the rate for Native Americans increased 39 percent.
And in 2020, according to CDC statistics, death rates for black people in US counties with greater income inequality were more than twice as high as in counties with less income inequality.
If there’s ever a lesson to be learned from capitalism, it’s that inequality kills. Hence the US government’s reliance on international bogeymen like the Chapitos to distract its citizens from a rather brutal reality: that the capitalist system itself is public enemy number one.
Now US lawmakers are pushing for tougher sentences for possession and trafficking of fentanyl – which is great news for the prison-industrial complex, but not so much for society. One can’t help but think of the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, when black communities in Los Angeles were decimated by an influx of drugs directly triggered by the US terror of Nicaragua – otherwise known as the Contra War against the so-called “red threat”.
Forty years later, capitalism is still a deadly drug and a euphemism for the all-out American war on the poor—a war for which fentanyl is just the latest face.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial view of Al Jazeera.