Amid the 2024 Presidential race, a critical topic is becoming the turning point for parents whose children died from fentanyl poisoning.
The deadly substance is in a large number of drugs and counterfeit pills, causing people to think they are buying drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine or percocet, but instead, actually ingest fentanyl.
Over 70,000 Americans die every year due to fentanyl, a number that has significantly grown over the past eight years and is more than deaths caused by car accidents and shootings combined.
Parents who have lost their children to fentanyl are upset over the handling of the issue in the Biden administration, leading them to turn their votes to Former President Donald Trump.
The majority of these parents had been life-long Democrats, but they described how it seems to be a more right-wing issue and one that they are passionate about.
One of these many parents, Jim Rauh, lost his son, Thomas, to fentanyl poisoning, which led him to run Families Against Fentanyl, a group dedicated to bringing attention to the crisis, bringing billboards to both conventions. While he wants to remain nonpartisan, he said that it was clear which candidate brings it up more often.
Upset parents say that the current administration has not given them any attention and has not discussed plans to stem the flow of fentanyl in the country, whereas Trump has given the issue the attention that it needs.
At the Republican National Convention in July, Trump spoke about the issue, alongside a speech from a parent who suffered from this kind of loss.
Trump has discussed his plans to stop fentanyl from coming into the country by means of expanding the death penalty to drug dealers, using the United States (U.S.) military to target Mexican cartels and halting illegal border crossings to prevent the drug from coming through U.S. borders.
Some experts say that this would not stem the flow of the drug into the country very much because it is smuggled in mainly from Americans and Mexican Cartels have many resources at their disposal to keep themselves hidden.
From the period of 2017 to 2021, overdoses and poisonings rose from 28,000 to 50,000.
Despite this, during his presidential term in 2019, Trump secured a major win by getting China’s government to regulate the production of fentanyl, which in turn, led to a significant reduction in illegal exports.
The Biden Harris administration claimed that they implemented policies and made “historic” investments in treatment and seized a record amount of fentanyl at the border, however during Biden’s first year in office amid the COVID-19 pandemic, fentanyl deaths rose by 23% to over 70,000.
Regardless of either candidate’s claims, neither party has a clear and 100% effective solution.
