NAFTA JOE BIDEN DOES NOT CARE ABOUT THE DRUGS FLOODING THE BORDER. ONLY UNREGISTERED DEMS OR THE CARTELS BRINGING THEM REGISTERED WITH THIS POS!
265 Pounds of Meth Intercepted in California near Border
Border Patrol seized nearly $750,000 in methamphetamine near Indio, California. The narcotics were seized from Mexican cartel smugglers after K-9 alerted to the illicit cargo concealed within two separate passenger vehicles.
As Border Patrol struggles to deal with a huge increase in migrant crossings, cartel narcotics smugglers are using the opportunity to sneak across the border.
On July 10, agents discovered a vehicle stopped near Interstate 10 at the California State Highway 86 interchange. Upon further investigation, the agents arrested a U.S. citizen after finding 131 vacuum-sealed packages of methamphetamine. The narcotics weighed in at 164 pounds and had a street value of nearly $450,000.
In another incident on Monday, a 62-year-old American drove into a Border Patrol checkpoint in the same area in a black Acura. Agents discovered nearly 100 pounds of meth. The street value of this load is estimated to be $271,000, according to authorities.
Border Patrol agents referred both cases to the DEA. The DEA notes that domestic production of meth is on the decline due to tight restrictions placed on imported precursors.
In Mexico, cartels import ingredients mainly from China and India.
According to the CDC, methamphetamine overdose deaths in the United States have risen steadily since 1999 and are second only to fentanyl. In 2019, the CDC estimated more than 15,000 psycho-stimulant (primarily methamphetamine) overdose deaths occurred in the United States.
Randy Clark is a 32-year veteran of the United States Border Patrol. Prior to his retirement, he served as the Division Chief for Law Enforcement Operations, directing operations for nine Border Patrol Stations within the Del Rio, Texas, Sector. Follow him on Twitter @RandyClarkBBTX.
Lethal U.S. Drug Overdoses Exceed Fatalities in World’s Worst War Zones
The unprecedented number of U.S. drug overdose deaths last year exceeded the combined fatalities in the world’s top five deadliest armed conflicts during the same period, including Afghanistan and Mexico, a Breitbart News analysis revealed.
Moreover, the 93,331 lethal drug overdoses in 2020 are over five times greater than the combined 10,156 deaths and 7,729 injuries from worldwide Islamic terror attacks, honor killings, and Sharia executions recorded by the Religion of Peace website that tallies such casualties.
Breitbart News analyzed overdose data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and war zone fatalities documented by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a non-profit that tracks violent incidents around the globe.
CDC estimated that lethal overdoses in the U.S. reached at least 93,331 last year, surpassing the 64,438 combined number of fatalities recorded by ACLED from all five countries with the most reported deaths linked to political violence in 2020.
ACLED’s definition of political violence events covers armed organized conflicts, conventional wars, cartel wars, violent riots, among other incidents.
“The countries home to the most reported fatalities from political violence in 2020 include Afghanistan (20,744 fatalities), Yemen (19,685 fatalities), Mexico (8,399 fatalities), Syria (7,950 fatalities), and Nigeria (7,660 fatalities),” ACLED, a prominent source for news outlets, reported.
Among those 64,438 deaths, which only amount to about 70 percent of U.S. overdose fatalities, are civilians, state forces, militiamen, and rioters, among other actors.
The U.S. overdose fatalities last year eclipsed the killings from worldwide political violence events directly targeting civilians alone.
U.S. lethal overdoses mark a nearly three-fold increase from the 33,790 fatalities from political violence targeting civilians worldwide, Breitbart News determined.
In its annual review of 2020 political violence events and fatalities, the organization noted:
The countries that registered the highest number of political violence events in 2020 are predominantly those experiencing conventional conflicts, like Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, and Afghanistan. That Mexico also tops the list reveals how the country’s gang violence has created a conflict environment that rivals an active war zone. All of these countries, with the exception of Ukraine, additionally registered the highest numbers of fatalities in 2020, underscoring the continued lethality of these ongoing conflicts.
In Nigeria, government forces have been fighting jihadi groups for years, including Boko Haram and the Islamic State (ISIS). Islamic Fulani herdsmen, one of the most active ethnic terrorists last year, have also been brutally killing Christian farmers in Nigeria in recent years.
ACLED identified the countries with the highest levels of civilian targeting events, from most to least, as Mexico, Brazil, Syria, Yemen, and India, adding:
Civilians continued to come under attack in a variety of contexts, from conventional conflicts in Syria and Yemen, to gang wars in Mexico and Brazil. In some spaces, civilians came under multiple concurrent threats, such as in India, where they faced persistent mob and communal violence as well as conflicts in Kashmir and the Red Corridor [region, home to communist insurgents].
Opioids, mainly synthetic fentanyl, were the primary driver of the record number of lethal overdoses last year, along with other drugs trafficked across the U.S.-Mexico border, such as methamphetamine and cocaine.
Some U.S. officials believe heroin from Afghanistan, the top opium-producing country in the world and a primary source of income for the Taliban, may also be contributing to the overdose fatalities in the U.S.
China, which borders Afghanistan, is the top producer of fentanyl globally, much of which ends up in the hands of Mexican cartels.
One pandemic fuels another: US overdose deaths hit all time high in 2020 with 93,000 dead
Drug overdose deaths in the US rose nearly 30 percent in 2020, resulting in a total of 93,000 deaths, according to preliminary statistics released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The figures translate to an average of more than 250 overdose deaths each day, or roughly 11 overdoses every hour in the heart of world capitalism.
The rise in deaths marks the largest single-year increase of overdose deaths on record, eclipsing previous years by thousands. The thirty percent rise in deaths in 2020 equates to 21,000 more deaths than in 2019. Prior to last year, the largest year-to-year increase was 11,000 in 2016—a figure which stunned experts at the time and is just barely over half of the increase in 2020.
The new figures have shocked public health experts, including professionals who have been tracking drug overdose trends for decades.
Daniel Ciccarone, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies heroin markets, commented to the New York Times on the revelations: “It’s huge, it’s historic, it’s unheard-of, unprecedented, and a real shame.”
Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, told the Wall Street Journal: “I can remember thinking 30,000 was an astounding number ... Now we’re three times that. It’s crazy.”
To put these figures in historical context, according to the CDC, there were about 9,000 overdose deaths in 1988, around the height of the crack epidemic.
The new figures also mark the most deaths on record from opioids in particular, as well as the most overdose deaths from stimulants such as methamphetamine. Finally, it marks the most deaths from one specific synthetic opioid family known as fentanyls. Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin and is more and more frequently being mixed into other widely used illicit drugs. Fentanyl was involved in more than 60 percent of the overdose deaths last year, CDC data suggests.
According to the new data, overdose deaths rose in every state but two, South Dakota and New Hampshire. The data suggests that at least ten states endured a 40 percent or higher rise in drug overdose deaths from the previous 12-month span. These include Arkansas, California, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia and West Virginia. In Kentucky alone, overdose deaths rose 54 percent last year, to more than 2,100, up from under 1,400 the year before.
The drug epidemic has a severe and profound impact on nearly every facet of US society. There is, first and foremost, the devastating toll that these deaths have on friends, family, co-workers and other loved ones. Children whose parents are caught up in the throes of addiction or die from it are inundating an already overwhelmed foster care system.
Understaffed and overrun hospitals, already dealing with the crippling pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic, cannot cope with the flood of overdose patients. In many towns overdoses are among the most common emergencies that confront first responders. There is no doubt that these deaths, on top of the impact of the pandemic, have taken a deep emotional toll on them.
Overdose deaths are just one facet of what was overall the deadliest year in US history. With about 378,000 deaths attributed to COVID-19 in 2020, more than 3.3 million Americans died last year.
COVID-19 was the third-leading cause of death in the US in 2020, after heart disease and cancer, according to preliminary mortality data. A category ambiguously named “unintentional injuries,” which include drug overdoses, was the fourth leading cause of death.
Overdose deaths combined with COVID-19 deaths have driven down life expectancy to such an extent that some experts believe 2020 will officially register the largest drop since 1943, during World War II. The CDC is expected to report preliminary 2020 life-expectancy data next week.
However, a report released from the CDC earlier this month found that approximately 19 percent more Americans died in 2020 than in 2019. Perhaps most shockingly, researchers also discovered that mortality rates for young adults aged 25 to 34 have skyrocketed in the last decade, reaching levels not seen since 1953.
Researchers determined the rising death rate for adult workers was driven by a sharp increase in deaths from drug overdoses, alcohol, suicide, and cardiometabolic conditions (including both heart disease and metabolic disorders such as diabetes).
Any objective observer reviewing these statistics would assuredly conclude that the social situation facing workers in the US, and indeed around the world, reveals a profound sickness in American society, the heart of world capitalism. Drug abuse and overdoses and other “deaths of despair” are symptoms of a society in deep crisis.
Since the onset of the pandemic, governments around the world responded to the unprecedented public health emergency by pumping trillions of dollars into Wall Street and corporations to prop up world capitalism. In order to pay back this money, workers were forced into plants and factories to continue production.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson perhaps best epitomized the response of the entire global ruling elite when he blurted out bitterly last November: “No more f***ing lockdowns, let the bodies pile high in their thousands!” … And pile up they did.
Workers were forced into impossible situations, often choosing between risking their lives and the lives of their families or giving up their livelihoods. In the last year poverty has soared and hunger has skyrocketed. Thousands of families were evicted from their homes and many more are currently hovering on the brink of eviction as moratoriums continue to be lifted and governments insist that things “return to normal.”
Over the last year and a half, the callous and indifferent attitude of the ruling class to workers has been more starkly exposed than at any time in recent history.
As for the institutions that are ostensibly meant to defend workers and improve their conditions, the trade unions, not a single one organized any resistance to the policies of the ruling class. On the contrary the trade unions acted as junior partners in the facilitation of the reckless and criminal “back-to-work” policy initiated by Trump and continued under Biden.
For many of the tens of thousands of people who had already been struggling with addiction, or who were in recovery, these crushing conditions, social isolation, and the further atomization of the working class were enough to push them to relapse. For many others, including many young people whose plans and lives were totally derailed by the events of 2020, the circumstances led many to turn to drugs, which resulted in tragic premature deaths.
The devastating revelations about drug overdoses in the US underscore the complete inability of the capitalist system, in the country where the financial aristocracy has amassed untold wealth, to put those resources to use in dealing with an acute social crisis. American capitalism can no more deal with the opioid crisis than it can deal with the even greater pandemic of COVID-19.
The necessary resources—doctors, nurses, counselors, drug treatment programs, anti-overdose drugs like Narcan—should be made freely available through a massive social mobilization that would cost only a fraction of what the Pentagon squanders each year on the means of death and destruction.
But this is impossible under a political system dominated by two right-wing capitalist parties that do the bidding of Wall Street and the pharmaceutical companies—including some which directly profited from pumping opioid drugs into impoverished inner city and rural communities.
The working class must break through the political monopoly of corporate America. It must connect the global wave of emerging strikes and rebellions against the trade union straitjacket, and build an independent mass political movement of its own, based on a socialist program.
Workers everywhere are on the move, fighting against the social conditions that laid the groundwork for the horrific drug epidemic ripping through the US. The measures required to confront the drug crisis in the US cannot be carried out without a frontal attack by the working class on the wealth of the corporate and financial elite and its stranglehold on the entire economic and political system.
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