FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

Washington Post Hits Obama’s Failure in Fentanyl Disaster

March 13, 2019 (EIRNS)—The Washington Post, of all publications, has issued a devastating investigative report—“The Fentanyl Failure”—on the Obama Administration’s complete and utter failure to confront or stop what is now an epidemic of fentanyl-related poisonings causing mass death in the United States. The report might more properly be labeled, “When Science Dies, Mass Death Will Surely Follow.”

The Post reports:

“Between 2013 and 2017, more than 67,000 people died of synthetic opioid-related overdoses—exceeding the number of U.S. military personnel killed during the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars combined. The number of deaths, the vast majority from fentanyl, has risen sharply each year. In 2017, synthetic opioids were to blame for 28,869 out of the overall 47,600 opioid overdoses, a 46.4% increase over the previous year, when fentanyl became the leading cause of overdose deaths in America for the first time.

“ ‘This is a massive institutional failure, and I don’t think people have come to grips with it,’ said John P. Walters, chief of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy between 2001 and 2009. ‘This is like an absurd bad dream and we don’t know how to intervene or how to save lives.’ ”

The Post compares the galloping and exponentially increasing fentanyl health emergency—about which the Obama Administration did practically nothing—to the declaration of the health emergency and expenditure of billions concerning the Zika virus, which had killed two people. The Post points out that fentanyl has grown into genocide as a result of two Obama Administration failures: the failure to recognize that fentanyl represented a unique threat, in the domain of a biological warfare agent, rather than simply an extension of the already-devastating opioid and heroin epidemic sweeping formerly industrial areas of the United States; and then Attorney General Eric Holder’s takedown of drug enforcement policy involving prosecutions, rather than opioid treatment centers. The article makes very clear that fentanyl often kills first- or second-time drug users, making treatment centers, in this context, an absurd concept.

Repeatedly, DEA, state attorney generals, others, banged on the doors of White House, the article documents, but to no avail. “fentanyl was killing people like we’d never seen before,” said Derek Maltz, the former agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Division in Washington. “A red light was going off, ding, ding, ding. This is something brand new. What the hell is going on? We needed a serious sense of urgency.”

The article describes that,

“for traffickers, illicit fentanyl produced in labs was the most lucrative opportunity yet, a chance to bypass the unpredictability of the poppy fields that produced their heroin. The traffickers could order one of the cheapest and most powerful opioids on the planet directly from Chinese labs over the Internet. It was 20 times more profitable than heroin by weight. By lacing a little of the white powdery drug into their heroin, the dealers could make their product more potent and more compelling to users. They called it China White, China Girl, Apache, Dance Fever, Goodfella, Murder 8 or Tango & Cash. The DEA has also identified Mexico as a major production point for fentanyl.”

It is noteworthy that President’s Trump and Xi Jinping have made complete eradication of these labs a strategic priority and that the Trump Administration has launched a significant but by no means adequate effort to intervene in this major national crisis. According to the article, Trump is also working with Mexico to stem the flow from there. The full Post article can be found under the title, “The Fentanyl Failure: Despite mounting deaths and warnings, the Obama administration did not take extraordinary measures to confront an extraordinary crisis, experts say.”