Meet the Press - July 2, 2023

Interview

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Thanks for having me.

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Yeah, so if you look just historically, we've always had more substance abuse problems in the Midwest of the country and if you look at sort of where deindustrialization, right, a lot of these manufacturing jobs went to China, Mexico, and so forth. I think that obviously was a mistake, but now we're dealing with the consequences of that fact. And what happens when people lose their jobs, when they lose their livelihood, their sense of financial stability? Sometimes that does lead to an increase in demand for drugs and alcohol. Now what's different about this maybe then 30 years ago is -- now look, alcoholism's a serious problem; I don't mean to minimize it. But if you take a person who is addicted to alcohol 30 years ago and you make that fentanyl now, all of the things that we worked towards, giving people a second chance, getting them into treatment, it's so much harder with fentanyl because it's so deadly and it's so addictive.

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There are a few different things, right? So, number one is people who have stable lives, stable families, who grew up in not necessarily wealthy households, but at least comfortable households, financially stable households, they're much less likely to be addicted. That doesn't mean fentanyl doesn't affect people from upper middle class backgrounds. Of course it does, but it's much more concentrated in people who are struggling financially. There is a very direct line between job losses to China, especially in the '80s and '90s, and the heroin and now the fentanyl problem today is a very, very direct line. So, number 1 we have to rebuild the middle class in this country and ensure that people don't want to do drugs in the first place. The second thing here is that of course we want to prevent people from getting addicted, but once they are addicted treatment is a major source of the story here.

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I think that the carrots and the sticks, again, both of these things really, really matter. We can't overstate how different this is from crack, from cocaine, from alcohol. It's so much more addictive and so much more deadly. The most heartbreaking thing that I've experienced, I'd say, in the last couple years because of this fentanyl problem is, you go into NA meetings, right? Narcotics Anonymous, where people are sort of taking the first, second, and third step to recovery. You go and talk to people and you always hear the story. You hear a story about an 18-year-old girl who got addicted, got caught up in the wrong stuff, but was a year clean, was two years clean, was working, was thinking about getting custody of her kids back, doing all the things that we want people to be able to do in a country of second chances. But one relapse, and because it was fentanyl instead of heroin or crack, that's it.

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Not even just much deeper relapse; they're dead, right? And so many times you hear the story of people who are doing the right thing. I mean, even in my own family I've seen people relapse multiple times. I've seen relatives who get back on the horse the seventh or eighth time, and that's what did it, right? They're ten years clean now, we're proud of them, we're happy, of course that's a good story for our family. But if you take this incredibly deadly substance you don't get seven or eight relapses; you maybe get one or two if you're lucky. That's why you have to work on the supply and the demand problem.

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That's right --

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Well, we're hamstrung if we assume good faith from everybody that we're working with. But I think if we actually have some real American leadership we can make some good progress here.

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I want --

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I want to empower the president of the United States, whether that's a Democrat or Republican, to use the power of the U.S. military to go after these drug cartels. Here's the real problem with --

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If we have to, absolutely. Here's the real problem with Mexico here. It's sort of two-fold, right? On the one hand, you have the cartels, which are arguably the best-funded criminal terrorist organization in the entire world. Because the amount of money --

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Oh, absolutely.

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Exactly. And by the way, I've talked to DEA agents who think that the amount they're bringing in, their revenue per year has gone up 14-fold just in the last couple of years. That shows you what, I think, bad border policies can do. But the second thing, Chuck, is we have to recognize the Mexican government is being, in a lot of ways, destabilized by the constant flow of fentanyl.

You mentioned Colombia, right? The Colombian drug cartels were so powerful that Colombia became a failed state. You think the fentanyl problem is bad now, what about three years from now when the Mexican drug cartels are more powerful than the Mexican state itself?

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Absolutely not.

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Correct.

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That's right.

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Well, look, we have less economic leverage over China than we did 15, 20 years ago, because we continue to make bad decisions. But we still have a lot of leverage, okay? And the Chinese export a ton to the American markets. They absolutely need the American consumer to be able to run their businesses. We should be willing to say that, "If you don't stop sending fentanyl precursors to Mexico and to our own ports of entry, we're going to really penalize you guys economically." That is the real tool. We're not going to invade China because they're sending fentanyl into our country. We can increase tariffs and extract a massive economic cost. I think the Biden administration should be doing exactly that.

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So, fair point there. I want to address that. A lot of it's coming through ports of entry. We don't really know how much is not coming through ports of entry.

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Because we're not catching it. But I think the fact that we have a pretty effective way to capture this stuff at ports of entry is evidence that it does work. Is it perfect? No. Right, no solution here is perfect. But the goal here is not to get to zero people killed by drug overdoses. The goal is to get it less than 100,000, and then less than 90,000, and then less than 80,000. Those are attainable goals. And absolutely, having better screening at our ports of entry is part of that solution.

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Of course.

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So, I think Portugal's a very different country. And in fact, if you look at some of the strategies that have been tried in Portugal, some of them have been tried in certain municipalities in the United States. And what you end up seeing is drug overdose numbers go up, addiction numbers go up. So, I think if the Portugal approach could work here, it would've, frankly, already worked. Look, some harm reduction absolutely matters, right? Suboxone is a sort of medically assisted treatment for people who are trying to break clean of this stuff. All that's part of the equation. But I think that if we believe we're going to solve the opioid problem by handing out needles, we're going to make the problem worse and in fact, we're already seeing evidence that we've done this. So no, I don't think that's the solution. But I do think that we should follow the evidence wherever it ultimately leads here. Legalization is not going to help, but maybe doing medically assisted treatment more and making that more accessible, that's a good solution.

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Thanks, Chuck.

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