Drug addicts are losing limbs to xylazine (aka "tranq") - a border wall is a cruel distraction
People who believe a border wall is what America needs to stop the scourge of addiction are either deluded, making money off it, or terminally sadistic. The desire of an addict to do drugs is overwhelming. And the profits to supply that need are just too vast to think that a barrier along a small part of America's borders will reduce the trade. Consider this, Americans spend as much on illegal drugs as they do on alcohol. And drug dealers pay no taxes.
Drug trafficking is the ultimate free market. Product innovation is robust as dealers constantly search for cost-saving substitute drugs. Cheaper heroin replaced relatively expensive oxycontin. Fentanyl then stretched out the heroin addict’s dollar. Now dealers are cutting fentanyl with the even cheaper xylazine (aka “tranq,” so called because its intended use is as a horse tranquilizer). And the effects have been devastating.
Injecting xylazine leads to sores, ulceration, and worse, scaly dead tissue called eschar. Untreated, this can lead to amputation. Yet, even knowing this, users will keep using it. And as long as addicts can pay for their drugs, there will be people with drugs willing to take their money. And addicts are single-minded about raising that money — because users need to get high no matter the obstacles or the cost.
Tracey McCann, 39, experienced the ravages of xylazine. The New York Times reported her story.
”As with many trapped by tranq, Ms. McCann’s hellish descent began with prescription opioids. In 2009, when she was 27, she developed a dependence on painkillers prescribed after a severe car crash. A boyfriend she met at one of her six stays in rehab introduced her to heroin. Cheaper and more potent fentanyl elbowed heroin off the streets. Then, as the Covid-19 pandemic descended in 2020, tranq stormed Philadelphia.
The paper further wrote,
Last July, she was evicted from her room in Kensington. “I was sleeping on the sidewalks crying every night, knowing that I was better than that,” Ms. McCann said. Someone next to her got shot. A man tried to rape her, but she defended herself with a box cutter. On the hot summer streets, she saw people whose tranq wounds were covered with fleas and maggots.
Even so, she said, “I could not pull myself away from that drug.”
Adding,
Over a matter of weeks, Tracey McCann watched in horror as the bruises she was accustomed to getting from injecting fentanyl began hardening into an armor of crusty, blackened tissue. Something must have gotten into the supply.
“I’d wake up in the morning crying because my arms were dying,”
Fortunately, McCann has now been in five months of intensive rehab. She has put on weight after dropping to 90 pounds. And the skin on her forearms has recovered, although it remains deeply scarred.
Others have not been so fortunate. Brook Peder lost a leg to tranq. And despite the severe damage to her arm (which she may also lose), she still injects tranq into it. And her mother, sister, and wife died of overdoses.
A man McCann knew on the street — he let her use his cell phone — has lost an arm and a leg to the drug, yet he still injects drugs into the stump.
The treatment protocol for xylazine is tricky. Unlike fentanyl, it is not an opiate. So even if an addict receives help to overcome a fentanyl addiction, they still face the withdrawal symptoms of xylazine, which include migraines, double vision, nausea, numbness in fingers and toes, sweats, and body-rattling anxiety. There is no medical protocol yet for managing it.
The answer is not the hugely expensive, completely useless vanity project, the Mexican Border Wall. Take a look at a map of the US. The Mexican/US border is 1,933 miles. In Trump’s most favorable scenario, The Wall would have been 1,250 miles long — less than 2/3rds the length of the border. By 2018, an administration official admitted the commitment was down to 316 miles of new pedestrian barriers - “in addition to what is there now.” Even that was too grand a goal. By the end of his term, the administration had built 40 miles of new fencing.
And a lot of that wall is in danger of collapsing.
As for the rest of the country, the US has a 3,987-mile border with Canada (not including Alaska). And a contiguous, 48-state coastline 5,839 miles long. Even if you were to build an impenetrable barrier between the US and Mexico, the vast majority of the country would still be “unprotected”.
And there is no evidence the wall works anyway. Smugglers have gone over and under it. And narcotraffickers prefer to ship through one of the legal openings. You have tons of freight. The least efficient way of transporting it is human mules carrying it across a desert.
The rest of the 52-year War on Drugs is an equal waste of money. It has cost over $1 trillion, with a further $51 billion spent annually. And it has not reduced drug use.
The only way to reduce the number of illegal drugs is to reduce the demand for them. To reduce demand authorities must offer aggressive and readily-available rehab for current addicts — and create effective programs to prevent the desire to do illegal drugs in the young.
I am not an expert on addiction — beyond knowing how powerfully the mind demands something that a person craves — so I leave it to others to design effective programs to convince kids not to do drugs. But I do know that some dumbass PSA featuring an egg sizzling in a hot skillet with the voiceover, “this is your brain on drugs” — or a vacuous suggestion by a First Lady to “Just say no” - are a complete waste of time.
The conservative approach to reducing drug use has been an abomination and immoral. If the Bible is true, then on the Day of Judgement, the Celestial Decider will ask these sanctimonious gits why they pursued policies that killed so many (over 100,000 a year). And left so many others with devastating injuries, mental anguish, and destroyed lives — among both addicts and their loved ones. And as God (if his book is accurate) knows all, they will not be able to get away with the lies they spout so facilely on social media and cable news.
The only way “the wall” has been effective is preventing people from getting help, thank you Pitt