He was interrupted. Republican lawmakers in the House chamber began to criticize Biden. Rep. Andrew Ogles (R-Tenn.) shouted, “It’s your fault!”
Biden quickly regained the floor, arguing in favor of increasing penalties for smuggling, working with companies like FedEx to better inspect packages and to improve technology at the border to catch more attempted shipments. But Ogles’s disruption does raise an interesting question: Where does blame for the surge in fentanyl overdoses lie?
In an interview with CNN, Ogles claimed that there was a relatively simple solution that Biden hadn’t taken.
“With a stroke of a pen he could have shut down the border,” Ogles said, saying that he was offended Biden hadn’t done so. He went on to say that Biden had, in fact, done nothing.
It’s true that completely shutting down the border would slow the import of fentanyl, but the scale of the shutdown would have to be near-total. Most fentanyl that’s seized at the border is found in vehicles searched at legal border checkpoints (and often in the possession of U.S. citizens). Unlike marijuana, a potent amount of fentanyl takes up relatively little space, allowing it to be smuggled in hidden pockets in vehicles or on a driver’s person.
Drug seizures at the border are down this year, in part because marijuana seizures — a major contributor to the net weight of seizures, the metric U.S. Customs and Border Protection uses — are down. Fentanyl seizures were up dramatically in December, though the total weight of seizures is still far lower than of other seized drugs. (On the bottom four graphs below, fentanyl seizures are overlaid to allow comparison of seizure amounts between drugs.)
There have been three jumps in the amount of fentanyl seized at the border. The first came in 2020, when Donald Trump was president, as seizures topped 1,000 pounds in a month for the first time. The next came in July 2022, when the monthly total for the first time totaled more than 2,000 pounds. (This was reported in mid-August.) The largest increase occurred in the last two months of 2022, when more than 7,000 pounds were seized.
It does not appear to be the case that the increase in seizures is a function of any change in Border Patrol processes or mechanisms. A representative of the organization who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were speaking without authorization indicated to The Washington Post that they were not aware of any change in the past two months that would explain the increase in seizures. The assumption, then, is that the reason more fentanyl was seized was that there is more fentanyl being pushed north into the United States.
In other words, that the driver of the increased number of seizures at the border is an increased market due to increased demand from drug users in the United States.
It’s hard to estimate how much fentanyl enters the country without detection. It’s also not clear how much fentanyl is produced domestically. Last month, law enforcement officials seized chemicals that could be used for the production of the drug at a house in Tucson. An increase (or decrease) in seizures does suggest a general increase in supply, absent changes in search technology or methods.
That Ogles hoped to pin fentanyl deaths on Biden is unquestionably intermingled with partisanship. Ogles, elected to the House in last year’s midterm elections, is an eager foot soldier in Republican culture-war fights. And blaming Biden for fentanyl deaths, often as a bank-shot to criticizing his handling of the border, is common on the right.
In the months before the midterm elections, for example, Fox News’s coverage of fentanyl increased dramatically. Often, that coverage came in the context of a conversation about the border; like Ogles, Fox News commentators sought to tie fentanyl deaths to Biden’s border policies.
Fox News mentioned fentanyl nearly twice as often in September and October as it did in December and January. Most of the time, those mentions were in the context of the border. In the period from July through October, Fox News mentioned fentanyl 22 times as often as CNN and more than 43 times as often as did MSNBC.
It is clear that an unacceptable number of people are dying from fentanyl overdoses, though the total is still far lower than the number of people dying from covid-19. It is also clear that the effort to halt fentanyl at the border is not as successful as either Biden or his critics would like.
It also seems clear that there is not a single point of blame to be assigned.
