In the sense that drugs, including fentanyl, is a supply and demand business, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., wants more attention paid to being effective in reducing the demand.
Capito said during a virtual press briefing Thursday that more must be done in prevention.
“The fentanyl problem in this country is a demand problem,” she said. “We talked about this with the Mexican president and he emphasizes that part of the problem. This is not just Mexico, so sending the drugs through there by the cartels and the illicit methods, you’ve got people who want this and there is demand out there so there is big money at stake.”
Capito and a bipartisan group of federal legislators traveled to Mexico last weekend to meet with President López Obrador.
The U.S. needs to be “much more aggressive on the prevention side,” she said.
“We need to go all the way down into the kindergarten, first, second and third grade levels,” she said of education about the dangers of drugs. “The DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) is moving forward with a program called ‘One Pill Can Kill.’ One pill can kill ... You can take a pill and it can kill you.”
Many pills that contain fentanyl are made to resemble other medications.
Capito said the costs of the devastating impact of drug addiction should be known at the front end, not only in the number of deaths, but the financial burden as well.
“If we can prevent this addiction from even occurring, think about how many lives would be saved … and money we would save on the back end,” she said of the cost of treatments and hospitalizations and other costly impacts of the crisis that could be reduced.
“I think we have been slow to the prevention part, but this is, I think, is going to be absolutely key, and I think it has to start with young, young children,” she said. “We need to get an all-hands-on-deck approach and we need to try innovative things using social media and other ways to reach people.”
Capito also said another preventive measure is for health professionals to prescribe non-opioid pain medications that would not lead to addiction.
She described a conversation with a mother of a young athlete who had surgery and was prescribed Percocet.
Four years later, he died of an overdose, she said, because he “couldn’t shake the addiction from those initial pills.”
Capito, who is Ranking Member of the Senate Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, also asked Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra last week about spending priorities related to his department’s budget request for fiscal year 2024 regarding the drug crisis.
“Substance use challenges continue to face the nation, and I don’t think have received enough mention in this budget,” she said during the budget hearing. “While the budget repeats many of the unobtainable funding levels for substance use programs from the fiscal year 2023 request, the White House budget overview rarely mentions fentanyl or opioids. My home state has been in the crosshairs of the opioid and addiction crisis for several years now. We continue to lead the country in overdose deaths per capita. Since fiscal year 2018, this subcommittee has increased resources toward opioid prevention and treatment programs by more than $4 billion. I know we need to shape the programs we’ve got, so I want to know how these funds and programs are moving the needle in the addiction crisis.”
Capito said she talked with Obrador about more cooperation in dealing with the drug trade, smuggling deadly fentanyl across the southern border and the illegal crossing of the border by immigrants.
The problem is, she said, China is sending precursors, chemicals, into Mexico for the production of fentanyl.
“We implored the president to be more aggressive with China to prevent these precursors,” she said, adding that he actually said he will “forcefully” talk with China about this.
“Hopefully, we can stop the flow, or at least slow it down,” she said. “Mexico has to be a partner with us on drugs,” but also on the illegal immigrant issue.
Capito said the northern border of Mexico is “totally controlled by the cartels” with illegal immigrants “flooding into this country.”
“The administration has not done enough, or done very little, to stem the flow,” she said of Pres. Joe Biden. “When Title 42 goes away in May there is going to be a flood of humanity at our southern border.”
Title 42 was put into place at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 to stop most people from coming in seeking asylum.
Deterrents are not in place to curb the flow, she added.
“We’ve got a real issue here,” she said, and the asylum process must be expedited to prevent people who are being vetted to enter the country and then spread out and wait possibly for several years before the process is completed.
Capito has long pushed to handle the asylum process at the border quickly without allowing a flood of immigrants into the country before they are vetted.