After securing former President Donald Trump’s endorsement to become the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, J.D. Vance went from chugging the Kool-Aid to spiking it with his very own conspiratorial falsehood.
Whatever the outcome from tonight’s election, it will be accompanied by a Vance lie so ridiculous that Trump himself might not have attempted it. Vance has actually suggested that President Joe Biden is allowing fentanyl to pour through the border so as to kill off MAGA voters.
“If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?” Vance asked Jim Hoft of the far-right news site Gateway Pundit on Friday.
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Vance conjured a vision of crisis at our southern border so dire as to demand priority over any humanitarian concerns presented by the war in Ukraine. He spoke of a “wide-open” realm where illegal immigrants—who he termed “Democrat voters” in a campaign ad—and drugs are allowed to pour through unimpeded. Never mind that the federal DEA estimates more than 90 percent of the drugs smuggled in from Mexico cross through established legal crossing points that would be unaffected by even the highest Trumpian wall.
“It’s really a border crisis that has gone all over the country,” Vance exclaimed. “It’s not just the southern border states that are affected by it. It’s everybody, and it does look intentional.”
Vance then said, “It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him and opening up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it.”
Vance’s contention becomes all the more absurd when you consider that although fatal overdoses have reached record levels, rates are no longer higher among whites than among Blacks—who are considerably less likely to vote MAGA. And the demographic change has been particularly dramatic in Ohio, the state Vance seeks to represent on Capitol Hill.
“For many years, black overdose death rates were one-third to one-half lower than for whites,” the non-profit Harm Reduction Ohio noted in a report. “But in mid-2016, that started to change. Since then, the trend has moved in the opposite direction. In 2019, death crossed the racial divide. Black Ohioans died of accidental drug overdoses at a significantly faster rate than whites.”
The overdose death rate among Blacks is now nearly 20 percent higher than among whites. Blacks comprise 14 percent of the state’s population, but suffer 17 cent of the overdose deaths.
Harm Reduction Ohio and federal law enforcement sources agree on the cause of the shift: fentanyl, the same deadly new drug that Vance cites in his conspiracy theory.
“Today Blacks have dramatically higher overdose death rates than whites and the reason is fentanyl moved from the heroin supply—the opioid supply—into the cocaine supply,” Harm Reduction Ohio president Dennis Cauchon told The Daily Beast on Monday. “For decades, for whatever reason, whites have always had disproportionately high heroin overdose death rates, and blacks have had traditionally high cocaine overdose death rates. It's true in Ohio, and it's really true nationwide.”
He noted that cocaine itself has a relatively low overdose death rate. That started to change when dealers began to lace it with fentanyl as a low cost potency boost.
“It’s now an all-purpose adulterate,” Cauchon said. “When fentanyl moved into cocaine it caused a lot of black overdose deaths.”
Cauchon dismissed Vance’s conspiracy theory with a single word.
“Ridiculous.”
He added, “Fentanyl is apolitical.”
(L-R) Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) look on as J.D. Vance speaks during a campaign rally in Newark, Ohio.
Drew AngererVance’s suggestion that Biden is using it as a diabolical anti-MAGA chemical weapon is apparently in part an effort to downplay the conflict in Ukraine, where chemical warfare is a real danger. Vance said on Steven Bannon’s War Room back in February that “I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another." What is happening there has come to include executions and rape and the deliberate bombing of hospitals and a host of other horrors. Vance has sought to divert us from Putin’s crime against humanity with a fiction about Biden and a deadly drug that Trump also could not stop.
Three of the handful of people already in Congress who voted against sending aid to Ukrainians came to campaign for Vance following the Trump endorsement. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia all describe themselves as champions of freedom as they join Vance in warning about the great crisis at the border.
One researcher who has been scientifically documenting actual facts regarding both overdoses and fentanyl was continuing his work at the border on Monday. Joseph Friedman of The Center for Social Medicine and Humanities and the Medical Scientist Training Program at UCLA spoke to The Daily Beast from Tijuana.
“I’m seeing this up close and personal,” he said. “For most of the pandemics, like two years, almost the only people who were allowed to cross the border were mostly U.S. citizens and U.S. permanent residents. And the fentanyl did not stop coming, which means it's being brought over by U.S. citizens,who cannot be denied entry to this country through legal ports of entry.”
He offered a conclusion.
“So the whole Republican talking point about a weak wall, it just empirically doesn’t make any sense. It’s just a flat out lie.”
Friedman has done considerable research into the changing overdose rates for Blacks and for whites. He agrees with Ohio Harm that fentanyl is a prime cause, but he ascribes the increase in the death rate among Blacks less to tainted cocaine than to an age difference in users.
“Among Black individuals, the highest death rates are actually in older folks, like in the fifties and sixties,” he said. “And that’s because these are people who initially started using heroin many decades ago and have been safely using heroin ever since. But all of a sudden, that heroin’s been replaced by something much more dangerous and those older Black folks are dying. Whereas with white overdoses… you see the highest rates are in slightly younger folks.”
He and fellow researcher Helena Hansen published some of their recent findings in the March issue of JAMA Psychiatry in a paper called Evaluation of Increases in Drug Overdose: Mortality Rates in the US by Race and Ethnicity Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Their conclusion will stand as science-based fact no matter what Vance achieves at the polls with a bigger than big lie.
“Drug overdose mortality is increasingly becoming a racial justice issue in the US.”
