Busting a myth

A common right wing trope is that illegal drugs are coming across the southern border, carried by illegal immigrants. You may even have seen the political ad featuring people climbing a wall wearing backpacks, implying that they were what are called " drug mules. " The whole thing was, of course, faked. I have written here before that this is not true, that is not how illicit drugs come into the country, butnow there is a very rigorous study proving it. Unfortunately, unless you have institutional access, you can only read the abstract, which is not very informative. (NBER used to be open access, this is apparently a new policy.) But I ' ll tell you what it says. Here are two key paragraphs:In this paper, we show that legal trade is a key factor driving fentanyl supply by documenting a relationship between international imports and fentanyl overdoses. Illicit fentanyl is produced abroad (Pardo et al. 2019). However, there is little information on how it is smuggled into the U.S., with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) emphasizing the roles of Mexican gangs smuggling fentanyl across the Southwest border and the use of mail packages from China (DEA 2019; 2021). We assess the empirical relationship between imports and fentanyl overdoses at the state level, with the idea that supply frictions result in overdoses disproportionately occurring near smuggling  locations.3 Specifically, using CDC mortality data and U.S. Census import datafor 2008-2020, we show that there ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs