Fentanyl surges in US because of ‘social decay’ not border crisis, Mexican president tells Biden
- Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Thursday that the fentanyl crisis in the US is due to “social decay.”
- Both US and most Mexican officials have acknowledged that fentanyl is produced in laboratories in Mexico from Chinese ingredients
- “Why don’t they solve their problem of social decay?” López Obrador said about the US, as a top White House official visits his country
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Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Thursday that the fentanyl crisis in the US is due to “social decay” and not the powerful synthetic opioid flowing from Mexico across the southern border.
López Obrador tried to shake his hands of responsibility despite both US and most Mexican officials acknowledging that fentanyl is produced in laboratories in Mexico from Chinese ingredients.
The Mexican president’s comments came as White House homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall visited the country and participated in meetings about the fentanyl trade.
“Here we don’t produce fentanyl and we don’t consume fentanyl,” said López Obrador. “Why don’t they solve their problem of social decay?”
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Thursday that the fentanyl crisis in the US is due to “social decay” and not the powerful synthetic opioid flowing from Mexico across the southern border
This photo, taken by the Phoenix Division of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, shows some of the 30,000 fentanyl pills the agency seized in August 2017 in one of its larger arrests
López Obrador then listed why Americans are turning to the drug, saying it was because of single-parent families, parents who evict adult children and the elderly who are sent to nursing homes where they are only visited ‘once a year’.
Fentanyl manufacturers in Mexico haven’t spent much time developing a domestic market because shipping the drug to the US is so profitable, Mexican safety analyst David Saucedo told the Associated Press.
In the US, fentanyl is often mixed with street drugs such as cocaine and heroin, causing an epidemic of overdoses among unsuspecting users.
Fentanyl is responsible for about 70,000 U.S. deaths each year.
Senator Lindsey Graham (RS.C.) was so outraged by the rise in fentanyl deaths that he recommended that Mexican drug cartels be officially categorized as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.” He also urged Congress to approve a military permit so that US troops could go after Mexican drug labs.
In response, López Obrador said that Mexican-Americans and Hispanics should boycott the Republican Party.
“We are going to make a call not to vote for that party because they are inhumane and interventionist,” López Obrador said.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was asked on a Zoom call with reporters on Friday to respond to López Obrador characterizing fentanyl as exclusively an American problem.
Kirby said the two presidents have yet to speak since López Obrador made the “social decay” comments, while pointing out that Sherwood-Randall is currently on the ground in Mexico.
“I can assure you that concrete steps to address fentanyl were certainly high on the list” of agenda items for the US delegation, Kirby noted.
He also pointed to discussions Biden, López Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had about drug trafficking during the so-called “Three Amigos” summit in Mexico City in January.
“Fentanyl is a problem that doesn’t just affect the United States, it affects every country in the world. It’s a global problem,” Kirby also said. “We think we’ve made significant progress so far, but we’re not letting go of the accelerator. It’s a critical challenge. It continues to cost so many Americans their lives.’
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