At an April 14 information convention in Washington, DC, Drug Enforcement Company (DEA) chief Anne Milgram sounded the alarm concerning the nation’s newest declared public enemy primary: 4 Mexican guys referred to as “Los Chapitos”, the sons of imprisoned Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Declaring El Chapo’s offspring “answerable for the large inflow” into the US of the artificial opioid fentanyl, Milgram insisted: “Let me be clear that the Chapitos pioneered the manufacture and trafficking of the deadliest drug our nation has ever confronted.”
As if this weren’t information sufficient, the DEA chief threw in some further alleged trivia, in response to which the Chapitos had “fed their enemies alive to tigers, electrocuted them, [and] waterboarded them” – actions the likes of which the US has clearly by no means perpetrated in opposition to its personal enemies.
There isn’t any debating the deadliness of fentanyl, which is 50 instances extra highly effective than heroin. Drug overdoses, nearly all of them fentanyl-related, at the moment are killing greater than 100,000 folks a 12 months within the US. Whole communities have been devastated.
And but it’s curious that the Chapitos are spontaneously guilty for the entire fentanyl epidemic – though the brand new narrative actually turns out to be useful when justifying the persevering with frenzied militarisation of the US-Mexico border.
Again in 2017, a US congressional listening to on fentanyl featured testimony from Debra Houry, a director on the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention (CDC), the nationwide public well being company, who famous that lots of these dying from fentanyl overdoses had beforehand been prescribed authorized painkilling opioids.
As Houry defined: “Folks which can be on prescription opioids get hooked on opioids and might then go on to overdose from heroin or fentanyl.”
So it’s hardly surprising that individuals are dropping like flies from fentanyl given the unchecked opioid over-prescription that has epitomised the modern healthcare scene within the US – an association that finally has little to do with well being and much to do with cash.
Certainly, it takes a downright sick system to allow the cargo of 9 million opioid tablets in two years to a single pharmacy in a city with a inhabitants of 400 folks, as occurred within the state of West Virginia.
And whereas large gamers within the US pharmaceutical business and pharmacy chains have not too long ago been pressured to pay symbolic monetary compensation for his or her irresponsible practices that fuelled the disaster, there was no precise admission of wrongdoing or any critical connecting of the lethal dots.
In different phrases, there was zero reappraisal of the US’s pathological capitalist foundations – which signifies that foolish issues like human lives won’t ever be put above company revenue.
In any case, it’s simpler simply guilty the Chapitos.
As could be anticipated in any such setup, the lives of the poor matter the least. And what have you learnt? The fentanyl disaster has disproportionately hit poor folks. A 2020 article printed on the web site of the Nationwide Library of Drugs discovered that individuals dwelling beneath the poverty line had the next threat of deadly opioid overdoses.
At-risk socioeconomic teams additionally included newly launched prisoners, in addition to people with insecure housing or no medical health insurance. The article famous: “Financial deprivation is a threat issue for opioid overdoses in the US and contributes to patterns of declining life expectancy that differ from most developed nations.”
How is that for American exceptionalism?
To make sure, in a rustic with a lot ache, it makes good sense that there ought to be such a requirement for painkillers – and the cheaper the higher for the impoverished communities upon whose distress the capitalist superstructure is constructed.
In the meantime, the extra the decrease socioeconomic echelons may be criminalised for his or her poverty and addictions, the extra handy for perpetuating the struggle on the poor that helps preserve US society good and submissive.
The truth that US army veterans are twice as more likely to die from an opioid overdose fairly effectively encapsulates the skewed priorities of a rustic that may spend trillions sowing destruction worldwide however can’t be bothered to handle even its personal warriors.
Then, in fact, there’s the matter of the intersection of socioeconomic and racial oppression in opposition to the backdrop of the fentanyl-dominated opioid disaster and drug overdoses generally. In accordance to Scientific American journal, the general overdose dying price for Black folks within the US first surpassed the dying price for white folks in 2019, with the proliferation of fentanyl producing a panorama through which “Black males older than 55 who survived for many years with a heroin habit are dying at charges 4 instances larger than folks of different races in that age group”.
The CDC experiences that the overdose dying price for Black folks elevated by 44 p.c between 2019 and 2020 alone, whereas the speed for Native People elevated by 39 p.c.
And in 2020, as per CDC statistics, overdose dying charges for Black folks in US counties with larger revenue inequality have been greater than twice as excessive as in counties with much less revenue inequality.
If there was ever a lesson to be taught from capitalism, it’s that inequality kills. Therefore the US authorities’s reliance on worldwide bogeymen just like the Chapitos to distract its residents from a moderately brutal actuality: that the capitalist system itself is public enemy primary.
Now, US lawmakers are pushing for harsher sentencing for fentanyl possession and dealing – which is nice information for the prison-industrial complicated however not a lot for society. One can’t assist however recall the crack cocaine epidemic of the Eighties, when Black communities in Los Angeles have been decimated by a drug inflow immediately occasioned by the US’s terrorisation of Nicaragua – in any other case referred to as the Contra struggle in opposition to the so-called “pink menace”.
Forty years later, capitalism stays as lethal a drug as ever and a euphemism for the all-out US struggle on the poor – a struggle for which fentanyl is merely the newest face.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially replicate Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
