In the waters off the Caribbean, the United States military has been blowing small boats out of the water.
The US military is using lethal force to blow up boats that it claims they're carrying drugs.
Well, look, all I.
Know is this. Every boat that you see get blown up, we saved twenty five thousand dollar average lives, twenty five thousand lives.
It's done this at least twenty times, killing at least eighty people. And in one case it's in the headlines right now. Orders were given to ensure that there would be no survivors.
Both the House and Senate Republicans and Democrats like Senators Read and Wicker calling for an investigation into war crimes here.
And this goes to.
Guess as the Secretary of Defense Pete heigsas Feis's questions about whether he's orders are illegal. Donald Trump is doubling down threatening strocks on Venezuelan soil.
It's important to note that the people in these boats have never been charged with a crime, is certainly not convicted of a crime, and yet they received the death penalty. And this is because the Trump administration claims that we are in a war against what they call Noco traffickers.
It's the latest escalation in Donald Trump's self declared war on Fentanyl, a campaign that casts foreign traffickers as the villains behind America's overdose crisis. But the origin of America's fentantal problem lies much closer to home inside the country's own pharmaceutical industry. I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to seven AM today drug a story and professor David Herzberg on how the fentanyl crisis really started and why the war to stop it could make everything worse. It's Monday,
December eighth. David, I think it's worth getting a sense of how bad the API or crisis is in the United States right now. What are we seeing at the moment.
It's really bad, and the hard to wrap your brain around thing is that it's that bad, but it's gotten better. So we're at about eighty thousand deaths in twenty twenty four. That's a lot of deaths, and it's down from a long stretch years and years and years where there were more than one hundred thousand deaths per year, and most of those deaths did involve fensanyl. It's incredibly potent, and that potency means that it's hard to package for safe use.
You have to mix it perfectly because if there are even any little tiny clumps, the tiniest little things can lead to contamination and overdose. So it's simply not a great product from the consumer's point of view. It's really dangerous. But it's great for smuggling because it's potent, which means it's easy to conceal, and the amount of profit you can make per unit of weight is higher. And in a prohibition market, whatever makes it easier to smuggle is better.
Side Trumpetney's officials side that these fans and is coming from Venezueila, and that the cruise on these boute nachie terrorists responsible for killing tens of thousands of Americans.
The American people are safer because narco terrorists. No, you can't bring drugs through the water and eventually on land. If necessary have to do to the American people, we will eliminate that threat, and we're proud to do it.
What should we make with those claims.
At the most direct level, they, as far as we're able to tell, are simply false. Venezuela is not a source of drugs heading to the US. At least in any significant way. And in general, fencanyl isn't coming into the United States over water. In general, it comes in over the land border. But let's step back from the specifics and address the broader claim that foreign traffickers are causing this fencinyl crisis and that we can fix the
crisis if we stop them. The trouble is in America now, there are many people who are addicted to fencanol, and that means that they're very strongly motivated to continue to buy it. So if we were able to shut down the fencinyl supply chain, those people would still be there wanting to buy a fencanyl And so you'd have a situation where supply and demand are mismatched. And we know
what happens in that situation. Prices go up, and when prices go up, the profits for selling the product also go up, and that'll draw in new suppliers to meet
the demand. But in an illegal market, there's no rules for the competition, there's no boundaries for the competition, so you often get violent competition, and the winners tend to be the ones who are the most ruthless, they're the most violent, they're the most effective, and historically speaking, in the Americas, they often tend to move closer to the end consumer in other words, the United States, because that
is more efficient. So if we were somehow able to shut off the supply of fentanyl, we might soon be facing something even worse than we currently have now.
So Hey does his feet in the Trumps border war on drugs rectory.
Yeah, it fits into is broader war on drugs rhetoric, and it also fits into the biggest narrative of the Trump administration. His favorite story is that Democrats betrayed America by opening up the borders and allowing first the jobs to be sucked out and then the drugs to be smuggled in.
For decades, open borders have allowed drugs and gangs to pour into our most vulnerable communities. They've allowed millions of low wage workers to compete for jobs and wages against the poorest Americans.
Theoretical Democrats want to turn America into one giant sanctuary for dangers, criminal aliens, and every American should know that if they purchase illegal drugs, they are helping to finance some of the most violent, cruel, and ruthless organizations.
Anywhere in the world.
Illegal drug use is not a victimless crime.
So blowing up boats really should be seen as part of his bigger plan to build a fortress America that'll stop foreigners from taking advantage of the country, and it'll allow this traditional, wholesome America to flourish again once it's no longer being exploited by these villainous foreigners. There are problems with the story, lots of problems with this story, but just in the drug context, foreign drugs didn't cause the opioid crisis, and stopping the fenyl supply chain won't
solve the crisis. In fact, at an even deeper level, Trump is spinning a fantasy about traditional America. I'm a historian of drugs in America. Traditional Americans used a ton of drugs. We've had a long series of addiction crises, starting right at the beginning of the country at what historians in my field call the Alcoholic Republic, right after the American Revolution. So it's important to recognize that using
drugs is very traditional in America. There is no drug free traditional America to return to.
Coming out the true cause of the epioid cross is in America. So Trump's story on the fentanyl crosses is one of wakeboarders and foreign traffickers, cattels and chemicals coming from Mexico and China. What does the real history of the fantanl crosses look like?
So the fentanyl crisis didn't start with a foreign trafficker, It started with an American pharmaceutical company.
Once you've found the right doctor and have told him or her about your pain, don't be afraid to take what they give you.
Often it will be an opioid medication.
Essentially, Starting in the nineteen nineties, the pharmaceutical industry was able to overcome the traditional market regulations that prevented a sales boom in medical opioids.
Doctors know many of those patients aren't really there for pain, but seeking a prescription for addiction, claiming a growing number of lives.
And so you had a dramatic increase in the amount of opioids just floating around in certain communities, and that made them really easy to get, and so a lot of people became addicted to them.
Over the first time, overdose deaths from prescription drugs outpace car crash fatalities in the United States.
When authorities recognized you know something is wrong here. We got to take action. They listened to pharmaceutical industry lobbyists who are saying, well, this isn't a problem with us, with this industry. The problem is the abusers. They are the problem. They're coming in and making bad use of our product. And so the first set of actions that the government took was to say, Okay, we got to
stop selling to these abusers. They're the problem. So imagine there's a generation of people walking out the pharmacy door having failed to buy their opioid, but they're still addicted. And so this brought in new suppliers, and the new suppliers first brought in heroin. But then this moment of disruption created an opportunity for innovators, for modernizers, and they said, what do we need farms and farmers and cutting open flowers with scalpels, like that's very twentieth century. This is
the twenty first century. Let's use a high tech product, a synthetic product. We can eliminate so many parts of the supply chain, which is super dangerous in an illegal context. And so you saw this switch defensanyl because it was good for the suppliers and the consumers didn't have a lot of choice.
We've heard a lot about this country's heroin epidemic, and for years, heroin dealers have been using another far more powerful drug to cut the heroin they sell. But now federal officials are expressing alarm that people are using that stronger drug, fentanyl alone, leading to overdoses and deaths.
And so our policies shifted those markets from pharmaceutical opioids to heroin and then defensanyl, and that means our policies could switch them back. You know, it's not as sexy as saying we're just going to blow all the bad guys, but it would be a big public health triumph.
What do you think when you heat politicians, blind foreign traffics in Tolka bat ending these three of military strokes on bouts, what's your reaction to that?
Well, we were just talking about large numbers of deaths. Every one of those deaths left people who loved that person with grief and fear for the other people and their families. And when you're afraid, you want a strong response. You want someone telling you that it's going to be okay because they're going to protect you. And so there's something very emotionally satisfying about saying, these foreign villains are doing this to you, and I'm going to get them
and you'll be safe. But it's also deeply depressing because it also just doesn't work, and we have a couple hundred year history of seeing how it makes things worse. You can win a battle or two, like, who knows, maybe we could stop this fens andal supply chain, but will it still be gone in two years. It's just historically speaking, incredibly unlikely. What we need is something we're not going to get, unfortunately, which is the political courage
to recognize that this is a pragmatic matter. What we have is a market for a product that's highly desirable and highly dangerous. The market has gone off the rails because we haven't regulated it, and as a result, we're seeing this kind of public health crisis, and we need to step in and do the real work of making people safer rather than beating our chest and going after foreign boogeymen.
So you calling for a pragmatic approach, David, History tells us what doesn't work. Does history point to us what does work?
Yeah, in a broad sense, it does. And I'll say that in general, we're pretty good at capitalism. We know how to build markets so that we incentivize the kind of behavior that we want. What has historically worked are moments where we have applied the tools we apply in the rest of capitalists to drugs. And in the broadest sense, this is you robustly regulate providers, manufacturers, sellers, and you make a deal with them. You say, you can make a lot of money selling this product, but to do that,
you've got to follow these rules. So think about automobile manufacturers have to do all these expensive things to make their cars, and they're not allowed to sell super cheap cars without anti lock breaks and airbags. You also got to recognize that life is imperfect. Hey, we have a lot of safety precautions, and there's still a lot of
automobile accidents. So any system that circulates a potentially dangerous product has got to have things in place to care for and support people when they're harmed to spital those protections. In the case of drugs, historically, what this has meant is providing treatment options that need to include access to the safest version of the drug that will keep that person going. One of the reasons why I don't think
this will be taken up by politicians. Is people as they have for the last two hundred year, will still be killed by drugs. I'm not promising a utopia or that we can go back to this imagined faeryland when everything is wonderful. I'm saying we're gonna honestly do the best that we can do, and it'll be better than what we're doing now.
Well, David, thank you so much for bringing it to my attention and for coming on seven am this morning.
Thank you for having me.
Also in the news, Anthony Alberes he knew about and approved Communication Minister Anika Wells's decision to spend almost one hundred thousand dollars on flies to New York for her and two colleagues. Anthony Alberanezi has told the ABC's Insiders program the flights were within the rules. Wells had planned to travel with the PM to sproute the social media ban at the UN but stayed back in Australia for longer to deal with the Optus triple zero out each.
She's now facing questions about other expenses she has claimed, including accommodation in Threadbath for her and her family who went skiing while she performed parliamentary duties. Wells has defended the expense, saying she doesn't write the rules, but she did follow them. And social media companies will blur pornographic and violent images from December twenty seven under new industry
drafted rules released by the E Safety Commissioner. The move is designed to protect children under eighteen from saying what the Commissioner describes as awful but lawful images. Adults who wish to view the material will be able to click through. The new rules also require social media platforms to redirect people looking up suicide, self harm, or eating disorders to mental health support services. I'm Daniel James. This is seven a m. Thanks for listening.