During Wednesday night's Republican presidential debate, Vivek Ramaswamy described a meeting with the parents of Sebastian Kidd, an Iowa teenager who died in July 2021 after consuming fentanyl disguised as Percocet that he "bought…on Snapchat." As is often the case with Ramaswamy's comments, his take on Sebastian's death was a mixture of sense and nonsense.
The sense was Ramaswamy's recognition that substance abuse cannot be explained in purely pharmacological terms. The nonsense was his reflexive endorsement of the war on drugs, which is responsible for the circumstances that led to Sebastian's death.
"It is our job to make sure that never happens," Ramaswamy said. "But it's also our job to make sure that 17-year-olds don't turn to Percocet via Snapchat. We have to bring back mental health care in this country, not with pumping pharmaceuticals, but [with] faith-based approaches that restore purpose and meaning in the next generation of Americans."
Although Sebastian was "great on the outside," his father, Deric Kidd, told the CBS affiliate in Des Moines, he "went through a lot throughout his life, a lot of loss [and] a lot of pain….You saw the smiles and the laughter, and it was a joy to be around him. But I think he was trying to internalize a lot of things that he went through."
When it comes to troubled teenagers (or adults), Ramaswamy is right to emphasize the importance of "purpose and meaning," the absence of which contributes to unhealthy relationships with drugs. Contrary to his implication, religion is just one source of purpose and meaning, which also can be found through secular pursuits and interpersonal connections. But even a well-adjusted teenager who wanted to try Percocet simply out of curiosity could have met the same fate as Sebastian.
Instead of Percocet, a combination of acetaminophen and oxycodone in doses ranging from 2.5 to 10 milligrams, Sebastian got an unknown amount of fentanyl, a much more potent opioid. Before going to bed one night, according to his parents, he swallowed half a tablet, which proved to be a lethal dose.
The hazard that killed Sebastian is a familiar feature of the black market created by drug prohibition: Consumers do not know what they are getting. Unlike prescription analgesics or a bottle of liquor, illegal drugs are highly variable and unpredictable. In recent years, that danger has been compounded by the proliferation of illicit fentanyl, which nowadays shows up not only in powder sold as heroin but also in stimulants such as cocaine and methamphetamine. It is also pressed into tablets that resemble pain pills.
This development was driven by the economic incentives that prohibition creates. As a synthetic drug that does not require cultivation of opium poppies, fentanyl can be produced much more cheaply and discreetly than heroin. And because it is much more potent, it is easier to smuggle, allowing traffickers to pack many doses in small packages that are hard to detect.
Thanks to the spread of fentanyl, which made potency even harder to predict, illegal drugs are a bigger crap shoot than ever before, as reflected in record numbers of drug-related deaths. The government made that situation worse by restricting the supply of prescription opioids, which left bona fide pain patients to suffer needlessly while driving nonmedical users toward much more dangerous substitutes.
Unsurprisingly, Ramaswamy did not mention any of this, because it would implicate policies he supports in tragedies like Sebastian Kidd's death. When Univision's Ilia Calderon, one of the debate moderators, asked how he would "stop fentanyl brought into the country, mostly by U.S. citizens through ports of entry," Ramaswamy said the answer was to double down on a strategy that has failed for a century.
"We do have to seal that southern border," he said. "Building the wall is not enough. They're building cartel-financed tunnels underneath that wall. Semitrucks can drive through them. We have to use our own military to seal the Swiss cheese of a southern border."
The adaptiveness that Ramaswamy describes has always doomed efforts to "stop the flow" of illegal drugs, and it always will. Prohibition sows the seeds of its own failure by enabling traffickers to earn a hefty "risk premium," a powerful incentive that drives them to find ways around any roadblocks (literal or figurative) that drug warriors manage to create. Since the government cannot even keep drugs out of prisons, "seal[ing] that southern border"—a 2,000-mile stretch that can be crossed in myriad ways—may be a bit harder than Ramaswamy suggests.
As Calderon noted, "90 percent of fentanyl is seized at official border crossings, and 57 percent of the smugglers are U.S. citizens." Even if the government could create an impregnable barrier elsewhere, it could not monitor traffic through ports of entry intensively enough to make a serious dent in the fentanyl supply without imposing huge economic costs by disrupting trade and travel. And even if it accomplished that impossible feat, traffickers have alternatives, including water routes, the 5,500-mile border with Canada, and the mail, through which commercially viable quantities of fentanyl can be shipped in small packages, only a tiny fraction of which can be intercepted.
"US government agencies have made considerable efforts to interdict fentanyl and its precursors from entering the US market, but the combination of its small size and high value makes this difficult," Roger Bate notes in a 2018 American Enterprise Institute report. "Mexican gangs and Chinese criminal enterprises find it easy to hide the products through a variety of transit methods."
Even if the U.S. government "managed to stop 100 percent of direct sales to the US, enterprising dealers will simply sell into nations such as the UK, repackage the product, and then resell it into the US," Bate writes. "Intercepting all packages from the UK and other EU nations to the US will not be possible." Furthermore, "whether or not drugs are available to the general public via the mail, drug dealers have domestic production and overland and sea routes and other courier services that deliver the product to the US."
Ramaswamy did not address any of these daunting challenges. But in addition to embracing the ever-appealing fantasy of stopping drug use through border control, he proposed a retail-level intervention. "If you're 16 years old or under," he said, "you should not be using an addictive social media product" like Snapchat.
Never mind that the age restriction Ramaswamy imagines would not have affected Sebastian Kidd, whose death he cited to justify the policy. And never mind that highly motivated teenagers would find ways to evade social-media age limits. Since any technology that facilitates communication can be used to arrange drug purchases, Ramaswamy's proposal is a pitifully inadequate solution to the problem he is describing.
"Why did [Sebastian] die?" Ramaswamy asked. "Because [the pill] was laced with fentanyl. That is closer to bio-terrorism, not a drug overdose. That is poisoning."
Ramaswamy wants us to know he is outraged by the dishonest practices of illegal drug dealers. But like nearly every politician of both major parties, he gives no thought to the policies that invite such potentially lethal fraud, because he is too busy promoting them.
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