Comments At Arlington County Board Meeting, September 14, 2024.
Like illegal border crossings which rose from 400,000 in 2020 to 3.2 million in 2023, fentanyl overdose deaths are marching steadily up an asymptotic curve. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reported 73,000 deaths in 2022 due to synthetic opioids—primarily fentanyl.
To most people fentanyl and the open southern border through which it flows is an easily forgotten statistic. Occasionally the impact registers on ordinary citizens like the sixty something panhandler I recently encountered outside Walgreens.
Usually she is looking for bus fare to get to the doctor. But last Friday she was looking for bus fare to Philly, where her 5-year old grandson was left to die in the ICU of a local hospital. Police brought him there after a 911 call reported a child crying in an apartment building. There they found him him near death, having been beaten to a pulp by his drug abusing mother.
The child had bruises and broken bones all over his body. Yet according to the grandmother, her own son abandoned the child, because he too was strung out. Now she was in tears begging for bus fare to Philly to see the kid before he died, even as she herself was scheduled for major surgery the following week.
I gave the woman my loose change, and another bystander said he would give her the rest of the cash she needed to get to Philly.
While County Board has no jurisdiction over this matter, it can lobby Virginia’s senators to pass H.R. 2, an immigration bill with teeth passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2023, that will shut down the border and end the flow of fentanyl across it.