Joe Biden joins the war on drugs (On the wrong side)

Op-ed views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

Leave it to President Joe Biden to not only be late to a party, but to show up to the wrong party altogether. But that’s what his administration is doing when it comes to drugs. While his policies are invited every non-American with a desire to live here to march across our southern border and be embraced, even favored, by the federal government, they’ve also welcomed record illegal narcotics to walk in too. Meanwhile, the President has declared war on…legal, helpful pharmaceuticals. Joe Biden joined the drug war on the wrong side.

Fentanyl kills more Americans every year than died in the entire Vietnam war and it is pouring across the southern border. We employ Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents for the express purpose of stopping people from illegally flooding over the border, partially because controlling who enters our country is a big part of our sovereignty, but also because we want to prevent the influx of deadly recreational drugs into the country. Those are no longer priorities at the southern border.

The Biden administration’s open border policies have turned border security into border daycare – with agents being pulled off every other aspect of their job except paperwork to process illegal aliens and their asylum claims, setting court dates more than a decade away. This is absurd and obscene, but typical for a politician not interested in gaining operational control over the border.

There isn’t a function of the CPB that is not being curtailed or simply ignored completely to aid in the processing of illegals. Zero attempt is being made to stop the flow of illegals, just process as many as possible as quickly as possible.

Since the mass illegal flooding of the border happens in specific locations, places the drug cartels smuggling the illegals choose, that leaves most of the rest of the border open to mule drugs across. The number of agents patrolling those sectors are almost non-existent, leaving only state and local police to engage and hopefully stop the drugs.

But the Biden administration frowns on state and local governments involving themselves with border enforcement issues, going so far as to sue Texas to prevent their involvement. It’s hard to believe the administration in Washington actually cares about anything related to the border when the thing they move quickest on is against someone trying to defend the border, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, as illegal drugs flood into the country, the President has declared was on prescription drugs. Not because some of them can be abused too, but because he believes they cost too much.

Of course, the cost to manufacture a legal drugs is very low – pennies or fractions of pennies per pill. That’s an easy argument to make – that drugs are cheap to make – but it misses the point of how much it costs to bring a new drug to market. Focusing on the manufacturing cost is like only focusing on the tip of an iceberg, while ignoring the giant mass under the surface.

While making a pill is cheap, discovering what to put in that pill and how much is very expensive. Deloitte estimates the cost to be $2.3 billion. That money must be recouped before any profit is made, and that profit must be made if future research and development of new drugs is to take place.

That doesn’t seem to be a priority for this White House, they need an immediate victory. So they have launched a government “negotiation” for the cost of 10 prescription drugs in Medicare.

Buried in the Inflation Reduction Act was the authority for the administration to set prices for 10 drugs of their choosing in Medicare. It’s called negotiations, but if the companies don’t agree to the terms set by the Biden administration, the law allows the imposition of a 95 percent excise tax on the sale of the drugs, which gives the government all the leverage in the world. “Agree to our price or we’ll punish you” is not a negotiation.

Now, Biden is claiming the right to seize drug patents if he deems the price to be too high. This one-two punch is what you’d do if you wanted to kill innovation and prevent new treatments, not help people. But if the goal is to help yourself at the polls come November…

The Biden administration has jumped into the drug wars with both feet. Unfortunately, they landed on the neck of prescription drugs that help improve and prolong lives while enabling the illegal narcotics flooding across the southern border. They couldn’t have done worse if they tried.

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