The New Yorker:

New research suggests that the Democrats’ struggles in communities battling fentanyl addiction had little to do with economic theory or messaging—it was, more simply, a failure of political attention.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

More than any drug since crack, the stories of fentanyl’s spread through the United States brush up against the edge of myth. It is a substance so concentrated that tiny amounts are said to be enough to get vast populations high: a saltshaker’s worth supplies a whole neighborhood; two truckloads keep a country of three hundred and thirty million stocked for a year. In the eighties, stories of the crack trade sometimes followed the historic maps of Black migration. The Chambers brothers, for instance, reportedly employed family members from the Arkansas Delta to conduct distribution operations in high-rise housing projects in Detroit, in conditions that we might now call human trafficking. Such stories were easily exploited by politicians interested in racial demonization, similar to the ways in which fentanyl trafficking is now used to stigmatize migrants crossing the Rio Grande.

Like many accounts of illegal activity, these stories, which tend to be sourced from law enforcement, are memorable in a tabloid-noir way, and probably directionally true, but also hard to verify. In the case of fentanyl, they have had a particular resonance for U.S. politicians, who are seeking to make sense of the country’s political turmoil, which might seem out of step with its broadly stable and prosperous society. The fentanyl epidemic suggests that maybe things aren’t really so good here—that instability, violence, and suffering are just below the surface, even though unemployment is under four per cent. It isn’t just Republicans, or cable-news hosts, who have made this an emphasis. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a talented young moderate Democratic congresswoman from rural Washington State, has said that forty per cent of infants delivered in one of the largest hospitals in her district are born to at least one parent who is addicted to fentanyl.

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