BUCK: Want to address opioid overdoses in this country? One of the biggest ways to do harm reduction would be securing our southern border to the greatest extent possible.

Psaki says the numerous reports about crack pipes being distributed in kits are inaccurate and were never included in the kits pic.twitter.com/AA0oxftSq7

— Acyn (@Acyn) February 9, 2022

Welcome back to Clay and Buck. The White House now drilling down on the issue of opioid overdoses. Two-out-of-three overdose deaths last year were from opioids; over 100,000 Americans died. Now there’s been a commission, U.S. Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking. They just published a report yesterday that you had a million people, a million Americans died from opioid overdose from 1999 to present.

And the numbers keep going up year over year in recent years, such that we actually have reductions in average American life expectancy for people in the midrange of life, let’s say 25 to 50 or so — and below 20, 18 to 50 — because of the massive increases in the amount of people who are dying from this. Now, she’s correct on some points. An absolutely essential cause, Clay, to stop the scourge of opioid overdoses in this country is a national emergency.

This is a true emergency. This isn’t climate change, “Oh, in 50 years or a hundred years we think…” This is right now. This is people listening to this who have lost loved ones — have lost family members, friends, colleagues, coaches, teammates, you name it — to drug overdoses. Two out of three of these overdoses are opioids, and here’s the part of it that they are not going to focus on.

This is coming across our border from Mexican drug cartels. The Mexican drug cartels use the human trafficking flow to bog down the Border Patrol members so that there are processing: Bringing sandwiches and water and doing covid testing — or not doing covid testing as the case may be. They’re bringing “people resources,” and that means that the border is then wide open and the cartels…

I’ve seen this in real time. They’ll just run a pickup truck or they’ll run people on foot where they know there’s not gonna be any coverage because there’s such a huge human trafficking flow. And then there’s also the China component of this which I’ll get into in a moment. But, Clay, if they’re going to be serious about dealing with the drug overdoses scourge in this country, they have to look at the porous border and make changes, and they won’t. So they’re identifying a problem but once again the Democrats aren’t serious about the solution. Giving out crack pipes is not gonna do it.

CLAY: Well, it’s unfortunate, there’s no doubt, and also I think this is directly connected not only with the border but with the shutdown and lockdown policy. ‘Cause there’s no surprise that the overall number of opioid deaths skyrocketed when suddenly you weren’t allowing people to be surrounded by their support structures, whether it’s going to addict meetings, whether it’s going to church, whether it’s being able to interact with their friends and family — and this is an important detail.

As we have set a high… I mean, that’s a crazy, unbelievable, awful number, Buck: A million people since 1999. We also have to think about years of life that are lost, and this is something that I’ve continued to hammer throughout the course of all of this covid madness. The average person who is dying of covid — or with covid, more accurately — is typically older than the average age of death in the United States.

That is, it’s awful, but the people who are dying with covid are approaching the age at which most people die of all causes. When somebody in their twenties or thirties or forties dies, Buck, they are losing 40 years or 50 years or sometimes 60 years of life, and this is why — and everybody out there understands it. It’s why when you go to a funeral for someone who is younger, that has died, it is such an awful feeling compared to when you go to a funeral for someone who’s 85 or 90 and it’s a celebration of their life.

What we are doing is destroying young people’s lives by not protecting our border, by not fighting against all of these — all these drugs that are coming in and then by not allowing people to live their normal life, we have stacked up tens of thousands of additional deaths that would otherwise not have occurred if we had never done lockdowns.