Exclusive | Kamala Harris and Donald Trump must focus on fentanyl crisis, experts plea

LAS VEGAS — Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump must make fighting fentanyl a priority, recovery experts and swing-state law-enforcement officials tell The Post. 

Close to 300 Americans are daily fatalities from illegal doses of the opioid, federal officials said in May. The synthetic painkillers — almost always originating in China — have flooded across the country’s southern border in recent years.

Wednesday was National Fentanyl Prevention and Awareness Day, established to call attention to the crisis.

Swing states, including North Carolina, Michigan, Virginia and Arizona, each had more than 1,000 fentanyl-related deaths in 2023, an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention drug-death data shows. 

The influx of opioids has “shot out of the roof” according to Washington County, Va., Sheriff Blake Andis, who’s backing Republican Hung Cao for the US Senate this year.

“Especially since the Biden administration and open borders, we saw the increase in overdoses on the fentanyl, methamphetamine just hitting the streets,” Andis told The Post. “And the methamphetamine is so plentiful now that the street value it’s decreased, you can buy kilos for what we used to buy ounces for.”

Although March CDC figures show declines in fentanyl-related deaths versus the same month last year, some states have posted a year-over-year increase, like Nevada, where they’re up 23.27%.

The issue of open borders is a factor in the fentanyl crisis, Republicans say, while the Democratic Party’s 2024 platform — whose “final” version still refers to President Biden as nominee — touts his administration’s anti-drug efforts, promising more and better in a “second” Biden term.

Hannah Muldavin, a Democratic National Committee senior spokeswoman, told The Post via email the platform was passed before Biden dropped out of the race. She said the document “offers a vision for a progressive agenda that we can build on as a nation.”

The GOP platform calls for greater border security overall and a US Navy “blockade on the waters of our region” to interdict fentanyl arriving by ship.

DNC spokeswoman Muldavin said Harris has offered “many remarks she’s made about securing our border and the successful actions the administration has taken to curb the fentanyl coming into the country.”

One antidrug group brought fentanyl issues to Democratic National Convention delegates this week with digital billboards in Chicago proclaiming the synthetic opioid drug is “a weapon of mass destruction.”

Jim Rauth, founder of Families Against Fentanyl, based in Akron, Ohio, told The Post, “Thousands of American families all across the country are living an absolute nightmare because their loved one was poisoned by illicit fentanyl slipped into pills or street drugs. And yes — many of us live in swing states.”

“Families like mine are looking for our leaders to treat this like the top crisis facing our country, because it is,” he added.

Dr. Marc Siegel, a noted New York physician and professor at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, told The Post that much more is needed from the government to stop fentanyl from flooding in.

“Our open borders are helping to breed the next generation of opioid addicts, and many are dying. A national awareness day like this is very important but not enough. The DEA is overwhelmed as are the Customs and Border Protection agents. We need an all-hands-on-deck approach,” Siegel, an internal-medicine specialist, said.

“We are in a deepening hole with fentanyl. Originally conceived as a long-acting treatment for cancer and terminal pain,” he said, “(fentanyl patch) “it has transformed into an extremely powerful killer that is frequently laced with other drugs. The poppy fields in Mexico are drying up, replaced by 10-foot labs that make fentanyl.”

Livingston County, Mich., detective Dale LaBombard said the opioid problem is unrelenting.

“I essentially work narcotics out there; I’m assigned to it,” he told The Post. “The whole opioid problem has risen out there over the last few years like crazy. We’re seeing more and more fentanyl, carfentanil, xylazine.”

Former Rep. Mike Rogers — the Republican US Senate candidate in Michigan — also said the open-border situation that’s resulted in “10 million illegal immigrants dashing into this country” is related to the drug crisis.

“In Michigan, we have an organized-crime drug cartel operating in southeast Michigan, thanks to Democrat policy,” he told The Post.

A Wisconsin law-enforcement leader said his area is also feeling the sting of synthetic opioids.

“The border crisis impacts the entire country because of fentanyl and illegal immigration,” Republican Dodge County Sheriff Dale Schmidt told The Post while attending J.D. Vance’s press conference in Milwaukee last week.

“We have an unprecedented amount of people dying from fentanyl,” Schmidt said with exasperation.

“[It] comes pouring across the border in unbelievable amounts,” he continued. Dodge County had the third-highest rate of fentanyl deaths in the state in 2021. 

Schmidt’s low-population county has had 38 fentanyl-related deaths in a year.

“I can’t build a wall around Dodge County,” the sheriff quipped.

Outside swing states, of course, the opioid crisis is striking communities as well. New Jersey state Sen. Holly Schepisi, a Republican, said “most of these lethal pills are flooding into the US across the southern border exacerbated by the failures of the Biden-Harris administration to control the border.”

Addiction counselor Scott H. Silverman of San Diego issued a call for both Harris and Trump to focus more on the opioid situation.

“The chemicals used to make synthetic fentanyl are pouring across our border and getting into communities across the country,” he told The Post. “Therefore, on behalf of the American people, I am demanding both presidential candidates make this a priority and outline how they will work to stop this crisis.”

Silverman, author of “The Opioid Epidemic,” said his optimism is tempered by his work with politicians.

“I would say that my experience with legislative leaders is they do the minimum they have to do, and once that’s in place, they feel like they’re doing all they need to do,” he said.

Silverman said government should “approach what’s going on with the opioid crisis with very similar tools, which are familiar to the federal government that we used with COVID: real-time data, education, prevention, putting resources where the greatest need is.”

— Additional reporting by Victoria Churchill, George Caldwell, Anthony Miragliotta, Amy Sikma and Kelly Jane Torrance.