The NPR Politics Podcast - New Culture War Cudgel: GOP Ads Blame Opioid Crisis On Migrants

Episode Date: October 17, 2022

Addiction deaths remain a major problem in the U.S. as the public health focus has shifted to COVID-19. But as midterm voting continues, Republican candidates have spent millions trying to link migrants with crime and opioid smuggling.This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, addiction correspondent Brian Mann, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.Learn more about upcoming live shows of The NPR Politics Podcast at nprpresents.org.Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey Atlanta, it's Asma Khalid from the NPR Politics Podcast. We are going to be live on stage doing our show Thursday, October 20th at 8 p.m. at the Buckhead Theater. And we'd love for you to be there. Ticket info is at nprpresents.org. Thanks to our partners, Georgia Public Broadcasting, WABE, and WCLK Jazz. See you there. Hi, this is Sue from Denver. Recently, I was driving, getting directions from my map app and listening to the NPR Politics podcast at the same time, when I realized that the female voice telling me which turns to make sounded just like Tamara Keith, which made me wonder, Tamara, is lending your voice to the map apps your side gig? This podcast was recorded at 1 15 p.m. on Monday, the 17th of October.

Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I'll still be taking directions from Tam. Okay, here's the show. That's a hard no. That is a hard no. This is not a good idea. Plus, if you're listening to the podcast and the maps will be like, went left, went too far to the right. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And we've got Brian Mann here with us. Brian covers addiction with NPR's National Desk. Hey, Brian. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me on.

We wanted to bring you here because the politics around drugs and drug policy are really heating up as the midterms get closer. So Brian, you've been covering this issue for a long time. Opioids are clearly still an issue here in the US. So 107,000 Americans died last year from drug overdoses. There's a new study that came out earlier this year that found that about 1.2 million more Americans are likely to die from drug overdoses by the end of this decade. And a lot of them are young in their 20s and 30s. So it's pretty brutal. And efforts to stop fentanyl from flooding into the U.S. unraveled during the Trump administration. The Biden administration has not had much success stopping the Mexican cartels. So as we head into these midterms, this is really, truly a scary, deadly mess.

You know, I covered the presidential campaign in 2016 and in particular did several stories about how opioids were this important issue that candidates were talking about. They were offering solutions. They were really trying to reach voters on this. It feels like it's coming up very differently now in the campaigns. Yeah, this is super different. I mean, in 2016, it was a public health issue that we were hearing about. This time, what Republicans in some really close races, Ohio, Pennsylvania, what we're seeing them is using fentanyl and the crisis here as an attack line, linking it to undocumented immigration, what they're describing as soft crime policies by Democrats. Here's an ad that was fired off by Republican Mehmet Oz's campaign in Pennsylvania. He's attacking Democrat John Fetterman here. John Fetterman supports decriminalizing dangerous drugs like fentanyl and heroin. And Fetterman supports creating heroin injection sites in our neighborhoods. Fetterman's ideas are radical, deadly and wrong. So really, you know, kind of a be afraid narrative here that drugs are just part of this scary, unraveling, and kind of dangerous cultural crisis out there.

And as you mentioned, this is all across conservative media. It's a pretty noisy narrative. This really is aimed at white working class voters as a way to try to fire them up to vote and to take sort of the responsibility off of them and place blame on another one of the culture issues that Republicans have used for so long, which is immigration. drugs are coming in with migrants who are in the United States illegally, as opposed to how the drugs have been coming across the border to regular ports of entry that we've seen throughout the years and have reported on. Brian, just a quick fact check. How reality based is this messaging? You know, there is this really interesting policy divide between many Democrats and many Republicans. You know, John Fetterman has embraced what are called harm reduction methods, where, you know, you give people clean needles. You talk about opening injection sites where people might be able to use drugs under some kind of medical

supervision. These are things that actually have a lot of support in the public health community, but they're very controversial and they sound really scary when they're rolled into an ad. So, you know, behind kind of the attack ad vibe that we're hearing there, there is a growing policy difference kind of on the Republican side, more drug war era criminalization, and on the Democratic side, a lean more toward drug treatment and public health policies. So, you know, there is some sort of reality underneath these ads. Right. And Domenico, as I've reported, ad spending, political ad spending has really focused in on the Republican side heading into the midterms on this idea that Democrats are soft on crime. And this gets wrapped up in that

that ad spending is tripled from August to September on this crime issue. But how salient is this as an issue? Are they spending the money because it's effective? They need to be able to drive out big portions of their base. And to do that in a midterm election, you know, it takes an issue or two that can really connect with people. And they're conflating a lot of different things. But immigration and crime are salient issues with the Republican base. And a lot of the talk of crime, not necessarily about fentanyl specifically, but a lot of the talk about crime throughout the country that Republicans are using is an effort to offset Democrats' perceived advantage with suburban white women because of the increased enthusiasm after the Dob August found a lot of Americans now do believe that fentanyl is being carried into the U.S. by undocumented migrants. This is not accurate.

You know, that's not how it's coming into the country. But when these ads and these narratives on conservative media go over and over again, that link is successfully being made in the minds of many voters. Brian, this is also coming up in the Ohio Senate race, and you've covered some of that. Yeah, J.D. Vance is the Republican candidate there. And of course, he wrote a really big book about the opioid crisis, Hillbilly Elegy, which was controversial. And he's pivoted really radically now to talking about fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction. He suggested in one interview that the Biden administration might actually be allowing fentanyl into the country deliberately to kill conservative voters,

which of course is, you know, there's no evidence to support any of that. His Democratic opponent, Tim Ryan, has pushed back in their debate. He said this is an example of J.D. Vance being sort of radicalized and being on the extreme that he would even embrace that kind of narrative about the opioid crisis. But there again, that fear narrative in that very, very close race, it could wind up being a factor. All right. Well, we are going to take a quick break. And when we get back, what is the Biden administration's approach to the opioid crisis? And we're back. And I want to start quickly with how Democrats are responding to some of these attack ads. I know that in many

cases, Democrats were expecting to be hit as being soft on crime. So they have gone out and they have found validators, people in uniform who will speak straight to camera and say, this Democrat is great on crime or this Democrat wants to fund the police. Brian, what are you seeing in your reporting about how they're responding to it, even more specifically on the drug angle? I think it's very similar. You know, Democrats are really struggling to make sure that voters think that they are also tough on drugs, that they're interested in making fentanyl really, really illegal, even more illegal than it already is. So, you know, there is sort of a game of catch up here. They do not want to appear soft on an issue that is really scary for many voters. I think there is

still more of a focus on public health, on getting dollars for treatment and for housing and all of those things. But I think this is a scary political sort of zone for many Democrats. They either just don't want to talk about it, or they're trying to sound, you know, as tough as the Republican. Let's talk about policy for a minute. The Trump administration made a big deal out of focusing on opioids early on declaring a public health emergency. The Biden administration is also facing this issue. And as you have said, there's a huge crisis of people dying from overdoses. Has the Biden administration had any sort of wins on drug policy? You know, the short answer is not really.

The opioid crisis, the fentanyl crisis, these are really tough public health emergencies, right? And so nobody's figured out how to remove the needle. During the first two years of Biden's time in office, we've seen opioid and other drug deaths spike higher and higher. It did coincide with the pandemic, which was absolutely terrible for opioid deaths. That's right. And it also coincided with the spread of fentanyl. It's basically everywhere now. And that's happened. So, you know, the White House has tried to respond. They're pushing for a big $3.2 billion increase in funding for drug treatment, for housing for people recovering from addiction. There's a new effort underway by the Drug

Enforcement Administration to try to target the money and the financing of the Mexican drug cartels. But again, this is a brutally difficult problem to crack. You know, addiction has been around for a long time and drug smuggling gets easier and easier. Fentanyl is a really easy drug to make and to smuggle. And so, so far, nobody's figured out how to solve that. And this has become a big political problem. It was a political problem for the Trump administration. And it's one, you know, President Biden and the Democrats inherited, and they just haven't found a fix.

Well, you know, when Biden ran for president in 2020, he ran on a host of different things that he bullet pointed about how to try to curb some of this. And number one on that list was protecting Obamacare, because it, you know, had a lot in it for how to get treatment, for example, which is so healthcare, which is something Democrats have talked about for a long time, has been sort of the top priority on that. But he did mention, you know, trying to stem the flow of illicit drugs, like fentanyl and heroin, you know, reforming the criminal justice system, you know, and holding big pharmaceutical companies accountable, for example, which we've seen somewhat of an effort on in other circles.

But really, Congress has become kind of divided on this, with, as you mentioned, some Republicans pushing to, you know, for stricicter penalties for something like fentanyl and Democrats really focusing on treatment. Well, and I do think it is interesting that the president recently made an announcement about marijuana, obviously a very different drug, but moving to potentially reducing penalties or making it less severe in the eyes of the law federally. And yet the president hasn't really leaned into that, even though politically it could be quite popular. And I wonder if part of that is because of the other conversations, because of the

conversations about opioids and fentanyl, whereas you say that the drug war rhetoric has made a really strong comeback. You know, there's a ton of really convincing research that decriminalization of drug use is a good approach to the public health crisis, that sending people to prison doesn't help a whole lot. It doesn't help communities very much. It certainly doesn't help individuals very much. So the research there is pretty strong. Unfortunately, it is still super controversial. When you talk to average people, they still are scared of addiction. They're scared of drugs. There's a huge stigma around it. And there's a stigma even around treatment. And of course, you know, with marijuana, you know, one of the things that we've seen is

that young voters and black voters have been least likely to say that they're definitely going to vote this fall. And this is part of the effort to appeal to them, including student loans and that initiative that the White House had taken. So when you see who's rolling out what and how, you always have to figure who are they trying to appeal to. And clearly, we're seeing the difference in those two things with opioid abuse versus marijuana. All right, we're going to have to leave it there for today. Brian Mann covers addiction for NPR. Thanks for being with us. Thanks, Tam. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And thank you

for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.