Congrats to Rep. Randy Feenstra and Sen. Chuck Grassley for supporting the bipartisan Rural Opioid Abuse Prevention Act, signed into law by President Biden last December.
“Rural Americans” they wrote in their recent editorial, “need real solutions to the opioid epidemic.”
After explaining how the act will equip healthcare workers treat addiction, support first responders to save lives and help the most vulnerable, they go on to say “we must also ... secure our wide-open border, which welcomes and facilitates the drug trade into our country and down our main streets.”
Rural Americans also need the real truth about how illicit drugs enter the U.S.
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection statistics, over 90 % of illicit drugs enter the U.S. through legal ports of entry and the U.S. mail, not the wide swaths of border in between where additional barriers could be erected. This corroborates with intelligence received from arrested smugglers and law enforcement partners in Mexico. Cartels clearly prefer moving high-profit narcotics through the busy ports of entry because their chances of success are better there.
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Join me in asking our elected officials to invest taxpayer dollars where it will get the biggest bang for the buck. Go after fentanyl and other illegal drugs in the ports, not the desert. Quadruple the number of trucks and vehicles examined daily. Save lives. -- Jane Shuttleworth, Iowa City
