A new study reveals America leads the world in overdoses, highest drug deaths out of 30 countries. Quiet Maine has higher average drug deaths than the Nation. Some may recall the “Opium Wars,” British pushing addiction for trade in 1800s China. We are now in a Third Opium War, right here.
A little history: Toward the end of China’s Qing (“Ching”) Dynasty, British merchants trafficked Indian opium to China, leading to a major addiction problem. When China resisted and Britain continued, two wars followed – the First (1839-42) and Second Opium Wars (1856-60).
The Qing Dynasty, outgunned, outmaneuvered, and remote lost both, as drug trafficking and addiction overwhelmed society and British, later French, leveraged trade advantages from China.
Fast forward to now. Not only are Chinese criminal operatives trafficking everything, fentanyl and precursors to marijuana, in America, pushing drug deaths past 100,000 annually, they are targeting – as the British and French did in China – rural, vulnerable, weakly policed states.
More to the point, the Chinese are joined, in states like Maine, Georgia, Virginia, and Oklahoma, by Mexicans, Dominicans, and other Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) groups.
From a high level, mortality data for 2022 show “the U.S. had the highest rate 324 overdose deaths per 1 million residents – that year,” 107.941 total overdose deaths, 32 deaths per 100,000.
Meantime, Maine – a state of 1.4 million run by a Democrat Governor, Democrat Attorney General, and Democrat legislature that all push drug legalization, needle giveaways, 20,000 units of Naloxone a month into schools – sees 54.3 deaths per 100,000, 40 to 70 dead kids per month.
The shock is, in Maine and other rural states, these numbers are a heart punch, avoidable. For every child dead of a drug overdose – fentanyl, heroin, meth, crack, cocaine – the family is torn apart. Parents, siblings, grandparents, cousins, and friends die a little, some a lot.
This reality describes where we are. The word that applies is war: war with drug traffickers, war with anti-law enforcement partisans, war with those who fail to understand the threat’s gravity. More than 180 years ago, China faced a killer of their population, opium.
Efforts by the Qing Dynasty to contain it, to fight back, to push against Britain and France, proved ineffective. Once addiction got its claws into the Chinese population, the claws were hard to dislodge – just as addiction is hard to break when it gets claws in an unsuspecting child.
The failure, which Qing Dynasty leaders understood too late, was not getting ahead of the traffickers, understanding that addiction is like a cancer, to the individual and to the Nation.
Today, we witness a kind of collective indifference – a learned paralysis, a sense that those addicted somehow are unimportant, are to blame, disposable children, that feeding their addiction until they hit bottom, perish, or both is somehow humane. It is not.
There are binary choices in life: up or down, life or die, not quietly accommodating addiction, and slow death because that is less harmful than sudden death, not tolerating drug traffickers.
Our moral, social, legal, and security obligations to ourselves, our neighbors, our communities, and our kids – in the United States and places like Maine – is to stop looking away from the threat and instead turn on it, confront it, and beat it.
At this moment, with a new administration and state elections in two years, Oregon to Maine, we have a chance to win, to save tens of thousands of kids who die if we do nothing. We can outsmart, outdistance, outlive this threat – or we can go the way of the Qing dynasty, within decades gone.
In short, will America be America or 1800s China? Will we beat drug traffickers, win this Third Opium War, or retreat, make excuses, and call premature death from addiction a new normal? Pray with me that we do the right thing because we can, we should, and we must.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).
RBC,
Congratulations on recognizing how President Xi and the Chinese Communist Party have been using fentanyl as a means to undermine and weaken the United States from within, as part of a larger, multi-faceted approach to overwhelm and potentially defeat the West entirely at some point. At least that is President Xi’s stated goal from the numerous white papers he has written over the years.
This is of course all very similar to the way that the British finally leveraged Opium in the 1800s to benefit the British Empire for economic and political gain. President Xi, from all documented accounts, is a big reader of history in order to try and do onto the West what was done onto China by the West. Since the British Empire is long gone, President Xi has chosen focused on the United States as it is the leader of the Western world.
As a student of world history myself, I couldn’t help but notice a few decades ago all the similarities between what the Chinese Communist party was doing with its interactions with respect to the West. Chiefly the United States, as the British Empire was long gone. How it was an inverse in so many ways to how the British Empire initially approached China long ago and gradually morphed the tactics of that led up the Opium Wars.
War on poverty gave us welfare dependency , out of wedlock children, failed schools, deteriorated neighborhoods,. addictions of all sorts, crime and kids roaming streets, mothers turning tricks for drugs, pimps and pushers lording over it all . Not once was this pointed out, addressed only more money thrown at the problem because it was poverty and racism behind it all. Only politicians and race baiters profited. God forbid someone should suggest to dismantle this show of horrors and introduce work related rewards .Now we are at the finale it would seem What started with the fanfare is ending with the funebre march .Democrat’s Grand opus
And the so-called Democrat party fully supports this war with their open border/sanctuary policies. Adding insult to injury, the Democrats support the mass slaughter of American unborn children, approximately 1.5 million per year. So does the American mass media. The whole lot should be charged with treason.
Under Reagan, 2000+ died each year. Racism and police are the new evil. George Floyd’s drug use is ignored.
Ive long considered this issue as a binary choice: we either execute dealers at any level and quickly, or legalize everything and try to manage it. Both are terrible choices and the American people wont stand for either so its back to crowing over occasional busts while 90% of the poison gets in. Choose your kids friends wisely.
Robert Charles is boring. As for our numerous problems with all the various drugs, legal and not, available to us, we hear an awful lot about the supply. We need to address the demand. No demand, no supply. Speaking from, unfortunately, experience.
Well America told the Queen to go take a jump a long time ago same with the French fry French . Now this has been going on for a long time and how are the nutjob’s ideas to counter this is working for America ?? The free needles , legalize dope for the dope heads talk to a counselor for a charge of course . The nutjobs for a profit offer no real solutions. And your statistics in this article are chilling . Watching the war movies on TV one side doesn’t let the other inflict casualties and then mend them up and everyone has a great talk and feel good moment that happens on Mash ! What are we doing to the Commie Chinese??
Mr.Charles knowledge of narrative driven propaganda appears limitless. Now it’s China that is responsible for the sad state of our society. If there were no demand for any of these drugs the supply would dry up naturally but instead we raise children using third party pseudo parents, aka, day care centers and when at home we entertain them with mind numbing socio propaganda spewing from televisions until they tire of that and retire to playing mind numbing video games…….when they can pry themselves away from mans newest leash the inapropriately named “Smartphone”.
So go ahead Bob,blame the Chinese or as you probably refer to them in private the “Gooks”, for yet another ill this dying nation is experiencing.