Tim Scott: Fentanyl epidemic requires prioritizing mental healthcare, not just border
Anna Giaritelli
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2024 Republican presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) is pitching voters on his belief that the fentanyl epidemic is a symptom of the mental health crisis in the United States and said addressing the underlying cause of people turning to fentanyl was as important as addressing the flow of drugs into the country.
“One of the unfortunate realities that we’re facing as a nation that we haven’t dealt with is that we’re in the midst of a mental health crisis in a way that we don’t fully embrace,” Scott said during a round-table discussion with city and county leaders. “During the pandemic, we saw a 30% or 31% increase in parents bringing their young kids to the ER because of a mental health breakdown, and that is a symptom to a much bigger problem that we, as a nation, we’ve got to become really honest about it.”
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Scott said 100,000 drug-related overdoses in 2021 and “skyrocketing” suicide rates were both “symptoms” of how children and adults were turning to substances to cope.
Communities such as Yuma, Arizona, a remote city of 90,000 residents, were affected by the illegal importation of fentanyl 17 times more than towns and cities not on the southern border, one official at the briefing told Scott.
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Scott said he would rely on local and state officials who work in these areas every day to inform his actions as president.
“We have some real issues that we need to wrestle with as a community, and I would benefit from healthcare experts from around the country who have ideas and thoughts about [them] that would be really important for us to capitalize and maximize some of our responses,” Scott said.
On the eve of his first border trip, Scott published an op-ed in the New York Post that listed the more than a dozen actions he would take to address immigration and border systems, putting a heavy emphasis on how serious the fentanyl crisis has become.
“Every time I visit Iowa — where overdose deaths among those under 25 have more than doubled just since 2019 — I am in a border county. Every time I visit New Hampshire — which has the nation’s fastest-rising overdose-death rate — I am in a border county,” Scott wrote. “Every time I’m back in South Carolina, speaking with grieving parents — like my friend Alan Shao, the former dean of the College of Charleston business school who lost his 27-year-old son and namesake to fentanyl — I am in a border county.”
He continued: “We lose more Americans to this one illegal drug every 10 months than we lost in the entire Vietnam War.”
Scott promised to restart and finish border wall system projects that President Joe Biden canceled, crack down on drug smuggling and human smuggling by way of vehicles at the ports of entry, cancel plans to hire 87,000 more Internal Revenue Services employees, and instead boost Border Patrol and immigration enforcement to the same number.
The public health pandemic policy Title 42 that allowed Border Patrol agents to turn away illegal immigrants at the border rather than take people into custody would be restarted until a Scott administration gained control of the fentanyl emergency.
“I will delete the Biden administration’s new smartphone app that provides concierge service to illegal immigrants, end catch-and-release and hire 1,000 new immigration judges so we can stop releasing people into our heartland with a polite invitation to a hearing often multiple years away,” said Scott.
Whereas the Biden and Obama administrations have introduced policies to prioritize the worst of criminal illegal immigrants for deportation, Scott would make all criminal illegal immigrants a priority for arrest and removal.
“If you’ve broken the law to get here and you break our laws again, the day your prison sentence ends, you aren’t going free on American soil — you’re going back where you came from,” Scott wrote.
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Drug cartels would be targeted and face having their financial assets frozen, bank accounts sanctioned, and supply chains crippled.
“The far left says caring about the border is racist. Every single American deserves safe streets, drug-free neighborhoods and secure borders,” Scott said. “And when I’m in the White House, they’ll get them.”
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