NY Post Editorial Board: The End of Title 42 Will Increase Soaring Fentanyl Deaths

President Biden’s border insanity isn’t just killing migrants and US law enforcement officers; it’s killing kids and destroying families via the massive inflow of drugs the White House has invited. 

Title 42 — a Trump-era rule and one of the few brakes on our current massive migrant inflows — will expire this week. That’s going to supercharge illegal migration, and with it the deadly movement of fentanyl over our southern border. 

The White House silence on this issue is deafening. Last week, a group of Republican lawmakers sent a blistering letter to the president demanding a meeting on the fentanyl crisis. The letter, signed by Jim Banks (R-Ind.), Chip Roy (R-Texas) and others, highlights the appalling fact that Biden has been playing dumb on a previous request sent in October (doubtless to avoid bad press before the midterms) and that more than an estimated 7,500 Americans have died from fentanyl-related causes in the intervening weeks. 

Nothing from Biden. But what else can you expect? Our president smiles vacantly and scoffs “there are more important things going on” when asked by a reporter about the border nightmare.

Our open border is an open invitation to sophisticated, violent and vast Mexican cartels. For over a decade, these syndicates have been shifting their production and distribution efforts from cocaine and heroin to synthetic drugs: meth and fentanyl. 

Those drugs are much easier to overdose on and far more addictive, and their flood into our country is clearly responsible for the brain-shattering increase in drug deaths. In 2007, the nation saw 27,000 ODs. Last year? 107,000, per CDC data. Of those, the agency estimates around 71,000 were fentanyl-involved.

And it’s not only ODs these drugs are supercharging. As Sam Quinones — a journalist who’s helped spearhead the investigation into our opioid epidemic — has noted, the increasingly ultra-pure forms of both poisons are a huge driver of the homelessness epidemic in blue-state cities. The drugs are so potent, in other words, that users would rather live in the open as long as they can continue to get their fix. 

These terrible problems have engendered, within the cities they afflict, equally terrible solutions: de facto decriminalization, so-called “safe” injection sites and pseudo-treatment programs run by woke non-profits. 

No, no and no. Arrest dealers, get users real help and clean up the streets (as Mayor Eric Adams is trying to do in New York). 

But until real action is taken on the border, even the bravest mayors and governors are going to be fighting a rearguard action. Biden needs to wake up to this crisis, before another 100,000 die. 

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