Imagine if you will, that the Wuhan Lab from which the Covid-19 pandemic originated due to their gain of function experiments on bat corona-viruses, actually intentionally produced, released and spread this virus throughout the world, killing over 5 million people world-wide, what would our response be? Would we not conduct a Nuremberg-like trial for the people behind this nefarious plan? Would all those responsible be facing the death penalty for knowingly and intentionally killing of millions of people, even though, the virus only has a 4% mortality rate even among the most vulnerable? Would any of these people be allowed to plea down to a lesser charge and be allowed to walk free in 6 months. Didn’t we try and hang every Nazi we could get our hands on after World War II ended? Didn’t we spend decades bringing to justice anybody who had any connection to any of the Nazi death camps, from prison guards to accountants. All were guilty, all had blood on their hands, all deserved the most extreme justice we could administer for the millions of deaths that they were connected to.
It strikes me as extremely incongruent that the people who produce, release and spread substances into this country, and into the rest of the world, who are directly responsible for the deaths of over 80,000 Americans, and over a million world-wide, the drug producers and drug dealers, who knowingly and willingly commit mass murder every year are not hunted down with the same righteous fervor that we hunted down the Nazis, and would hunt down any person connected to the intentional release of a deadly pathogen.
Why isn’t every member of the Sackler family, the owners of Purdue Pharmaceutical who continually lied about the safety of OxyContin which created the opioid epidemic, wearing an orange jumpsuit and sitting in a 6x8 jail cell right now? Yes, they paid 25% of the fortune they accumulated from their actions that killed millions of people, but they still walked away with over $12 billion from the deaths of Americans, and went back to their mansions and limousines. Every single one of them should be in jail for the remainder of their natural lives, and every cent of their fortune should have been confiscated. They willingly released a drug into the country that they knew would kill tens of thousands of people every year, and they did it anyway. But no, their children will grow up to become congressmen and senators, using the money they received for killing Americans to rise to power so they can rule over the next generation of Americans.
Right now, thanks to Joe Biden, Mexican drug cartels have set up shop along our nation’s southern border, and the flow of fentanyl, the most lethal drug of them all, into our country is at an all-time high. And our government, our elected leaders are doing nothing about it. In your lifetime, you will probably come across more people who will die of drug overdoses, than will die of Covid-19, and definitely more people under the age of 50. If we treated drugs with the same aggressiveness that we treat Covid-19, hundreds of thousands, if not millions more of our youth would be alive and thriving today. But we treat the guy on the corner not wearing a mask with more contempt than we treat the guy on the corner dealing deadly drugs.
People say that we lost the war on drugs, that it has been a colossal waste of time and money. That may be true, but its only true because we have fought the war on drugs the same way we have fought the other wars that we have lost, Vietnam and Afghanistan. You cannot win a war if you put being politically correct ahead of winning.
We know where most of the poppy fields are around the world right now. We should send our B-2 bombers to incinerate ever poppy field in the world that we know about, and when they replant, do it again, and again, and again, until they get the message. That would be a use of our military superiority that would actually save American lives, and the lives of people from every country. One may argue, that is a violation of the national sovereignty of these other countries. True, but imagine if those same fields were producing Anthrax to be released in the United States to kill tens of thousands. Those fields would be incinerated within 48 hours of us discovering them, and we would not have one ounce of concern about that country’s national sovereignty.
Every drug producer, drug dealer, drug pusher who is caught should spend the remainder of their natural lives in a prison cell with zero chance for ever seeing the light of day again. Until we take this problem with the seriousness it deserves, victory in this war will forever elude us.
We are staring at one of the most deadly and horrific epidemics in our nation’s history, and we are doing very little about it. The drug epidemic has killed more Americans than Covid-19, international terrorism, climate change, and all of our wars combined. But many people, especially those in power who could actually do something, do not give it a second thought as our families, our communities and our country are being torn apart by one of the most preventable threats we have ever faced.
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Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.