‘Whole Society Approach’ to Opioid Awareness Under Trump Former US Border Patrol Agent

New data reveals the United States continue to see a decline in annual opioid overdose deaths through the most of 2025. It comes after years of rising deaths since the 90s. Deaths had peaked around 111,000 in 2023 and then plummeted to around 80,000 in 2024. Joining us to discuss this is Edmund Blair, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He specializes in border security and immigration policy with over two decades of experience as a U.S. border patrol agent and U.S. Army officer. Edmund, always great to have you on the show. I mean, it's quite remarkable and positive news that U.S. overdose deaths fell dramatically through the most of last year. What do you think contributed to this? Yeah, great question. And again, thank you for having me. One, of course, the Trump administration is making fentanyl a top priority, making that drug coming from Mexico and other countries and the precursor chemicals from China as a number one threat, as a chemical weapon used on our population. So that's one of them. The next one is also the prolific amount of Naxolon or Narcan available throughout our communities and community programs that were counting this opioid addiction. You can see it also, like if you go to my son plays high school football and you can actually see that, kind of like what we grew up with, like the counter drug program that we grew up with when we were kids, the D.A.R.E. program. We're starting to see billboards like that across the entire United States during high school football games, like I mentioned, on the billboards talking about opioids, just publicly talking about it, the danger and the use of it. And so I think this is like a whole community or whole society approach that has gone. But it's because of the leadership right now of the Trump administration that has been attacking this issue. But if you notice, the numbers were also going down even at the later end of the year of the Biden administration as well. So in terms of preventing illegal drugs entering the U.S., what evidence are you looking at that we have that shows less drugs are available on streets in the U.S.? Yeah, great question. Unfortunately, really, the only thing that we have is our southern border apprehension numbers. So if we so we have kind of like a denominator that's missing. We actually don't know how much is coming across because we don't have 100 percent domain awareness on our southern border still. And now it's getting there. We're getting the technology in place so that we can't have 100 percent domain awareness. But if you look at our northern border, oh, it's vastly different than our southern border in terms of the amount of technology and infrastructure in order to understand what is or what is not coming across both sides, what's going north and what is coming south. So until we can actually figure out the actual denominator of what is actually coming in by creating the apparatus or the infrastructure to have 100 percent domain awareness, that's going to be difficult. Another issue is the amount of operations that have now moved into the interior of the U.S. Look, our focus has been seeing what Mexico, what President Scheinbaum is doing in Mexico, eradicating the fentanyl labs and doing this and doing that against the Mexican cartels. So our whole focus has been there and kind of tunneling how many of those pill presses and how many of those labs are now inside the United States, how many are in Canada. And so and so we really don't know now what is actually on the streets today. We can a little bit if you talk to DEA or if you talk to Haida, the Haitian Drug Trafficking Association, if you talk to them, you realize that cocaine, that cocaine, the price of cocaine on the streets is actually decreased as well as crystal meth. So it's not just all drugs lumped into one sum that is actually decreasing. We may have a decrease in opioids, but we have seen a rise in cocaine and crystal meth. Okay. Another thing I wanted to ask you about was President Trump's tearing out of drug strikes. Do you think these are helpful? How helpful do you think the strikes have been in preventing drug overdose deaths? Yeah, great question. So a lot of those strikes, really, if you if you look at where fentanyl was actually coming from, you'll see that it was mostly coming from Mexico. And then you also have labs up in Canada as well. So a majority of the narcotics that were coming from South America was typically like cocaine and other narcotics of that nature. Really the importance of those drone strikes in the Caribbean was the process known as the kill chain. The entire intelligence process to figure out who those individuals are, who those terrorists are in the Caribbean from point A to point B, their entire chain of getting there, all the intelligence necessary to figure out exactly how to strike, when to strike and at what time. That led to us understanding the entire illicit trade networks and supply chain across the entire Caribbean, not just from narcotics. You may have seen on TV us striking narcotics, but that was the end result of an entire intelligence platform trying to understand the entire supply chain, which also included other illicit commodities like oil that Iran was utilizing to get away from their sanctions. So when we struck those vessels there in the Caribbean, that was just the end result of an entire intelligence cycle. So you're right about the supply chain. Research papers indicate that synthetic drugs like fentanyl are highly dependent on supply chains. Can you just speak a little bit more about that? What more can be done to disrupt these chains? Yeah, great question. Really, it's attacking the people that are actually supporting it. So shifting the concept that this is a war on drugs and making it a war on our enemies that are utilizing drugs as a type of warfare. This is chemical warfare. So now that we know the supply chains, the intelligence to get to that point, we now must have to go after the organizations themselves. We must go after the Mexican cartels. We must go after them as they have created that supply chain throughout the United States, throughout 65 other countries in the world. So every single one of those countries must back the United States in terms of completely eradicating the Mexican cartels from being able to produce and distribute the narcotics, whether that is for headquarters in Mexico, the US, Canada, or in the Caribbean. And so understanding who is actually doing it, where they're actually producing this and distributing it is giving the next vital piece. If that's in Mexico and if Mexico is not willing to do so, then that's when we need to start having some hard talks. Okay, Ayman, always great to speak to you. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me.