Illustration by Ana Mouriño
Just say no. That’s pretty much how Donald Trump plans to combat the heroin epidemic. The outdated phrase that dates back to Nancy Reagan and the 1980s just doesn’t work. The so-called “War on Drugs” failed.
On Monday at a campaign event at Farmington High School in New Hampshire, a capacity crowd of 1,000 people came out to hear the following message:
“The question I get just about number one when I come up to New Hampshire: the drugs that are pouring in,” Trump said. “They’re coming across the southern border and we are going to stop it.”
Trump doesn’t talk about addiction as a disease or ways to help addicts. On the contrary, he links the problem to illegal immigration or weak borders, a key element of his platform.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” the reality TV star infamously said at his campaign launch in June. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
He says he wants to help addicts but offers no ideas on how to do so. As with many issues, the business mogul is vague.
“We are gonna try and help the young people, and the old people, and the middle-age people, and everybody that got addicted,” he said. “What’s much easier, is if we can just stop it with where they don’t start. And we can talk to people and talk to the kids and say, ‘Don’t do it.’”
Trump has had a change in tune since April 1990, when he advocated for the legalization of all drugs, including heroin.
“We’re losing badly the War on Drugs,” he said to a crowd of 700 people back then. “You have to legalize drugs to win that war. You have to take the profit away from these drug czars.”
Trump says he doesn’t partake in drugs or alcohol but calls addiction “a very tough thing.”
The other Republican presidential candidates appear to be as empathetic as the Democrats regarding the issue of drug addiction.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has been ahead of the curve on this issue, speaking about it three months ago.
“I’m pro-life,” Christie said. “And I think that if you’re pro-life, that means you gotta be pro-life for the whole life. Not just the nine months you’re in the womb. The 16-year-old teenage girl on the floor of the county lockup addicted to heroin, I’m pro-life for her too.”
Christie, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, businesswoman Carly Fiorina, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich all sounded off about the subject at the New Hampshire Forum on Addiction at Southern New Hampshire University earlier this month.
“If we continue to criminalize drug addiction, we’re not treating it,” Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett Packard, said. “And the system we have today is part of the problem now, not part of the solution. We now have the highest incarceration rates in the world. And the majority of people we have in prison are people like my daughter, Lori, struggling with addiction.”
Prior to the forum, Fiorina had written a message to her supporters about her daughter’s bout with addiction.
“It broke my heart to watch the look that grew in Lori’s once-bright eyes as her addictions overcame her,” she wrote. “As Lori grew progressively sicker, the potential disappeared from behind her eyes. The light, the sparkle she once had, left her. What remained was a dull, flat void. It was the look of hopelessness. And that look is what haunts me most.”
Gov. Jeb Bush weighed in about his own daughter Noelle, who ended up in jail because of her addiction.
“[Addiction] is one of the soft underbellies of our country and we need to get on with it. And we need to make it a much higher priority than we have,” Bush said. “We need to recognize that restoring people’s chances to be able to live a life of purpose and meaning doesn’t just deal with the illness of drug addiction. It also means giving them a chance to get a job and doing other things.”
Gov. John Kasich extolled Ohio’s prison programs, which he believes do a great job of training inmates with skills they can use once they’re out of jail.
“If you’re interested in changing your life and learning a skill, we’re going to give it to you,” Kasich said. “All of these things are about one thing: We don’t want to waste a human life.”
Trump remains an outlier when it comes to the issue of addiction. His stance is antiquated and obsolete. It’s pure hogwash, rhetoric of a bygone era.
“We are going to help the people that have the problem and try to get them off,” he said at that campaign appearance. “But what really is easy is to convince everybody ‘don’t take it.’”
I think I’m gonna “Just Say No.” Just say no to Trump.
