Josh Stein’s Putative Concern over Illegal Drugs

Two important stories were reported in North Carolina last week.

First, it was announced that our state had experienced a 22% increase in overdose deaths during 2021 compared with the previous year.

Almost simultaneously, our esteemed state Attorney General, Josh Stein, called for funding of a Fentanyl Control Unit within his state Department of Justice. On the surface, that sounds very admirable.

However, we must recall a bit of history.

During the first couple of years of the Trump Administration, Josh Stein was seemingly suing Trump nearly every week over various policies with which he disagreed. Many of these had to do with immigration. Trump was trying to tighten border controls whereas Stein favors open borders.

Here are some examples:

1. Interfering with the processing of illegal immigrant families;
2. Interfering with the order to ban travel from certain countries with a markedly elevated risk for terrorism;
3. Intervening in court on behalf of illegal immigrant children to force Trump to provide them with certain amenities; and
4. Opposing Trump’s efforts to end the DACA program that had protected illegal immigrants who had arrived here as children.

There are probably others.

He joined these suits often in combination with other socialist state Attorneys General. They were essentially trying to tie Trump in knots to prevent him from doing anything substantive to tighten border security.

Of course, when the border is open, illegal drugs like fentanyl flow across the border freely. The border becomes a sieve for narcotics.

When Stein says he wants a fentanyl control unit, he wants to create a bureaucracy within his own department to deal with a problem that he had played a critical role in worsening. As with many other democratic socialist efforts, Stein’s announcement last week is a charade that seeks to obscure what has really been happening.

We fight fentanyl after we have done everything we can to assure its easy availability. Right.