ITHACA, NY (WSKG) – An expert on the opioid crisis says President Trump’s focus on the U.S.-Mexico border overlooks important facts in the ongoing crisis of overdose deaths.
Shannon Monnat, professor of public health at Syracuse University, has spent years looking at what the opioid crisis is doing to communities across the country. Monnat says the national emergency is an example of how current policies don’t help.
“The president has emphasized drugs coming in from the U.S.-Mexico border,” she said. “but paid far less attention to the fentanyl that’s entering the northeast from China.”
To Monnat, that overlooks one important fact.
“Opioids,” she said, “are far more deadly than any drugs that are entering through the U.S.-Mexico border.”
The recent convictions of two Elmira men for importing fentanyl from China included charges that the pills they made and sold killed two people.