Another Day, Another McCaughey Lie

 

 Another Day, Another  Betsy McCaughey Lie

Betsy McCaughey has had a checkered  and relatively  unsuccessful political career.  She actually managed to become the elected Lieutenant Governor of New York and in four years so soured her relationship with her boss and the Republican Party that they refused to add her to the ticket for a second term. So she changed parties and tried, but failed,  to get the nomination of the Democratic Party for governor, making her “0 for 2”. So, she then decided simply to write Far Right drivel for a living, a la Fox News. She's not so much a bad writer as a bad liar.

          In an op-ed column in today's paper, she started off by stating, not just implying, that the federal government, especially the CDC is responsible for the decline in the average lifespan of the average American. Later in the article she blames part of the decrease in average expectancy on the proliferation of fentanyl which, apparently, is also the fault of the CDC. As I sat there, choking on my coffee and wondering how the CDC was responsible for the proliferation of fentanyl or for the decrease in lifespan, it struck me that Ms. McCaughey is simply taking statistics and then making up her version of why they're meaningful. This parallels the famous Mark Twain quote that there are “Three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.”

          I told myself I was going to ignore this, let it go and do something else this morning,  not write about her. But as I sat and stewed over the absolutely inane nature of her comments I realized that what she really had done had simply ignored every aspect of how fentanyl gets in the United States in the first place and secondly, that the entire world has seen the average lifespan decrease because of the events of 2019 to 2022. You might have heard of it COVID-19? Blaming the CDC for Covid deaths is a fool’s errand, especially when one considers the Trump Administration’s initial denial, foot dragging and adamant refusal to proactively follow CDC recommendations.  

So, I did what Miss McCaughey did; I looked up the statistics. The numbers by themselves show a decrease in the average lifespan of every country that keeps records over the last three years. While that  does not say specifically that is due to COVID,  it is clear that with a global pandemic and a concomitant global downward trend in average life expectancy, yes it's COVID.

As far as fentanyl is concerned she would love to be able to pin that entirely on what she and The GOP are overly fond of characterizing as the Biden administration's “open border” policy which of course is not an open border at all, it's simply a more humane treatment of refugees. Those who are xenophobic and really just don't like refugees of any kind at all are quick to claim, without proof and against factual information, that the fentanyl plague in this nation is all “coming into the country across the border with illegal immigrants.”  Sadly the majority of these people conflate political refugees seeking asylum with  illegal immigrants, while the fact is that most fentanyl, even though it may be made in Mexico, comes across at legal entry points in conveyances like trucks and private cars and is sometimes unloaded in ports like Miami and Philadelphia from the ships that brought it in.

Because this is not well known, here is a quick fentanyl tutorial: Here are facts:

Fact: Fentanyl smuggling is ultimately funded by U.S. consumers who pay for illicit opioids: nearly 99 percent of whom are U.S. citizens.

Fact: In 2021, U.S. citizens were 86.3 percent of convicted fentanyl drug traffickers—ten times greater than convictions of illegal immigrants for the same offense. Unfortunately, this doesn’t fit the GOP narrative, huh?

Fact: Over 90 percent of fentanyl seizures occur at legal crossing points or interior vehicle checkpoints, not on illegal migration routes, so U.S. citizens (who are subject to less scrutiny) when crossing legally are the best smugglers.

Fact: Just 0.02 percent of the people arrested by Border Patrol for crossing illegally possessed any fentanyl whatsoever. That’s fewer than one in 5,000!

Remember that with fentanyl you're dealing with a substance so toxic to humans that I could bring in a one pound can  and kill most of the people in The Villages which is about 130,000 people….THREE TIMES over! As an ultrapowerful synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, as little as two milligrams, about the size of 5 grains of salt, can cause negative health effects including the ultimate one, death. The FDA, not the CDC, approved the drug in 1968 primarily for palliative care - meaning cancer victims in intense pain and Hospice treatment. Despite FDA recommendation doctors sometimes prescribed it for other types of cases. Some of those people became addicted and so the problem began.

 

Regardless of how fentanyl gets here, blaming a US government organization for an analgesic in use world-wide is ludicrous.  In point of fact, the CDC/NIH just keeps the data on things like deaths due to fentanyl overdose etc. It has always fascinated me (this will probably anger some readers) that there seems to be a tendency to overlook the fact that knowingly taking an illegal substance outside of medically supervised conditions is the voluntary act of the person who ingests it. 

In 1986, a University of Maryland basketball player named Len Bias, an NBA #1 draft pick, did cocaine once, had a heart attack and died. While some people blamed cocaine, the fact is that the person to blame was Len Bias. The same is true of most of the people who overdose on methedrine, heroin and most other addictive and toxic substances. I have had no epiphany regarding how we can keep people from killing themselves with dangerous drugs. If there was such a method we would already have it in use. Education and much better parenting might do something to stem the flood. Addicts are made and, except in the case of the addicted newborns of addicted mothers, are not born. Children that are born to addicts suffer immensely while they're being weaned from the toxic substance in their blood. Is the government responsible for the mother being addicted?

 Using potentially addictive substances is legal, if the substance is alcohol. Unfortunately, we have a significant number of alcohol addicts in our society, however alcohol is a substance available at local watering holes around the nation. The same is not true of most controlled substances. There are no fentanyl bars (not legal ones anyway) and there are no heroin bars. Everybody who is an opioid addict becomes one at some point because of two factors, One, they have an addictive personality and lack the ability to tell it “No,” But, the second is that whether they knew that or not the first time, they still knew that using that drug, either outside medical guidelines or simply illegally was a crime. Were they to pay for it with their life, why is it the government's fault? In one case, that of the Sackler family, their  drug company, Perdue Pharma, hyped Oxycodone as non-addictive when the reverse is true and they knew it. In many ways, Fentanyl is the new Oxy.

In Ms. McCaughey’s case, she, like the Hannitys and Carlsons, screams about "too much" government.  That is, right up until she discovers a way to accuse it of not doing enough. Blaming the CDC for what people illegally do to themselves is not only counter intuitive, it's just stupid. It’s the old GOP  “fix the potholes and maintain a Fire Department, but don’t you dare raise my taxes to do it” mantra of the Far Right.