Sealing the nation's southern border with a wall, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton said Friday, is integral to fighting both the United State's opioid epidemic and the sale of other deadly drugs.
Days after Cotton introduced federal legislation to quell the sale of unwashed poppy seeds, he and Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge held a round-table discussion in Little Rock with the upper echelons of state law enforcement to discuss, in part, the spread of opiates.
"The drug epidemic in our country is truly staggering," Cotton, R-Ark., said Friday after the event. "We need to secure our southern border. We need to build a wall, [and] crack down on the cartels and the gangs that are using our southern border to import deadly drugs into our society. It's not just opioids."
Cotton and Rutledge said there is no "silver bullet" to solving the drug crisis, but agreed that much of the deadly opiates that flow into the United States are mailed in from other countries.
"So many things are being done with regard to the opioid epidemic because we lose hundreds of lives here in Arkansas and 60,000 to 70,000 lives [nationally] ... due to the opioid and prescription drug epidemic," Rutledge said, referring to local investigations into the illegal sale of opiates, educational and recovery programs and ongoing litigation with opioid manufacturers as current efforts to quell the drugs' spread.
"What we must also do is shut down a supply chain of opioids coming in, being manufactured out of country, and coming in through our southern border."
Rutledge said curbing opioid addiction was a primary topic in the conversation Friday with directors from the state Crime Laboratory, Department of Correction, Department of Health and Criminal Justice Institute, along with representatives of the FBI, Arkansas State Police and others.
Cotton referred to legislation introduced Wednesday that would halt the sale of unwashed and sometimes drug-laced poppy seeds and poppy seed pods, which have caused at least 12 deaths in the United States, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and which can be a gateway to opioid addiction.
But Cotton said stopping the transfer of drugs across the southern border would also slow the resurgence of crystal methamphetamine, of which he said cartels are now exporting more than previous years.
"We've taken steps in Congress to pass treatments and recovery legislation to help our citizens who have fallen victim to addiction get back on their feet," Cotton said.
"We've stopped the shipment of synthetic opioids like fentanyl from China to the United States through the Postal Service. ... There's no one solution that's going to stop this problem. We need to focus on every aspect of it."
Metro on 04/06/2019