New Hampshire’s fentanyl crisis has impacted Democrat Sen. Maggie Hassan’s (D-NH) reelection hopes, as the state leads the nation in fentanyl overdoses, Dartmouth Medicine reports.
According to the state’s medical examiner’s office, nearly 4,000 state residents have died from an overdose since 2011. In 2022, more than 330 overdoses occurred. Of those deaths, 135 were related to fentanyl.
The crisis has Hassan’s attention, but her open border immigration policies have gone unchanged.
“Teenage deaths from fentanyl more than tripled from 2019 to 2021,” she tweeted in July. “Police are seeing fentanyl laced in other drugs, creating a horrible emerging frontier in the substance misuse crisis.”
Yet Hassan has not altered her illegal immigration policies. She has voted against Republican efforts to force a vote on an amendment to a coronavirus bill to reinstate Title 42 restrictions. She has refused to oppose the Biden administration’s “catch and release” illegal immigration policy, along with opposing former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which President Joe Biden ended.
As a result, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended a record-setting 2.2 million illegal migrants during fiscal year 2022, representing a 33 percent increase over the previous record year of 2021.
State Police Col. Nathan Noyes stated at a press conference in June that undetected fentanyl is mixed with illicit drugs that come through the southern border.
“It’s rare to see heroin by itself,” Noyes said. “When we do see heroin, it is routinely mixed with fentanyl. And while fentanyl can be found as the sole drug in some samples, approximately 70 percent of the time it is mixed with other drugs. … We’re seeing fentanyl mixed with everything, including counterfeit pills.”
Chris Stawasz, the Northeast regional director of government affairs for American Medical Response, told the New Hampshire Bulletin that many who overdose are unaware they have overdosed on fentanyl.
“Yet they were unresponsive,” Stawasz continued. “They responded to Narcan. So clearly there was an opioid involved in whatever they were taking.”
While Hassan refuses to change her open border policies. Republican challenger Gen. Don Bolduc has a four-point plan to solve the crises. Speaking with Breitbart News, Bolduc said the first goal is to secure the border.
“The second thing we need to do is give our law enforcement all the tools they need, which she [Hassan] just voted against doing, and the third thing is that we need to designate the cartels as terrorist organizations, so we can get the whole weight of our joint terrorism task force behind interdicting these cartels,” he said.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
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