Biden plays deadly name game on opioids

Opioid overdose deaths topped 79,000 for the first nine months of 2022 — the grim number driven by fentanyl flooding in over the southern border. 

The Biden administration response? Stop calling it drug abuse.

That’s right. 

As tens of thousand die from this poison, the feds are lobbying to change the name of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to the Substance Use and Mental Health Services Administration.

Otherwise, you see, people dying from fentanyl might feel stigmatized. 

On top of the name change, Biden’s budget would earmark almost $11 billion for SAMHSA, including major bucks for a “Community Harm Reduction and Engagement” program — and, for the first time, allow federal health-aid dollars to cover syringes for addicts.

This all suggests Biden wants to send the disastrous “safe” injection programs pioneered by San Francisco and New York national in some way. 

Set course for more deaths, plain and simple. 

There’s no safe non-medical way to use fentanyl. 

There’s no safe way to shoot heroin. 

When you illegally buy and ingest opioids, you’re abusing them. 

And the practice should be stigmatized.

It kills people, devastates their families and rends the overall social fabric. 

In other words, substance abuse is never a victimless crime.

Just ask Jacqui Berlinn, whose son is lost in the state-sanctioned open-air drug markets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. 

Or the bereaved families of New York’s own recent overdose dead — who number in the thousands. 

Part of the reason Biden & Co. are pushing for these worse-than-the-disease cures is that taking real action on fentanyl would require Biden to admit the border catastrophe is genuine. 

That’s not going to happen. 

But the central cause is the president’s surrender to the progressives in his party, for whom the specious idea of harm “reduction” — as with their deadly criminal justice “reforms” — is a policy prerogative. 

How many more Americans must be sacrificed for an ideology that thinks the best answer to drug abuse is to not call it by its name?