After more than 10 months on the campaign trail, Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden on Wednesday released his plan to address America’s drug crisis.
The Biden plan would pour $125 billion into the crisis over the next 10 years, more than any of his 2020 opponents had previously promised to spend. In many ways, however, the plan mirrors other Democrats’ approaches, focusing heavily on treatment and harm reduction, identifying pharmaceutical firms as the major perpetrators of the crisis while deemphasizing the role of law enforcement.
Biden’s lack of emphasis on law enforcement and bare lip service to the crisis’s current epicenter in Mexico and China suggests the former vice president is out of touch with the way the drug epidemic has shifted over the past several years.
The new plan debuted just weeks after the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control revealed a slight decline in drug overdose deaths in 2018, down from roughly 70,000 in 2017 to just over 67,000. That figure, however, still makes 2018 the second deadliest year on record for drug overdose deaths. Prior to Wednesday’s release, Biden made allusions to the crisis, but had not placed it front and center as President Donald Trump did in his own campaign four years ago. – READ MORE
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