Part of the Series

Listen to a J.D. Vance speech long enough, and you’ll hear him mention drugs. From his personal story of his mother’s addiction to his conspiracy theory about Joe Biden aiming to “kill a bunch of MAGA voters” by allowing fentanyl into the U.S., the Republican vice presidential candidate has made opioid-related issues central to his policy platforms and public persona. His tales about the overdose crisis, including his family’s experiences, are a linchpin of his appeal.

Vance is not simply sharing vulnerably about his life and community. He is cynically exploiting the very real tragedy of rampant overdose deaths to justify racist politics, including border militarization and deportations, fearmongering around foreign policy, heightened police power, and racist rhetoric that fuels white nationalist fervor. It’s crucial to recognize Vance’s narrative as part of a broader rhetorical and political push, which, shamefully, uses the overdose crisis to rationalize policies that will fuel more tragic deaths.

As the Democratic ticket shifts following Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race, it’s important to get clear on Vance’s exploitation of the opioid narrative — and ensure that, as debates move forward, he and Trump are challenged on it at every turn.

In a 2022 campaign ad, Vance asks, “Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racists for wanting to build Trump’s wall. … Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” Of course, Vance’s ad is inaccurate when it comes to Democrats’ immigration policy; Biden has actually overseen a “four-year rightward march on immigration,” as Shireen Akram-Boshar notes in Truthout.

Further, Vance is overtly justifying racism via the specter of “more illegal drugs.” He is advocating death-dealing systems — in this case, border hyper-militarization and deportation — in answer to deaths.

“This issue is personal,” Vance says in his ad. “I nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across our border.” And in his recent speech at the RNC, Vance described losing members of his Ohio community, saying that phone calls with people back home often include the sentence, “They died of an overdose.”

This issue is personal for me, too. My sister died of an opioid overdose, and my journalism and activism have been profoundly shaped by her addiction and the way society responded to it. There’s no denying that we must confront this crisis: 107,543 people died of drug overdoses in the U.S. last year alone.

State violence is never an answer to overdose deaths, many of which are fueled by state violence … whether in the form of policing or deportations or harsh punitive laws.

But confronting this crisis cannot mean waging yet another drug war, this time baselessly targeting migrants. State violence is never an answer to overdose deaths, many of which are fueled by state violence, including the violence of criminalization. And state violence, whether in the form of policing or deportations or harsh punitive laws, continues to be a standard response to the crisis across party lines.

As the federal government has implemented policies like those advocated by Vance, overdoses have increased. A recent report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) showed that 500,000 people were deported for drug offenses between 2002 and 2020, during which time overdose deaths skyrocketed.

I asked Maritza Perez Medina, the director of the Office of Federal Affairs with Drug Policy Alliance, to weigh in on the calls for hardline immigration policies in response to the overdose crisis. Her response resonates, particularly after Donald Trump falsely claimed at the RNC that fentanyl trafficked via immigrants has recently killed “hundreds of thousands.”

Medina condemned the “shameful” scapegoating of immigrants, saying, “To be clear, nearly all people convicted of trafficking fentanyl are U.S. citizens driving cars and commercial vehicles through legal ports of entry, not undocumented immigrants or asylum seekers.”

She told Truthout:

Members of Congress and the executive branch, as well as state and local officials, should reject the false conflation of immigrants and drugs. Instead, they should develop more humane policies on two fronts: assisting asylum-seekers and immigrants fleeing danger, or seeking to join or return to US family members, homes and communities; and addressing the domestic drug overdose crisis by expanding access to evidence-based health services.

In its report with Human Rights Watch, DPA recommends resourcing priorities like harm reduction supplies and tools, wide-ranging social supports, and voluntary treatment. Harm reductionists also urge more resources for police-free community-based peer networks, in which drug users can support each other in living their lives. And DPA advocates an end to federal drug prohibition, while ensuring that legalization laws “include all immigrants, not explicitly exclude them as has been the case in recent federal actions.”

So, how is Vance explaining the policies he advocates, which directly contradict what’s needed to curb overdoses? As is so often the case among MAGA figureheads, Vance relies on conspiracy theories and fact-free, dog-whistle-heavy rhetoric.

The call to “address” the overdose crisis via a pro-police agenda charts a perilous and contradictory path.

During his 2022 primary race, Vance suggested that Joe Biden was opening the border for fentanyl trafficking in order to murder Trump supporters. “If you wanted to kill a bunch of MAGA voters in the middle of the heartland, how better than to target them and their kids with this deadly fentanyl?” Vance asked. “It does look intentional. It’s like Joe Biden wants to punish the people who didn’t vote for him and opening up the floodgates to the border is one way to do it.”

Of course, there was no evidence for this bizarre theory. Moreover, under Biden, drug arrests at the border actually have risen significantly. Biden has proved himself, again and again, to be fully supportive of the deadly U.S. border apparatus.

But the point of Vance’s statements isn’t to tell the truth — it’s to use overdoses, which are universally recognizable as a devastating tragedy — to justify a brutal policy agenda.

That agenda includes dangerous fearmongering related to foreign policy. Vance has accused China of deploying certain drugs to the United States as a “weapon of mass destruction,” asking, “Are we sort of witnessing something like a reverse opium war where they are intentionally allowing this stuff to come into our country because it’s killing 100-120,000 people a year and it’s significantly impairing a lot more than that?” And Vance has suggested that the president use “the power of the U.S. military” against drug cartels in Mexico.

Additionally, although policing and imprisonment are clear contributors to the deaths of overdose victims like my sister, Vance took a lead role in railing against the movement to defund the police. For example, he sponsored a Senate resolution “expressing support” for law enforcement, which repeatedly decries the defund platform.

Policing and imprisonment force drug users to hide their use, making it hard to access harm reduction tools like drug testing, to seek treatment, and even to access life-saving care upon overdosing. Keeping a wide range of drugs illegal makes them impossible to regulate, opening the door to rampant contamination and making overdoses far more likely.

Narratives like J.D. Vance’s perform a devastating sleight of hand, drawing people in with heartbreaking stories and then turning around to scapegoat immigrants and glorify the very systems of policing and incarceration that harm those impacted by addiction and overdose.

Militarized and policed responses to drug use also interfere with harm reduction approaches, from overdose prevention centers to peer-led support networks to mutual aid, which are things that make survival possible for many drug users. And prison and other forms of confinement, which are abstinence-based spaces, lower the tolerance of drug users, making overdose many times more likely upon release. The call to “address” the overdose crisis via a pro-police agenda charts a perilous and contradictory path.

Vance’s enthusiasm for policing extends to his calls for cops to surveil people who’ve had abortions, and his sponsorship of a bill that would have criminally charged medical providers who provided essential gender-affirming care for youth. Not only would these pro-police, pro-surveillance policies harm drug users, but they would also significantly endanger the health — and the very lives — of abortion seekers and trans people. Again, we see the contortion of a “health”-related rationale to push deadly policy.

Vance has also advanced fearmongering rhetoric around cannabis, declaiming “soft on crime” approaches even as he says states should be able to determine weed laws. He commented in 2022 that often, “If you look at the underlying charge — it wasn’t just that they smoked a joint, it’s that they smoked a joint and then beat an elderly woman over the head with a pistol.” Here, too, his facts are wrong: Statements about marijuana fueling violence have been widely debunked.

In 2016, Vance founded a nonprofit ostensibly aimed at addressing opioid issues in Ohio, but it closed within five years and then faced a scandal: An Associated Press investigation showed that “the charity’s most notable accomplishment — sending an addiction specialist to Ohio’s Appalachian region for a yearlong residency — was tainted by ties linking the doctor, the institute that employed her and Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin.” Thus, even Vance’s “charity” work around this issue is soaked in malfeasance.

This constellation of drug-related maneuvers is bigger than one candidate. The Republican platform this year leads with two overtly anti-migrant messages: “seal the border to stop the ‘migrant invasion’”; and “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.” Both of these horrifying planks cite drug trafficking as a rationale for extreme acts of state violence against immigrants. And Republicans certainly aren’t alone in their disproportionate punitiveness toward immigrants when it comes to drugs. Both parties’ recent administrations have overseen thousands of deportations annually for drug offenses, according to the HRW/DPA report.

Medina of the Drug Policy Alliance points out that these deportations and acts of criminalization have overwhelmingly harmed communities and have done nothing to stem overdose.

Our stories and our pain should not be exploited to push policies that drive more deadly violence.

“The United States has harshly criminalized drugs and deported our community members for decades,” Medina told me. “Yet, there has been no significant decrease in drug use or the availability of drugs. However, as a result of these policies, there has been a huge increase in overdose deaths and families torn apart by our draconian immigration system.”

Narratives like J.D. Vance’s perform a devastating sleight of hand, drawing people in with heartbreaking stories and then turning around to scapegoat immigrants and glorify the very systems of policing and incarceration that harm those impacted by addiction and overdose. And as Democrats deploy hardline border policies and fail to robustly support harm reduction and drug legalization and regulation, both migrants and drug users are being abandoned from multiple directions.

Moreover, amid the vice presidential candidate’s flattened narratives, it’s worth remembering that drug users aren’t limited to members of the “white working class” (or Vance’s caricature of that category). When we hear about this crisis, where are the stories of the thousands of criminalized overdose victims, like my sister and her friends, for whom policing and incarceration increased their chances of death by traumatizing them, forcing them into hiding, and reducing their tolerance — making them more vulnerable to overdose? Where are the stories of Black and Indigenous drug users and families impacted by this crisis, as overdoses in these communities have risen? Where are the stories of trans and queer people disproportionately at risk of overdose? Where are the stories of immigrants themselves who have died of overdoses, who may be less likely to seek care due to the danger of deportation? These, too, are the stories of the overdose crisis.

Drug users, their loved ones, and the loved ones of overdose victims deserve political action that actually supports survival. Our stories and our pain should not be exploited to push policies that drive more deadly violence.

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