Utah Republicans blame Biden and Democrats for border drugs while ignoring the opioid crisis in our own streets. 

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I have no idea what the drug fentanyl looks like. I imagine the legal versions of it look similar to the same types of painkillers that I've often been prescribed after surgery. Depending on the surgery, I've been prescribed the painkillers oxycodone or hydrocodone—both in the opioid family, same as fentanyl.

The times I've been prescribed such pain relievers were for post-surgery recovery of shoulder, hip and knee replacements. I've also had painkiller prescriptions for neck disc fusions and a variety of other minor and major surgeries.

Except for the pain that seemingly lasted forever after my right knee was replaced (and during which time I also had a lateral release procedure), I've never finished a prescription of painkillers. With my knee, I needed to refill the painkillers quite a few times. It was the worst. All I can say about it is, "Mom, Dad—if you love your kids, don't let them play high school football."

About a year ago, I looked in the cupboards and realized I had gobs of painkillers just sitting there. I looked them up online and figured out that if I sold them on the street, I'd have made off with about $3,000.

Despite a brief moment of imagining myself reclining in a first-class cabin seat on a one-way trip to Greece, I decided that was a terrible idea. So, I researched the preferred method of disposing of them (not down the toilet) and did so.

Had I wanted to sell them, I wouldn't even have known how to find a buyer. But somewhere out there, even on this snowy Utah Tuesday, I'm certain somebody nearby does know how to sell them and to whom. Maybe it would be at what is thought to be our presumptive place of drug use—among the "druggies and homeless" who converge around Pioneer Park or who reside in tent clusters all over the near west side of Salt Lake City. They get blamed for everything.

But logic defies that. If I had $3,000 worth of pills in my cabinet, and I'm just one patient, how many more tens or hundreds of thousands of pills are available in medicine cabinets all over this state?

Well, certainly far more than could be purchased by just the perceived abusers who reside at the bottom of our society's ladder.

That means, then, that my neighbors are using the stuff. Maybe the cop. Maybe the religious leader. Maybe the stay-at-home mom. Maybe the construction guy. Maybe the schoolteacher. And to complicate it all, whether it be a person in pain or an addict, those who can no longer access legal subscriptions turn to illicit sources.

As a result, they too often learn the hard way that their seller has provided a counterfeit drug that is composed of the synthetic opioid fentanyl. And fentanyl can be made to visually mimic or partially substitute into a variety of common drugs like Xanax, not just opioids.

Who doesn't like Xanax? No one I know, so it's not hard to imagine that more than a few fentanyl overdose deaths are directly linked to a person thinking he's just calming his nerves before said first-class seat to Greece, but who soon discovers his high is far beyond regular cruising altitude. In Utah, one person each day dies from opioid, heroin or synthetic-opioid (fentanyl) overdoses—those OD deaths sometimes coming in combinations, with illicit drugs mixing with any number of other legal drugs into a lethal cocktail from which one does not awake.

The fastest-growing category of overdose deaths is directly attributable to fentanyl, which is mostly manufactured in Mexico using chemicals derived of Chinese sources. It's easy to whip up a fervor about illegal drugs coming over our borders with such clichéd villains.

It's a favored talking point of nearly every high-profile Republican these days. Trouble is, so many of them just spout off without basis—some citing an uptick in border seizures of fentanyl as proof that the Biden administration is soft on stopping fentanyl flow into the United States.

The Biden administration would say otherwise. It must be especially galling to them that some politicians make audacious claims that Biden—and thus his administration and, by extension, all Democrats—favor letting illegal drugs into our country, or that he cares about Ukrainians more than Texans.

This is nonsense. It scores political points and may give solace to those who choose to direct their eyes from reality, but it is patently false.

Long before Joe Biden became president, the fentanyl and opioid crisis was already killing Americans. Nearly 200 American deaths, daily, are attributable just to fentanyl—forget other opioids or sundry drugs. But we can't forget them, especially here in Utah.

It is not just at Pioneer Park or down some shady urban alleyway where Utah drug and fentanyl overdose deaths are a problem. It's rural Utah, where the crisis is most pronounced, yet barely spoken about, where it has risen fastest. It is seriously hard to get my head around what would be the driver for a resident of some idyllic central or southern Utah county to find such pain or circumstance that leads them to opioid abuse.

All of Utah's rural counties are represented by Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate. Most, if not all, are represented at the local levels by Republicans. Our Utah Senate and House are overwhelmingly Republican, and we bear a Republican governor.

So, all my red, Republican friends, fentanyl abuse is your dog. Quit carping about what is going on in El Paso when you cannot find compassion in yourselves nor funding in your government offices to create a Utah where opportunity and hope are the drugs of choice, not fentanyl.

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