A national security bill including desperately needed aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan is being held up in the Senate, and who’s to blame depends largely on your party affiliation. Democrats claim that Republican insistence on the inclusion of much stronger border control measures is the fault, while the GOP says that Democratic refusal to include border protections is the obstacle.

Without diluting the strategic importance to American security interests of supporting Ukraine and Israel in their current fights and protecting Taiwan from a looming fight, it is difficult, to the point of comical near impossibility, to argue that border security is not integral to national security. The figures revealing the sheer volume of illegal crossings daily are sobering enough. But there is another, often overlooked, element: the volume of illicit fentanyl pouring over that border and the ease with which it is.

The scope and toll of the gestating fentanyl crisis in America cannot be overstated. It is 50 times more potent than heroin, and a mere 2 milligrams of this poison is considered lethal. That’s just about enough to cover the tip of a pencil. It has rapidly replaced heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine as the predominant street drug. It is the fuel that catalyzes the emergence of the wretched homeless encampments infesting urban areas all over the country, yet it is not confined to that particular street-level drug culture; it is finding its way into just about every drug one can find, getting mixed in, knowingly or not, with heroin, cocaine, and marijuana.

The toll is measured not just in crime, disorder, homelessness, and addiction. According to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 107,081 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2022. More than two-thirds of those deaths involved synthetic opioids other than methadone, principally illicitly manufactured fentanyl.

The problem itself is constantly evolving. What started out a few decades ago as an issue of overprescription of legal opioid-based painkillers has since transmogrified from simple abuse of legal prescription drugs into a complex international drug trafficking enterprise. Ninety percent of the precursor chemicals used in the manufacture of illicit synthetic fentanyl come from China. Most of those chemicals find their way to Mexico and into the hands of the cartels, which operate their death factories to generate synthetic fentanyl, often in pill form, to be smuggled across the sieve-like southern border, from whence it is distributed with deadly efficiency to every city and town in the country.

How much is coming across the border? Well, we have no way of knowing for sure, but according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data , fentanyl seizures have almost doubled every year since 2019, when 2,633 pounds of fentanyl were seized at the border. In 2022, that number was 14,700 pounds. 2023? 27,000 pounds. That’s just what was caught, with everyone acknowledging that that represents a fraction of what is actually getting through. Meanwhile, the law of supply and demand is an impartial arbitrator, and the street value of fentanyl has been dropping accordingly; in 2021, a pill was worth between $12 and $20. Now the price in most jurisdictions is below $1. In some places closer to the border, it is less than 20 cents.

The default solution sought by policymakers has been, predictably, the easy one: Sue the pharmaceutical companies that created and then lamentably pushed overprescription of legal opioid medications. Accordingly, settlements have been reached with several distributors and manufacturers to the tune of billions of dollars. That money has been earmarked, appropriately, for the states to use in their fight against this scourge.

But some policymakers have been unable, or unwilling, to keep up with the changing nature of the problem. Rather than directing efforts toward necessary measures — increasing resources for law enforcement, border interdiction, punishment of dealers, treatment for addicts (who are the ultimate victims) —some lawmakers have been beguiled into recklessly pursuing the opposite alternative, i.e., reducing penalties for drug crimes and even attempting to manage the problem by providing “safe” injection sites.

Meanwhile, some state attorneys general, such as Bob Ferguson of Washington, have kept ambling down the easy route, trying to see how much they can squeeze out of the pharmaceutical companies instead of settling. Of course, even if they get anything extra, most if not all will likely go directly to the trial lawyers, not to the front lines.

Lawmakers at all levels need to recognize both the severity of the fentanyl problem and the hard realities of its current nature. They must address it realistically, aggressively, and without ideological blinders. It will be cops, district attorneys, and border patrol agents who win this fight, not trial lawyers.

Kelly Sloan is a former employee of the Calgary Police Service and victim services coordinator with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He graduated from Mount Royal University with a degree in criminology. He now resides in Denver.