The US Military's Fentanyl Crisis May Be Putting National Security at Risk
It wasn’t hand grenades or machine gun bullets that killed 332 service members from 2017 to 2021.
It was drug overdoses, according to a 2023 Department of Defense report.
Of those deaths, 174 — or 52.4 percent — involved fentanyl, doubling the number of dead in just five years.
And those were just the fatal cases.
Among the four major military branches, there were 15,293 overdoses of all kinds from Fiscal Year 2017 to 2022.
It’s a problem plaguing America, and the military isn’t exempt. And that very well can create a national security risk involving a question of preparedness.
Yet the Biden administration’s weak border policy has ensured the fentanyl crisis will not only continue but get much worse.
In 2020, authorities seized 4,600 pounds of fentanyl along the southern border, according to the National Immigration Forum. In 2023, Border Patrol seized 26,700 pounds of the substance, a 480 percent increase since President Joe Biden took office.
Fentanyl: The Accidental Killer
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid roughly 100 times more potent than morphine, according to the DEA.
No doubt, fentanyl’s potency is largely what makes it so deadly. But another formidable and common danger exists: A user has no way of knowing if a drug he buys illegally has been laced with fentanyl or how much is present.
Although the DOD report said some members overdosed using fentanyl alone, the drug was used in combination with other substances, intentionally or not, in the majority of fentanyl deaths.
For example, in 2021, soldiers Matthew Disney and Joshua Diamond died in the then-Fort Bragg Army barracks. (It’s since been renamed Fort Liberty.) They had accidentally overdosed on fentanyl-laced Percocet, Military.com reported. It is unclear if they knew the opioid-based pain relievers were laced with fentanyl. Regardless, their lives were cut short.
In another tragedy, 23-year-old Ari McGuire accidentally overdosed.
McGuire was an Army reconnaissance scout. He had deployed to Afghanistan, received an Army Commendation Medal and had dreams of becoming an Army Ranger. But in 2019, he unknowingly overdosed on fentanyl, and doctors were unable to save him.
According to the DOD report, 84 percent of the overdoses in the military (not just fentanyl) were accidental.
“My son wasn’t an addict,” said Carole De Nola, McGuire’s mother. “A lot of these kids go out to buy drugs and don’t have any clue that they’re laced with fentanyl. The phrase should be fentanyl poisoning, not overdosing. People still don’t know about this stuff.”
The Military’s Response to the Threat
The military’s response to the crisis has been meager. There’s only so much it can realistically do about the issue head-on, especially given that it’s reflective of the increasingly growing national problem.
The DOD came under the spotlight, however, after a 2022 Rolling Stone report exposed a string of overdose deaths at then-Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
The report prompted a number of senators to write letters demanding answers from the DOD, resulting in the report cited earlier in this article.
Prior to the report, the military did not track overdose deaths.
Now, in accordance with the 2024 annual defense policy bill, the Defense Department must track overdose information, including what substances were involved, whether or not they were prescribed, and whether or not an overdose was intentional.
The law also requires the military to develop a plan that would ensure opioid antidotes, like Naloxone, were widely available to troops by 2025, Military.com reported. Naloxone is a life-saving emergency medication that can quickly reverse an opioid overdose; it can be injected into a muscle or taken as a nasal spray, according to the DEA.
A Weaker Military Overall
In the last few years, the world has grown increasingly unstable with wars and rumors of wars — both at home and abroad.
The threat of a domestic conflict increases every day, as thousands of illegal immigrants flood the border each month. Some of these illegals are America-hating terrorists and criminals.
At any moment, at any place on the globe our military may need to deploy in a major way.
Would it be ready to respond?
The current active-duty military is the smallest it’s been since 1940, according to the Military Times.
This year, the total number of active-duty service members will drop to 1,284,500, a decrease of nearly 64,000 members in the last three years.
Recruiting numbers are also woefully low.
In 2023, the Army fell short of its recruiting goals by 10,000, the Air Force by 2,777, and the Navy by 6,764, according to Military.com.
Only the Marines and Space Force met their enlistment quotas.
It probably didn’t help that President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin mandated an experimental vaccine in 2021, forcing thousands of experienced reluctant service members out of the military for refusing to take it.
Of those 8,000 who left, only 43 returned when the mandate was repealed, according to CNN.
Yet despite the dire enlistment situation, the Biden administration seems almost intent on making matters worse.
It’s doing so through wokeness, which infects all branches of the military.
The 2020 National Defense Authorization Act mandated the Marine Corps to fully gender-integrate its training program at the platoon level. The mandate required the Corps’ various training facilities to fully comply by 2025 and 2028, according to the Marine Corps Times.
The mandate prompted the Marine Corps to reluctantly contract a $2 million study with the University of Pittsburgh to help determine the best way to go about integrating its new woke training program, the Marine Corps Times reported.
But the madness goes much further than that.
In 2023, the Army released a memo stating that gender-transitioning service members would be “non-deployable” for 300 days.
And those are just two examples.
The military’s standards in general are only getting lower, largely to address its self-inflicted recruiting struggles.
The U.S. Navy recently began allowing recruits to enlist despite not having a high school diploma or GED.
In 2022, the Army lowered its fitness standards for women and older service members, after a study found that young men performed much better on the fitness tests, The Hill reported.
Add to all this a frightening fentanyl crisis, and it raises the question: Does America truly possesses a competent, battle-ready fighting force or does it have a national security risk on its hands under Biden?
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