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On Feb. 19, 2025, Pennsylvania State Police were dispatched to three separate homes in the hamlet of Tyrone. At each one, they found an occupant dead of a heroin overdose. It was a grim day, even in a town where drug abuse had become distressingly common. The victims were aged 25, 24, and 32.
President Donald Trump claims a goal of his military action in Venezuela is stopping these tragedies before they happen. He says blowing up fishing boats and arresting the country’s dictator will stem the flow of narcotics into the U.S.
House and Senate Republicans have parroted these talking points, even as Trump’s focus has shifted to stealing Venezuelan oil.
This echoes the War on Drugs logic of the 1980s and ’90s, when it was promised that tougher law enforcement and harsher prison sentences would reduce drug use. It didn’t. Overdose deaths and teen experimentation both went up in this period. The bottom line is that when people want to use illicit drugs, they will find a way to do so.
In their 2020 book Deaths of Despair, Anne Case and Angus Deaton argue that a more effective solution is addressing the factors that drive people to drug abuse in the first place. They say the most common culprits are lack of economic opportunity and a pervasive sense of hopelessness, both of which are more pronounced in rural areas.
“Without a good job, you can’t get married or have a stable home life,” Case told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Your community is falling apart. Your sense of connection with other people is gone … [It] made the drug epidemic much, much worse because [drugs] were falling into a community that was looking for a way to numb itself.”
Case could easily be talking about Tyrone. The town was once a manufacturing hub for paper and textiles, but many of those jobs are now gone, pushed offshore by bad trade deals and corporate greed. Nearly 14% of residents live below the poverty line. Drug deaths in Blair County, where Tyrone sits, rose by 80% between 2019 and 2022.
Trump won Blair County in 2024 with 70% of the vote. Tyrone, in many respects, is emblematic of the types of communities Trump targeted with his promises of economic renewal and a return to past glories. Now, he says concerns about affordability are a “hoax” as he leads America into another foreign war. Worst of all, he is exploiting the pain and hopelessness of people in these communities to justify the invasion.
The people of Tyrone are unlikely to get any relief. Oil companies, meanwhile, have a chance at record profits. |
