Crack Pipes: Biden Administration's Handling of US Opioid Crisis Raising Questions, Journo Says

The congressional legislative initiatives to ban the federal distribution of drug paraphernalia come in response to a bombshell by The Washington Free Beacon. On 7 February, the media outlet alleged that the Biden administration was funding smoking kits with pipes for users to smoke crystal methamphetamine, crack cocaine, and "any illicit substances" under a $30 million Health and Human Services (HHS) Department grant programme. The grant document, cited by The Washington Free Beacon, mentioned Biden's executive order 13985, titled "Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government".

White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki on 9 February denied that smoking kits distributed to "underserved communities" include crack pipes, saying that "the safe smoking kit may contain alcohol swabs, lip balm, and other materials to promote hygiene and reduce the transmission of diseases like HIV and hepatitis". For its part, the US Department of Health and Human Services stated that "no federal funding will be used directly or through subsequent reimbursement of grantees to put pipes in safe smoking kits".

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki holds a press briefing at the White House in Washington, U.S., January 25, 2022. REUTERS/Leah Millis

US lawmakers, however, expressed suspicions that the federal government grant indeed meant to give away free smoking pipes. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) tweeted last Friday that "the Biden administration is in cleanup mode because they got caught funding crack pipe distribution".

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and 15 other Republican senators on 10 February introduced the Cutting Off Rampant Access to Crack Kits (CRACK) Act which is designed to amend the $1.9 trillion COVID relief spending plan signed into law by Joe Biden in March 2021. The CRACK Act would add a clause that prohibits funds to be used to "procure, supply, or distribute pipes, cylindrical objects, or other paraphernalia that can be used to smoke, inhale, or ingest narcotics".

The Halting the Use of Narcotics Through Effective Recovery (HUNTER) Act of 2022 was brought forward by GOP Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Dan Bishop (R-NC) on 11 February to ban the distribution of crack pipes.

On the same day, Rubio and Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) presented a bipartisan bill, dubbed the Preventing Illicit Paraphernalia for Exchange Systems (PIPES) Act. The legislation is aimed at ensuring that American Rescue Plan funds won't be used to buy illicit drug paraphernalia for addicts.

"Every American and West Virginian has been impacted by the drug epidemic that has killed over 101,000 Americans from April 2020 to April 2021", Manchin said in an official statement, stressing that "using taxpayer funds to buy paraphernalia for those struggling with substance use disorder is not the solution".

Migrants near the US-Mexican border

Biden's Policies Threatening Americans' Health & Well-Being

"We have heard about initiatives in Holland and even here in the United States to provide clean needles for heroin addicts and safe spaces for drug addicted individuals to indulge", says Jason Goodman, an investigative journalist and founder of Crowdsource the Truth. "The stated purpose is to prevent the spread of blood borne diseases in IV drug users, but I am unaware of statistics regarding the effectiveness of such programmes. I also do not believe that smoking pipes pose the same risk for disease transmission. Some addiction experts are adamant that anything at all that encourages or prolongs drug use is not helpful to recovery".

Moreover, "given the Biden family history of drug abuse, particularly crack, it is hard to imagine any public health programme having a worse appearance than this", according to the journalist. US media outlets wrote a lot about the president's son's drug addiction. In October 2020, the New York Post published photos featuring Hunter Biden smoking a crack pipe. The issue was also touched upon by Hunter himself in his memoir, "Beautiful Things".

In this Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021, file photo, Hunter Biden arrives at the inauguration of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington

While the Biden administration acknowledges that the opioid crisis in the US requires a solution, it has yet to seal the nation's southern border to prevent the smuggling of illicit drugs and opioids into the country.

The United States Senate Republican Policy Committee (RPC) concluded in November 2021 that the crisis that has seen millions of people trying to illegally cross the country's southern frontier included "an increase in the flow of lethal synthetic opioids, threatening public health and safety".

"The average amount of fentanyl seized from 2018 through 2020 was 321 pounds a month", the committee observed. "Through the first nine months of this year, the monthly average is 830 pounds. In fiscal year 2021, US Customs and Border Protection seized 10,586 pounds of fentanyl at the southern border, more than double the amount seized in FY 2020".

It seems that the Biden administration is much more concerned with Russia's border with Ukraine than it is with the US border with Mexico, Goodman notes, referring to the White House's initiative to send troops to Eastern Europe to resist the alleged Russian "invasion" of Ukraine, denounced by Moscow as "fake news".

In 2020, more than 100,000 drug overdoses were recorded in the US with nearly 76,000 of them being attributed to opioids, an increase of approximately 30 percent over 2019. However, one may presume that in 2021 and 2022 indicators will be even worse due to the spike in opioid smuggling and psychological stress endured by ordinary Americans amid the COVID pandemic and soaring inflation, Goodman says. "It seems like the Biden administration is cooking up a recipe for utter disaster", he notes.

"Many people would suggest that what is happening in the United States and around the world right now goes beyond a struggle between American Democrats and Republicans", the investigative journalist says. "There would seem to be an epic struggle happening, the technocratic totalitarian control structure foreseen by Zbignew Brzezinski appears to be taking hold. We are at an inflection point as Joe Biden said in his speech about possible military action against Russia. This is the New World Order George H.W. Bush spoke of at the UN in the early 1990s".