Former President Donald Trump’s running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) told comedian and podcast host Theo Von that the United States needs to “have a military response at the southern border” to fight the drug cartels that are killing around 70,000 people a year by trafficking fentanyl into the country.
After being asked on Von’s This Past Weekend podcast why the fentanyl crisis is so bad in the United States, Vance explained the breakdown of how it works, saying that the drug cartels operate like “any business” that has “a manufacturer, a wholesaler, and a retailer.”
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“You can’t make fentanyl in a trailer in somebody’s basement. It’s not like meth. It takes a really complicated, pretty sophisticated pharmaceutical process,” Vance explained.
“We know that a lot of it, maybe even most of it, the Chinese are making — Chinese companies, not necessarily the Chinese government, but they sure as hell know about it — and then they bring it in primarily through the southern border, and the Mexican drug cartels are like the wholesalers,” Vance said. “And then it makes it to the street level.”
Trump’s running mate added that a DEA agent told him, “The cartels were making less than a billion dollars a year” a few years ago, and that they expected the drug cartels to make “$14 billion a year” in 2023 and 2024.
“So there’s an explosion of drug trafficking in this country,” Vance said, before noting that a big problem involves fentanyl being laced into drugs, and in some cases, even in marijuana.
Von then chimed in, saying, “I don’t know how you fight something like that,” to which Vance replied, “You’ve gotta go to it at the heart.”
Vance explained that something Trump did during his administration “that doesn’t get a a lot of headlines” was that the 45th president used “economic leverage to try to convince the Chinese to crack down on fentanyl manufacturing.”
“Because if you get it at the source, that’s really the way to address it,” the Ohio senator asserted.
Vance went on to say that the people involved in these drug cartels are “very dark and dangerous people.”
“This is not some guy who’s selling joints on a college campus,” he said. “They’re doing sex trafficking, they’re getting 11, 10-year-old girls involved in the sex trade. They’re very evil people.”
“Why are we making it easier for these massive criminal organization to get richer, and richer, and richer?” Vance asked. “We should be trying to make them poor.”
Von then noted that deaths resulting from drug cartels trafficking fentanyl into the U.S. is similar to “if there were somebody shooting in your country every day and killing people.”
“Can you imagine if Mexico sent gunmen across the border and killed 70,000 Americans a year — because that’s about what dies from fentanyl — we would be in a major war,” Vance said.
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Trump’s running mate added that at some point, “the cartels are going to start to destabilize the country of Mexico,” citing the late Columbian drug lord Pablo Escobar, noting that “the Colombian cartels in the 70s were as powerful as the Colombian government.”
“It was a narco-state,” Vance said. “You don’t want that to happen right at the American southern border, where the drug cartels have more power than the Mexican government.”
“That’s just going to be chaotic,” he added. “It’s going to be basically a warlike atmosphere on our southern border.”
Von then pointed out that the situation would likely be handled very differently “if it were actual people shooting at these people.”
“We would send people there in a heartbeat,” Von said, to which Vance responded, “And I think that’s what we have to.”
Vance added that he believes “we actually have to have a military response at the southern border,” to which Von replied, “100 percent.”
“Because these are such vicious people,” Vance said. “We’ve got to be willing to send our best people, our best fighters, to get control of the southern border. I think that’s the most important issue confronting the country.”
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
