The Opioid Epidemic, the Border Wall, and Magical Thinking

President Trump knows that the United States is suffering through one of the worst drug epidemics on record. Its breadth was captured well by Christopher Caldwell, who . “A heroin scourge in America’s housing projects coincided with a wave of heroin-addicted soldiers brought back from Vietnam, with a cost peaking between 1973 and 1975 at 1.5 overdose deaths per 100,000,” he began by way of context. “The Nixon White House panicked. Curtis Mayfield wrote his ballad ‘Freddie’s Dead.’ The crack epidemic of the mid- to