Fentanyl, Self-Government, and the Obligation to Think

By Brigadier General (Ret.) Paul B. “Trey” Chauncey III

On fentanyl, complexity, and the responsibilities of self-government

A constitutional republic does not survive on passion, outrage, or slogans. It survives on an educated populace. Not educated in the narrow sense of credentials or degrees, but educated in the harder discipline of understanding systems, incentives, tradeoffs, and consequences. Citizens must resist being told what to think and instead insist on understanding how to think.

That obligation has never been more important than it is today.

The fentanyl crisis offers a stark case study in what happens when complex national problems are reduced to headlines and talking points. The issue is often framed as a failure of border enforcement, or a failure of law enforcement, or a failure of compassion. Each framing contains a partial truth. None, by itself, is sufficient.

To understand why, we have to slow down and examine the system as it actually exists, not as we might wish it to be.

Fentanyl is not just another illicit drug. It is a synthetic opioid with extraordinary potency. Very small quantities can produce millions of doses. That single fact reshapes every assumption about trafficking, interdiction, and enforcement. Unlike plant based drugs, fentanyl does not require large fields, long growing seasons, or bulky shipments. It rewards concealment, dispersion, and redundancy.

The scale of harm is difficult to overstate. At its peak, annual drug overdose deaths in the United States exceeded 100,000 lives per year, with synthetic opioids, primarily fentanyl, responsible for the majority of those deaths. To place that in context, the annual death toll from overdoses has exceeded total U.S. combat deaths in the Vietnam War, which claimed roughly 58,000 American lives over more than a decade. In some recent years, overdoses have killed more Americans than all U.S. combat deaths from World War I, the Korean War, and the Global War on Terror combined.

These are not abstract comparisons. They are indicators of scale.

For several consecutive years, fentanyl and other synthetic opioids were the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 49. That age range overlaps almost exactly with the nation’s prime working population and its military recruitable cohort. No foreign adversary has inflicted comparable sustained losses on the United States in that demographic band in modern history.

For years, much of the public conversation has focused on supply. Where does fentanyl come from. How does it enter the United States. Why are seizures not stopping it. Those are fair questions, but they are often asked in isolation, divorced from economic and human realities.

I have spent much of my adult life in uniform and in senior national security roles. I have had candid conversations with allies and partners, including senior foreign military officers, about narcotics trafficking. One of those conversations, years ago at the U.S. Army War College, remains relevant today. A Mexican general, speaking plainly and without malice, told me that the problem was not fundamentally a drug supply problem. It was a drug demand problem. Until the United States addressed the latter, the former would persist.

That observation stung, not because it was hostile, but because it was accurate.

Demand is the center of gravity in any illicit market. Where demand is durable, supply adapts. History demonstrates this repeatedly. Heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and now synthetic opioids followed the same pattern. Enforcement pressure raises costs and risk. Suppliers respond with innovation. Routes change. Substances change. Potency increases. Profits remain.

This does not mean interdiction is pointless. It is necessary. It saves lives. It raises friction. It buys time. But it does not, by itself, collapse markets driven by persistent demand.

In maritime counterdrug operations, a reality long understood by professionals is that only a fraction of drugs moving alongside legitimate commerce are ever intercepted. Global trade depends on the movement of millions of containers and vessels every year. Inspecting more than a small percentage is neither practical nor compatible with a functioning economy. Traffickers understand this. Losses are calculated and accepted as a cost of doing business. When a kilogram of fentanyl can generate enormous downstream revenue, redundancy is cheap.

This is not conjecture. It is basic economics.

Recent years have seen increased attention on maritime interdiction, including kinetic actions against high confidence trafficking vessels. That posture reflects a recognition that trafficking platforms themselves can be neutralized where legal authorities allow. It is a defensive measure, not a declaration of war. It also reflects a sobering reality. Stopping every shipment is impossible. Disrupting networks and increasing risk remains essential.

Still, none of this addresses the underlying driver.

Demand in the United States has proven remarkably resilient. Opioid use disorder did not emerge overnight. It grew from prescription practices, economic dislocation, untreated mental health challenges, and social fragmentation. Fentanyl did not create that demand. It exploited it. It delivered lethality at a scale that transformed a chronic social problem into a mass casualty phenomenon.

Recent provisional data suggests that overdose deaths have declined from their peak. That is encouraging. It is also fragile. Those declines are largely attributed to expanded access to naloxone, better awareness, and treatment. They do not reflect a collapse in supply or a fundamental reduction in demand.

This distinction matters for national resilience and national defense.

Every fatal overdose removes a citizen from the workforce. Many more remove individuals from eligibility for military service through addiction, medical disqualification, or criminal history. The cumulative effect is a steady erosion of the population base from which the nation draws soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and guardians. Readiness is not only a function of equipment and budgets. It is a function of people.

No nation has ever eliminated a demand driven drug problem. Some have reduced harm. Some have stabilized use. None have solved it permanently. Those that have made progress invested heavily in prevention, treatment, and social cohesion over decades, not election cycles.

This is where the obligation to think, rather than react, becomes critical.

Simplistic narratives offer comfort. They promise that if we just secure a border, or just punish traffickers more harshly, or just legalize everything, the problem will resolve. Real systems do not work that way. Complex problems rarely yield to single lever solutions.

A self governing society depends on citizens who can tolerate complexity without surrendering to cynicism. It depends on voters who understand that policy is often about managing tradeoffs, not achieving perfection. It depends on a public willing to engage with uncomfortable facts.

One of those facts is that demand lives inside our own population. It cannot be interdicted at sea. It cannot be sanctioned abroad. It must be addressed through education, treatment, prevention, and cultural resilience. Those are slow investments. They do not produce dramatic footage or immediate political reward. They are nonetheless essential.

Another fact is that supply side actions remain necessary, even when they are insufficient. Interdiction saves lives in the margins. It disrupts networks. It signals resolve. A nation can walk and chew gum at the same time. The false choice between enforcement and treatment is itself a failure of thinking.

The fentanyl crisis is not unique in this regard. It is simply the most lethal expression of a broader challenge facing self governing societies. How do we sustain informed citizenship in an environment optimized for outrage and oversimplification.

Our form of government assumes a citizenry capable of synthesis. It assumes people can absorb information, weigh evidence, and resist the urge to outsource judgment to headlines or memes. When that assumption erodes, policy follows.

Fentanyl forces us to confront that erosion, not because the answers are easy, but because self-government fails when citizens stop doing the hard work of understanding complex realities.