Thread by @JoeUchill

WHEREIN I LOOK UP THE NUMBERS THAT HUGH HEWITT GUESSED.

https://twitter.com/hughhewitt/status/1096850542217678848

According to the DEA, more than 60% of overdoses are from medications. More than 90% users take prescriptions from friends or family. And only 6% of prescription abusers used dealers - and at at least some of those dealers had domestic sources.

dea.gov/sites/default/…

Other drugs? Well, according to CATO: "Border Patrol agents between ports of entry accounted for just 8 percent of hard drug seizures by value in 2018" along the border.

Drugs also get flown in and some can be domestically made.

In short: Well under 1/2 of overdoses are drugs from mexico. Less than 10% of those come in between ports of entry.

But even pretend that the 3,500 number was true. That's:
-1/10 of deaths from firearms
-A little over 1/2 the deaths from veteran suicides
-Under 1/100 of deaths from smoking
-1/7 the death from antibiotic-resistant disease

Now, don't take that to mean that preventing 3500 deaths would be bad. It's just that building the border wall doesn't mean that those deaths magically disappear.

Hewitt is making a problematic chain of assumptions.

Hewitt assumes that, if the drugs don't pass in between ports of entry, they won't make it into the country. There's no reason to assume the same drugs won't be smuggled through the port of entry.

Hewitt assumes that, if we reduce the supply of drugs by 5%, we will also reduce the amount of overdoses by 5%.

At least 7% of drug deaths are suicides.
At least 1% percent of drug deaths are homicides.

(above from cdc.gov/nchs/products/…)

I couldn't find data, but I'm not sure it's safe to assume that increasing scarcity of drugs would impact the users most and least likely to overdose equally.

And it's unclear that spending tens of billions of dollars on a border wall would be more effective than far cheaper safe injection sites or more spending on drug diversion programs.

Hugh is just guessing. He says he's just guessing. Guessing isn't lying, although with half an hour he could have looked up any of this.

And everyone retweeting me should probably check my work.

(cato study: cato.org/publications/p…
CDC deaths: cdc.gov/healthreport/p…
VA / suicide: mentalhealth.va.gov/docs/data-shee…)