President Trump is set to declare the opioid epidemic a national public health emergency this week with a speech Thursday, bringing to the fore a long simmering problem linked to poverty in run down Rust Belt cities and social decay in the absence of jobs.

Axios writes:

The opioid crisis has hit hard in Trump country – rural areas, and economically depressed white communities. For Washington, it's been out of sight, out of mind for too long – and a reminder of the blinders we have in the bubbles, which also delayed recognition of Trump's heartland strength.

But focus as the press in general is going to do on social travails, Trump probably should be highlighting that the problem started getting bad right about when President Obama opened the borders to non-enforcement in 2009.  Not only did the unaccompanied children rush in, but so did the drug dealers.  Their wares fueled the opioid epidemic, often rolling in from the Texas Gulf Coast to the highway arteries leading north to Chicago (that place with the Juárez-style murder rates – what a coincidence), and then spread to the depressed Midwest surrounding it.

The website called DrugAbuse.com's Drug Trafficking across Borders page has quite a few reputable links showing how the opioid epidemic has a lot to do with the great available supply brought on by Obama's open borders policy.

Data on drug seizures at the U.S. border indicate an alarming volume of trafficking taking place in recent years. Since 2009, heroin seizures at the southwestern border have almost tripled, while meth seizures quintupled through 2014.

The page shows that most trafficking is land-based, and the traffic over the northern border, from Canada, while not as bad as Mexican border trafficking, is not insignificant, either.  It notes that Arizona, which has a more aggressive seizure policy at its borders, has significantly fewer drug deaths compared to its neighbors.  It also notes that as land routes shut down, drug-traffickers turn to higher-volume and higher-risk sea and air routes.  All the same, it concludes from its data that there is a significant foreign component to the opioid epidemic, one that comes explicitly from an absence of border enforcement.  While Trump will probably focus on the problems of the buyers of these drugs and the need for curing them, there is also the problem of the open borders sellers.

Increased drug trafficking in the U.S. has led to an epidemic level of overdoses, surpassing car accidents and firearms as the leading cause of injury and death among Americans. Drug abuse is ending too many lives, too soon.

According to data from the DEA, the number of drug overdoses has climbed more than 50% in the last decade. Death and injury can be traced back to drug-related violence, overdoses from illicit drug use, accidental deaths as a result of drug abuse and injury or death related to smuggling.

While the production of some drugs takes place within our borders, foreign drug trade into the U.S. is largely responsible for the number of dead or injured. Drug abuse has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and the government allots billions of dollars each year to counter the growing epidemic.

If that isn't an argument for building the wall, what is?