A new study reveals America leads the world in overdoses, highest drug deaths out of 30 countries. Quiet Maine has higher average drug deaths than the Nation. Some may recall the “Opium Wars,” British pushing addiction for trade in 1800s China. We are now in a Third Opium War, right here.

A little history: Toward the end of China’s Qing (“Ching”) Dynasty, British merchants trafficked Indian opium to China, leading to a major addiction problem. When China resisted and Britain continued, two wars followed – the First (1839-42) and Second Opium Wars (1856-60).

The Qing Dynasty, outgunned, outmaneuvered, and remote lost both, as drug trafficking and addiction overwhelmed society and British, later French, leveraged trade advantages from China.

Fast forward to now. Not only are Chinese criminal operatives trafficking everything, fentanyl and precursors to marijuana, in America, pushing drug deaths past 100,000 annually, they are targeting – as the British and French did in China – rural, vulnerable, weakly policed states.

More to the point, the Chinese are joined, in states like Maine, Georgia, Virginia, and Oklahoma, by Mexicans, Dominicans, and other Transnational Organized Crime (TOC) groups.

From a high level, mortality data for 2022 show “the U.S. had the highest rate 324 overdose deaths per 1 million residents – that year,” 107.941 total overdose deaths, 32 deaths per 100,000.

Meantime, Maine – a state of 1.4 million run by a Democrat Governor, Democrat Attorney General, and Democrat legislature that all push drug legalization, needle giveaways, 20,000 units of Naloxone a month into schools – sees 54.3 deaths per 100,000, 40 to 70 dead kids per month.

The shock is, in Maine and other rural states, these numbers are a heart punch, avoidable. For every child dead of a drug overdose – fentanyl, heroin, meth, crack, cocaine – the family is torn apart. Parents, siblings, grandparents, cousins, and friends die a little, some a lot.

This reality describes where we are. The word that applies is war: war with drug traffickers, war with anti-law enforcement partisans, war with those who fail to understand the threat’s gravity. More than 180 years ago, China faced a killer of their population, opium.

Efforts by the Qing Dynasty to contain it, to fight back, to push against Britain and France, proved ineffective. Once addiction got its claws into the Chinese population, the claws were hard to dislodge – just as addiction is hard to break when it gets claws in an unsuspecting child.

The failure, which Qing Dynasty leaders understood too late, was not getting ahead of the traffickers, understanding that addiction is like a cancer, to the individual and to the Nation.

Today, we witness a kind of collective indifference – a learned paralysis, a sense that those addicted somehow are unimportant, are to blame, disposable children, that feeding their addiction until they hit bottom, perish, or both is somehow humane. It is not.

There are binary choices in life: up or down, life or die, not quietly accommodating addiction, and slow death because that is less harmful than sudden death, not tolerating drug traffickers.

Our moral, social, legal, and security obligations to ourselves, our neighbors, our communities, and our kids – in the United States and places like Maine – is to stop looking away from the threat and instead turn on it, confront it, and beat it.

At this moment, with a new administration and state elections in two years, Oregon to Maine, we have a chance to win, to save tens of thousands of kids who die if we do nothing. We can outsmart, outdistance, outlive this threat – or we can go the way of the Qing dynasty, within decades gone.

In short, will America be America or 1800s China? Will we beat drug traffickers, win this Third Opium War, or retreat, make excuses, and call premature death from addiction a new normal? Pray with me that we do the right thing because we can, we should, and we must.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).