Listen to a J.D. Vance speech long enough, and you’ll hear him mention drugs. From his personal story of his mother’s addiction to his conspiracy theory about Joe Biden aiming to “kill a bunch of MAGA voters” by allowing fentanyl into the U.S., the Republican vice presidential candidate has made opioid-related issues central to his policy platforms and public persona. His tales about the overdose crisis, including his family’s experiences, are a linchpin of his appeal.

Vance is not simply sharing vulnerably about his life and community. He is cynically exploiting the very real tragedy of rampant overdose deaths to justify racist politics, including border militarization and deportations, fearmongering around foreign policy, heightened police power, and racist rhetoric that fuels white nationalist fervor. It’s crucial to recognize Vance’s narrative as part of a broader rhetorical and political push, which, shamefully, uses the overdose crisis to rationalize policies that will fuel more tragic deaths.

As the Democratic ticket shifts following Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race, it’s important to get clear on Vance’s exploitation of the opioid narrative — and ensure that, as debates move forward, he and Trump are challenged on it at every turn.

In a 2022 campaign ad, Vance asks, “Are you a racist? Do you hate Mexicans? The media calls us racists for wanting to build Trump’s wall. … Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more Democrat voters pouring into this country.” Of course, Vance’s ad is inaccurate when it comes to Democrats’ immigration policy; Biden has actually overseen a “four-year rightward march on immigration,” as Shireen Akram-Boshar notes in Truthout.

Further, Vance is overtly justifying racism via the specter of “more illegal drugs.” He is advocating death-dealing systems — in this case, border hyper-militarization and deportation — in answer to deaths.

“This issue is personal,” Vance says in his ad. “I nearly lost my mother to the poison coming across our border.” And in his recent speech at the RNC, Vance described losing members of his Ohio community, saying that phone calls with people back home often include the sentence, “They died of an overdose.”

This issue is personal for me, too. My sister died of an opioid overdose, and my journalism and activism have been profoundly shaped by her addiction and the way society responded to it. There’s no denying that we must confront this crisis: 107,543 people died of drug overdoses in the U.S. last year alone.

State violence is never an answer to overdose deaths, many of which are fueled by state violence … whether in the form of policing or deportations or harsh punitive laws.

But confronting this crisis cannot mean waging yet another drug war, this time baselessly targeting migrants. State violence is never an answer to overdose deaths, many of which are fueled by state violence, including the violence of criminalization. And state violence, whether in the form of policing or deportations or harsh punitive laws, continues to be a standard response to the crisis across party lines.

As the federal government has implemented policies like those advocated by Vance, overdoses have increased. A recent report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) showed that 500,000 people were deported for drug offenses between 2002 and 2020, during which time overdose deaths skyrocketed.

I asked Maritza Perez Medina, the director of the Office of Federal........

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