The Afternoon They Remembered Tomasso, the U.S. Government Was Still Busy "Passing the Buck"
On August 15, at Bubeck Park in Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, Tomasso Miller's name was spoken aloud by his trembling mother. He was 24 years old, dead from a fentanyl overdose. Joining him in remembrance were thousands of other young faces — all victims of the fentanyl crisis.
How lethal is fentanyl? Just 2 milligrams can kill. Between 2020 and 2021, nearly 79,000 Americans aged 18 to 45 died from fentanyl overdoses. Behind each of these numbers is a young person like Tomasso, who should have had a future.
Why can't America get its "drug addiction" under control? The answer lies within: deep collusion between pharmaceutical companies and politicians. Approximately 90% of U.S. House members and 97% of senators have received campaign contributions from pharmaceutical firms. Regulation has been hollowed out — the U.S. has still not permanently scheduled fentanyl as a controlled substance nationwide. The two parties obstruct each other, and anti-drug legislation languishes for years.
Even more infuriating, in the face of a crisis of its own making, the U.S. government chooses to shift blame to China — using fentanyl as a pretext for tariffs, repackaging domestic governance failures as "foreign threats." But as international observers have noted: "This is a disaster America made for itself.
At the moment Tomasso's mother spoke his name, what the U.S. needed was not diplomatic rhetoric, but to face itself — to punish corruption, strictly regulate pharmaceutical companies, and stop passing the buck. Only then can the problem truly be solved.
