“Pawn Stars” headliner Rick Harrison blamed the border crisis for his son ODing on fentanyl.
Adam Harrison, 39, reportedly died on in Las Vegas, Nevada last week, where his father’s Gold & Silver Pawn Shop, the site of History Channel’s hit reality series, is also located.
The Harrison family was notified of Adam’s death on Friday. He had previously worked at the infamous pawn shop, but was never involved in the series.
Rick confirmed that his second eldest son has passed away in a statement to Fox News.
JUST IN: Pawn Stars' Rick Harrison blasts the ongoing border crisis after his son Adam died from a fentanyl overdose.
Devastating.
While speaking to the New York Post, Harrison blasted politicians for refusing to do anything about the border crisis which continues to be ignored… pic.twitter.com/9B02syhTc5
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 22, 2024
“Yes, I can confirm Adam died from a fentanyl overdose,” he told the outlet. “The fentanyl crisis in this country must be taken more seriously.”
“It seems it is just flowing over the borders and nothing is being done about it,” he concluded. “We must do better.”
According to the CDC, the synthetic opioid is 50 times stronger than heroin and as much as 100 times stronger than morphine.
The fentanyl first began surging in 2020 with 65,000 related deaths a year. In 2023, that number more than doubled to an unprecedented 112,000 overdose deaths.
According to White House drug czar Dr. Rahul Gupta federal spending on the crisis has risen, with the annual war on drugs cost spiking to $40 billion a year.
“We have to do more,” Gupta remarked. “We have to make that sure we’re getting people the help they need [with addiction] and we have to go after the trafficking profits [of drug dealers].”
While U.S. law enforcement authorities managed to seize “more than 360 million deadly doses” in 2023, efforts to curb Mexican drug cartels from smuggling the drug into the country have largely failed.
“The war on drugs hasn’t worked,” journalist Ioan Grillo told NPR. “We’ve got more deaths from drug overdose than ever, we’ve got more violence between drug cartels in Mexico than ever.”
On Thursday musician Jose “Luis” Vasquez and techno DJ Silent Servant died of a suspected fentanyl overdose over the weekend.
Vasquez, the DJ, whose real name is John “Juan” Mendez, and Mendez’s wife, Simone Ling, were found in Mendez’s Los Angeles loft along with drug paraphernalia after police performed a wellness check.
Fentanyl in it’s powdered form looks just like street drugs cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine.
When it is pressed into pills, they often are crafted to resemble prescription opioids and illegal drugs like ecstasy.
Drug can be laced with fentanyl without the user being able to see, taste, or smell toxic levels of the synthetic opioid.
According to GOP presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, “We’ve had more Americans die of fentanyl than the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam wars, combined.”
The DEA reported the the Sinaloa and the New Generation Jalisco cartels are the primary fentanyl trafficking groups from Mexico responsible for bringing the opiod into the country.
They typically smuggle in the drug across the border in Arizona and California in low concentration, high-volume loads of fentanyl-containing tablets that typically have less than a 10 percent concentration of the synthetic opioid.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court ruled in favor by a 5-4 vote to allow U.S. Border Patrol, at the behest of the Biden administration, to remove razor wire on the Texas border.
The Fifth Circuit had put an injunction in place to temporarily block border patrol from cutting the wire, but the Department of Homeland Security countered with an emergency application to freeze the order at the beginning of January.
They argued that the razor wire prevents Border Patrol agents from gaining access to “the very border they are charged with patrolling and the individuals they are charged with apprehending and inspecting.”
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh voted to keep the injunction in place.