Sixteen Tons

One of Donald Trump's major selling points for his proposed southern border wall is that it would stop most illicit drugs coming into the United States. He has repeatedly -- and falsely -- inferred that most illegal narcotics enter the United States overland, carried by illegal immigrants.

The reality is that almost all drugs come in through legal points of entry -- by vehicle, by train, and by watercraft. The majority of heroin brought into the United States comes through the southern border, but more than 99 percent of that enters through legal points of entry (details here).

Other drugs come primarily by sea and, of course, come in no where near the southern border. That point was well illustrated yesterday when federal authorities seized more than sixteen tons of cocaine in Philadelphia's port, more than a thousand miles from Mexico's border.

It was a record haul for that part of the country and has a street value of more than a billion dollars. And, of course, a southern wall would have done utterly nothing to stop it.

Trump's proposed wall is a fifteenth century solution to a twenty-first century problem. Further, one of the big selling points, that it will nearly stop the flow of illegal and dangerous drugs, is a gigantic lie.