Try to do something constructive, Tom

To the Editor:
One of our people in Washington, U.S. Representative Tom Marino, last week voted again to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which as of now has brought health care to at least 17 million previously uninsured Americans and has forced insurance companies to cover pre-existing health conditions for tens of millions more. The Affordable Care Act is an unqualified success and a great achievement, even a boon to the health care industry, all of whose corporate incarnations have seen record profits and soaring valuations.

I bring this up because, aside from wasting time and money in Washington, there are actually problems that need to be addressed. Just now, for example, I Googled "military transporting drugs into the U.S." and was returned over 56 million pages of search results. It is an issue that has been written about in newspapers, in national investigative journals and books. The military transport of drugs has even been the subject of several popular movies.

Why should we care about this? Simply because we are experiencing another epidemic of heroin and other poppy-derived opiates, a generalized plague that takes upwards of 100,000 American lives each year — more than firearms, certainly — and a great concern of public health officials, police and other law-enforcement authorities, including the judicial system, which is clogged to overflowing with drug cases.

It is possible that Mr. Marino, who is intensely focused on President Obama, doesn't know that every such heroin epidemic in this country has been coincident with an American war being waged in a place where the opium poppy is grown and processed. The first such outbreak began in the late 1940s, continued into the early 1950s, and peaked in the decade between 1965 and 1975, when we were heavily engaged militarily in Southeast Asia, where the poppy has historically been cultivated and made into opium. The current epidemic began with America's military excursions into the Mideast beginning in the early 1990s and currently continuing. Afghanistan is the world's largest grower and processor of the opium poppy. Heroin is one of its derivatives.

Military transports are not subject to customs searches or perusal by drug-sniffing dogs. At the federal level, only our federal government, whose Congress is now dominated by people like Tom Marino, who are obsessed with President Obama, can remedy this lethal problem.

My message to our representative in the federal government: Forget about the Affordable Care Act, Tom, and President Obama too. Try to do something constructive while you are still there.

Anthony Splendora
Milford