Pop star Demi Lovato is beautiful, talented, and successful — which makes her alleged heroin overdose on Tuesday all the more heart-wrenching to her family and friends. A woman who has her whole life ahead of her throwing it away due to addiction. Her near-death experience received the attention of many celebrities and media outlets. Lovato's overdose and struggle with addiction is a tragedy, but the 64,000 Americans who died in 2016 have just become nameless statistics, and Washington isn't doing nearly enough to stop this crisis.

According to the New York Times, the amount of Americans who have died from an opioid overdose last year is higher than those who died of AIDS, gun deaths, and car accidents during any given year. More people died in a single year from overdoses than during the entire Vietnam War.

The financial burden is equally as startling. A report from CNBC stated that the economic cost to the United States since 2001 of the opioid epidemic is more than $1 trillion, and is projected to be $500 billion from 2018 through 2020.

Those statistics are incredibly alarming and should warrant urgent action from Washington, but politicians have yet to stop the flow of drugs in our country.

The State Department reported in 2017 that Mexico produces between 90 to 94 percent of all the heroin consumed in the United States.

While American parents mourn the deaths of their children to this plague of drugs in the United States, Mexico has refused to take this issue seriously, and corruption between the government and the drug cartels is rampant. State and local governments will go bankrupt fighting this crisis, but once the drugs have entered local communities, there's only so much they can do.

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The U.S. is sending billions of dollars to Mexico through foreign aid and remittances that both legal and illegal immigrants send back every year. Until Washington starts adding financial pressures on Mexico to fight against the cartel, communities in the U.S. will always be playing defense, and the body count will increase substantially through the end of the decade.

Leaders in Washington need to take this fight to Mexico. Stop sending their government $350 million in foreign aid, tax the billions of dollars in remittances, threaten to pull out of NAFTA, build a wall on the southern border, and add additional screening metrics at the ports of entry.

While Lovato recovered in a hospital room on Tuesday night, approximately 150 other American parents got a call that their child didn't make it. The drugs from Mexico snuffed their future right from underneath them. Until the U.S. takes the fight to its origin and protects the southern border, this crisis will only continue. And while occasionally a high profile celebrity will suffer an overdose and some like actor Philip Seymour Hoffman will die from it, most of overdose deaths will go without national awareness. The only attention they will receive are as statistics used in news articles and bureaucratic reports on the epidemic.

Ryan Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is a writer based in New York.