President Trump knows that the United States is suffering through one of the worst drug epidemics on record. Its breadth was captured well by Christopher Caldwell, who looked back for comparisons. “A heroin scourge in America’s housing projects coincided with a wave of heroin-addicted soldiers brought back from Vietnam, with a cost peaking between 1973 and 1975 at 1.5 overdose deaths per 100,000,” he began by way of context. “The Nixon White House panicked. Curtis Mayfield wrote his ballad ‘Freddie’s Dead.’ The crack epidemic of the mid- to late 1980s was worse, with a death rate reaching almost two per 100,000. George H. W. Bush declared war on drugs. The present opioid epidemic is killing 10.3 people per 100,000, and that is without the fentanyl-impacted statistics from 2016. In some states it is far worse: over thirty per 100,000 in New Hampshire and over forty in West Virginia.”

Roughly 52,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2015.

And drugs came up in Trump’s interview with the Associated Press. This is how they came up:

TRUMP: Well, first of all, the wall will cost much less than the numbers I'm seeing. I'm seeing numbers, I mean, this wall is not going to be that expensive.

AP: What do you think the estimate on it would be?

TRUMP: Oh I'm seeing numbers — $24 billion, I think I'll do it for $10 billion or less. That's not a lot of money relative to what we're talking about. If we stop 1 percent of the drugs from coming in — and we'll stop all of it.

But if we stop 1 percent of the drugs because we have the wall — they're coming around in certain areas, but if you have a wall, they can't do it because it's a real wall. That's a tremendously good investment, 1 percent. The drugs pouring through on the southern border are unbelievable. We're becoming a drug culture, there's so much. And most of it's coming from the southern border.

The wall will stop the drugs.