An in-depth Kansas City Star article on heroin subtitled, “If this mom and daughter can beat addiction, can America, too,” fails to mention where the heroin comes from.

If America is to “beat addiction,” as the Star reporters hope, it would seem useful to say where America has to go to start the beating. Thanks to Sam Quinones’s Dreamland–the “must-read book about America’s heroin crisis,” according to the Christian Science Monitor–we know where that is.

After years of research, many of them spent in Mexico, Quinones does a masterful job of tracing the drug-dealing enterprise to a poppy-growing region of Northwest Mexico. There, the local entrepreneurs have mastered the arts of producing and distributing black tar heroin, which is cheaper and more potent than the pharmaceutical opioids on which many Americans have been hooked. They have also mastered the art getting across the border illegally with their product.

And there’s the rub. President Donald Trump knows this, which is one reason why he has cracked down on illegal border crossings. The Star readers would not know this. What they are told about Trump is that critics have “faulted the president for including no specific funding increase” for his newly announced commission to fight opioid abuse.

And that’s not all. “Others,” the Star reporters tell us without specifics, “cast doubt on the president’s commitment.” These critics claim that had the Trump-approved Obamacare replacement passed, insurers would no longer have to cover substance abuse as “an ‘essential’ benefit.”

The media will dig this deep into the weeds in order to undermine Trump. They will not, however, write a word about how the heroin gets here lest in doing so they make Trump’s border policy look prudent.

Over the years, the media have poured an enormous amount of critical ink into the denunciation of Big Tobacco and with good effect. During the Obama years, however, they and the president were as reluctant to say “Mexican heroin networks” as they were “radical Islamic terrorism.”

In no small part as a result, Big Heroin was killing four times as many young Americans when Obama left office as it was when he started.