First published 2018
Howard G. Buffett draws on his experience as both a philanthropist and an Illinois sheriff to examine America's interconnected border and drug crises. The author owns land along the U.S.-Mexico border and has witnessed how Mexican heroin and other opiates flood into American communities in unprecedented volumes. Buffett argues that politicians wrongly treat border security and opioid addiction as separate problems when Mexican cartels have grown powerful by exploiting weak border policies and desperate migrants. The crisis affects not just border states like Texas and Arizona but reaches communities in Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Vermont as cartels turn migrants into drug transporters and Americans into addicts. Rather than proposing a wall as the solution, Buffett presents a bipartisan strategy that targets cartels directly, strengthens national security, and addresses the underlying instability in Mexico and Central America that fuels the chaos.
Genres: american, political-science, social-issues, non-fiction, 21st-century, current-affairs
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: bipartisan-strategy, investigative-journalism, personal-experience
Setting: Mexico, United States
Period: 21st-century
384 pages · Hardcover · Grand Central Publishing
Content warnings: addiction, drug-use, violence