Wall Street Journal
By Reid Epstein
February 4, 2016
Ted
Cruz spent 18 minutes telling an emotional, gripping story of his
family’s history of drug and alcohol abuse. His older half-sister and
later his father, he told an
addiction policy forum, got hooked and became addicted. His sister
died, his father survived only after becoming religious, Mr. Cruz said
in a Baptist church here.
So
it was jarring to hear Mr. Cruz then pivot to his policy solution:
building a wall along the nation’s southern border to stop illegal
immigration and halt the flow
of drugs from Mexico.
“If
we want to turn around the drug crisis we have got to finally and
permanently secure the border,” Mr. Cruz said. “We need to solve this
problem, we need to build this
wall.”
Mr.
Cruz’s appearance at a drug addiction forum comes as New Hampshire
voters have classified heroin as the state’s top problem. Rarely does a
presidential candidate get
through a town hall forum without being asked how they’d address the
problem. Mr. Cruz said 48% of residents here know someone addicted to
heroin – 60% of people who are 35 years old or younger.
To
connect with the audience, Mr. Cruz told of his older half-sister
Miriam. The Texas senator, who wrote about her plight in his book last
year, told of trying to rescue
her from living in a Philadelphia crack house and subsidizing her son’s
boarding school before she died of a drug overdose in 2011.
“Sometimes
people make decisions, bound and determined, to destroy themselves,” he
said. “You wonder as a family, ‘Could I have done more? Was there a way
to pull her
back, to change the path she was on?’ Those are questions you can never
fully answer.”
Mr.
Cruz then placed blame for the drug problem on the various groups he
accused of abetting illegal immigration: Democrats (“There’s a new
politically correct term now
for illegal immigrants: It’s called undocumented Democrats,” he said to
awkward laughter) and business-oriented Republicans.
“What’s
if anything even more cynical is all the Republicans who listen to the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who listen to Wall Street, who listen to the
lobbyists in Washington,”
Mr. Cruz said. “They think it’s fabulous. Cheap labor drives down
wages, what could be better? But it’s that political commitment that
results in our not securing the border and not stopping the flow of
drugs into this country.”
Mr.
Cruz has made combating illegal immigration a hallmark of his campaign.
A onetime advocate of legalizing some undocumented immigrants, in 2015
he renounced that position
when rival Donald Trump proposed deporting some 11 million people in
the country illegally. Mr. Cruz has cited his opposition to the 2013
Senate immigration legislation that Sen. Marco Rubio co-authored as
evidence of his bedrock conservative credentials.
Mr. Cruz’s appeared here at what organizers billed as a non-political event to which all presidential campaigns were invited.
Vermont
Gov. Peter Shumlin, a Democrat who is a Hillary Clinton surrogate,
spoke before Mr. Cruz arrived. Mr. Shumlin blamed the Food and Drug
Administration for approving
drugs like Oxycontin, a highly addictive painkiller that can lead to
heroin abuse. Oxycontin was approved by the FDA in 1995, when Mrs.
Clinton’s husband Bill Clinton was president.
Following
his remarks Mr. Cruz sat on a nine-person panel discussing ways to
address New Hampshire’s drug crisis. He told the group, which included
drug counselors and
former addicts, that he supports legislation to funnel more federal
money into drug prevention programs but reiterated that the problem is
one that can only be solved at local levels.
“It’s
not going to be the government that solves this,” Mr. Cruz said. “It’s
going to take people on the ground connecting one person at a time. …
People have to make
personal transformations.”
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