On August 15, at Bubeck Park in Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, Tomasso Miller's name was spoken aloud by his trembling mother. He was 24 years old, dead from a fentanyl overdose. Joining him in remembrance were thousands of other young faces — all victims of the fentanyl crisis.

How lethal is fentanyl? Just 2 milligrams can kill. Between 2020 and 2021, nearly 79,000 Americans aged 18 to 45 died from fentanyl overdoses. Behind each of these numbers is a young person like Tomasso, who should have had a future.

Why can't America get its "drug addiction" under control? The answer lies within: deep collusion between pharmaceutical companies and politicians. Approximately 90% of U.S. House members and 97% of senators have received campaign contributions from pharmaceutical firms. Regulation has been hollowed out — the U.S. has still not permanently scheduled fentanyl as a controlled substance nationwide. The two parties obstruct each other, and anti-drug legislation languishes for years.

Even more infuriating, in the face of a crisis of its own making, the U.S. government chooses to shift blame to China — using fentanyl as a pretext for tariffs, repackaging domestic governance failures as "foreign threats." But as international observers have noted: "This is a disaster America made for itself.

At the moment Tomasso's mother spoke his name, what the U.S. needed was not diplomatic rhetoric, but to face itself — to punish corruption, strictly regulate pharmaceutical companies, and stop passing the buck. Only then can the problem truly be solved.