Make America free from the scourge of illegal drugs!

The only thing that surprises me about this is that anyone would be surprised.

The widespread abuse of the potent opioid fentanyl appears to be largely the result of illicit manufacturing of the synthetic drug as opposed to the misuse of legally prescribed versions of the painkiller, according to two US government studies released Thursday.

That represents a dramatic change in the way opioids have traditionally been abused, and means public health officials will likely have to adjust their response to the two-decade-long crisis.

Until recent years, much of the illegal trafficking in opioid painkillers started in a doctor’s office with a prescription for drugs like OxyContin< and Percocet. Some patients became addicted after getting a prescription for a legitimate injury. Others stole drugs prescribed to family members or friends.

And unethical doctors working out of “pill mills” wrote huge numbers of prescriptions to addicts or to middlemen who sold them to drug dealers.

But it appears that much of the fentanyl now on the street is coming from clandestine labs. Many of these are in China, and the fentanyl — which can be 50 to 100 times more potent than heroin — is often routed through Mexican drug cartels and then distributed in the US.

The number of drugs containing fentanyl seized by law enforcement jumped 426 percent from 2013 to 2014, and then almost tripled from 2014 to 2015, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. The number of synthetic opioid deaths nationally went up 79 percent from 2013 to 2014.

But the number of prescriptions for fentanyl from 2010 through 2014 has remained flat.

In Ohio, which has been particularly hard hit by fentanyl overdoses, prescriptions for fentanyl actually declined by 7 percent from 2013 to 2014.

This is precisely what the drug warriors wanted when they demanded — and got — a crackdown on medically prescribed opiate drugs. Criminalization is always seen as better than medicalization (to say nothing of decriminalization or legalization). The more the laws spur crackdowns on supplies in one place, the more the motivation for suppliers to find or create supplies in other places. What should be a simple economic issue is constantly spun and re-spun (with the help of law enforcement bureaucrats and manipulated grieving moms) as a moral issue. To compound that illogic, it then is bootstrapped into a public policy, even “national security” issue.

And of course, as Hillary Clinton famously said, we can’t legalize drugs because there’s too much money involved.

I’d like to imagine Trump is better, but where there’s so much money and so much emotion, what’s the point of imagining?

We cannot make America drug-free again because America was never drug-free.

What we can do is make America free again. (Illegal drugs were not a problem before 1914.)

If you don’t like the current approach, by all means “vote Libertarian while you can.”