Opinion
The annual U.S. death toll from illegal drugs, which has risen nearly every year since the turn of the century, is expected to fall substantially this year. The timing of that turnaround poses a problem for politicians who aim to prevent substance abuse by disrupting the drug supply.
Those politicians include Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who promises to deploy the military against drug traffickers, and his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, whose platform is also heavy on supply-side tactics. Neither candidate seems to have absorbed the lessons of the “opioid epidemic,” which showed that drug law enforcement is not just ineffective but counterproductive, magnifying the harms it is supposed to alleviate.
In the first two decades of this century, the annual number of drug-related deaths quintupled, reaching a record of nearly 108,000 in 2022. That year, illicit fentanyl figured in 90% of opioid-related deaths and more than two-thirds of all drug-related deaths.
“We took the drug and fentanyl crisis head on, and we achieved the first reduction in overdose deaths in more than 30 years,” Trump brags, referring to the 4% drop between 2017 and 2018, which in retrospect looks like a blip. The upward trend resumed in 2019, and it included a record 30% jump in 2020, Trump’s final year in office.
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded a 3% reduction in fatal overdoses, similar to the 2018 decrease that Trump cites as evidence of his success. But unlike the 2018 drop, this one seems to be continuing: According to preliminary CDC data, the death toll for the year ending in April 2024 was 10% lower than the death toll for the year ending in April 2023.
Nabarun Dasgupta and two other drug researchers at the University of North Carolina found that the downward national trend indicated by the CDC’s provisional counts was consistent with state-level mortality data and with overdose cases reported by hospitals and emergency responders.
‘”Our conclusion is that the dip in overdoses is real,” they write, although “it remains to be seen how long it will be sustained.”
While replacing street drugs with methadone or buprenorphine reduces overdose risk, Dasgupta et al. say, it does not look like expanded access to such “medication-assisted treatment” can account for the recent drop in deaths. But they think it is “plausible” that broader distribution of the opioid antagonist naloxone, which quickly reverses fentanyl and heroin overdoses, has played a role.
By contrast, Dasgupta et al. say it is “unlikely” that antidrug operations along the U.S.-Mexico border have helped reduce overdoses. They note that recent border seizures have mainly involved marijuana and methamphetamine rather than fentanyl, the primary culprit in overdoses, and that retail drug prices have been falling in recent years — the opposite of what you would expect if interdiction were effective.
Supply-side measures, which are doomed by the economics of prohibition, not only have failed to reduce drug-related deaths. They have had the opposite effect.
Prohibition makes drug use much more dangerous by creating a black market in which quality and purity are highly variable and unpredictable, and efforts to enforce prohibition increase those hazards. The crackdown on pain pills, for example, drove nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes, replacing legally produced, reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with iffy street drugs, which became even iffier thanks to the prohibition-driven proliferation of illicit fentanyl.
That crackdown succeeded in reducing opioid prescriptions, which fell by more than half from 2010 to 2022. Meanwhile, the opioid-related death rate more than tripled, while the annual number of opioid-related deaths nearly quadrupled.
Trump and Harris seem unfazed by that debacle. Trump imagines “a full naval embargo on the drug cartels,” while Harris aspires to “disrupt the flow of illicit drugs.” They promise to achieve the impossible while glossing over the costs of persisting in a strategy that has failed for more than a century.
About Jacob Sullum
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Follow him on Twitter: @JacobSullum. During two decades in journalism, he has relentlessly skewered authoritarians of the left and the right, making the case for shrinking the realm of politics and expanding the realm of individual choice. Jacobs’ work appears here at AmmoLand News through a license with Creators Syndicate.
The war on drugs is one of the federal governments biggest failures today each state has different laws that still in the eyes of the law are considered a federal crime. This has cost the taxpayers a heck of a lot of money while men and women remain in jail charged for what today is nothing more than a ticket.
Fentinol deaths are dropping because we are running out of idiots using the poison because they are all dead and no one wants to step up and replace the dead ones and become future dead addicts . Smart people don’t use fentinol .
You’re missing part of the problem. Many of the dead weren’t even aware that they were taking fentanyl. Nowadays, the entire stock of drugs in black market channels has likely been contaminated with the stuff to one degree or another whether intentionally or by accident.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd76HxqCPf0
even pot has been dusted with it ,like was done with pcp back in the day, I would not be surprised if china staged a supply here to contaminate food, they did buy food processing company smithfield ,how many others
I used to be in the pet supply business. Years, ago, ’08-’10 maybe, China processed American corn into corn gluten. The protein levels weren’t right, and the boss of the Chinese plant, decided to boost the levels with melamine. The dog/cat foot companies put tons and tons of it in dog/cat food, at plants all across the US, which made probably at least half of all the dog/cat food made. A lot of dogs and cats died. China executed the boss of the corn gluten plant. My point is, they have a proven history of poisoning food, even if that… Read more »
Not just pet food.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal
I’d forgotten about it being in baby formula and things. In ’08 I would’ve been 16. I remember hearing from a few customers their dogs had gotten sick, a few even died. I can’t remember hearing about anyone’s cats though. Being an independent store, most of the food we carried didn’t have corn gluten in it. That was mostly used as filler in the Dog Chow, Kibbles ‘n Bits, etc, that you find in the grocery store. We didn’t carry that, couldn’t come close to matching the price. Carried mostly premium food, but some of our lesser brands were recalled.… Read more »
I have a question. Just how much did the drug trafficking fall when Trump had what was almost a completed wall up and Mexican police enforcing stay in Mexicrap policy. I don’t recall hearing about fentanyl overdoses everyday like I do now?
they have not published it , amounts interdicted at sea went way up back to 1980s levels ,but the mix has changed
Appears Americans are the culprits.
Most fentanyl is being smuggled into the U.S. along the southern border, often in vehicles driven by American citizens, as cartels and other criminal groups in Mexico have turned the production of the synthetic opioid into a clandestine industry that has become the primary source of fentanyl in the U.S., according to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).
Fentanyl seizures rise at U.S.-Mexico border — here’s why – CBS News
The massively expensive and failed war on drugs has only made drugs more dangerous by creating a massive black market which has given rise to the cartels. The same way alcohol prohibition led to more dangerous alcohol, government actively poisoning people, and the rise of the mafia. Government has absolutely zero constitutional authority to dictate what adults choose to put into their own bodies and, even if they did, prohibition has never worked. It never ceases to amaze me that some of the same people who understand how arms laws are unconstitutional and do not work somehow believe drug laws… Read more »
Hee haw Harris said she will stop the flow of drugs if she is president. So what has she been doing for the past four years as VP to stop the flow of drugs into America? The cartels must be bringing in semi truck loads of illegal drugs into America everyday. What do they do at check points the southern border? Just wave all semi trucks through? If drug deaths are dropping, it’s because the drug addicts are dying off States like California, that lealized pot and said that would stop drug dealers selling pot. What happened was the state… Read more »
Ah, yes…the wonders of methadone. I remember when it was used in clinics to try and get hypes (heroin addicts) off of horse in the 70s. Addicts had weekly, or more, visits to take, and swallow, a pill. Methadone had its own high, although less than heroin, but they became addicted to methadone, and when they couldn’t get their methadone fix, reverted to heroin, or other drugs. Didn’t work then, doesn’t work now.
This simply shows that people fail to learn from history. The prohibition era did nothing to stop alcohol consumption. In fact, it increased. All that happened is that production shifted underground and organized crime (mafioso) realized huge profit from becoming the primary distributor. Contrary to what movies and newsreels depicted, beer and liquor was available right out in the open as opposed to “secret hidden speak easys”. Those places did exist but they were the “nicer” night club type settings as opposed to a neighborhood corner dive bar. All of the taxpayer money spent on enforcing prohibition was a total… Read more »