Don’t Credit Drug Warriors for Reducing Overdoses
During their presidential campaigns, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both promised to fight substance abuse by disrupting the drug supply. Recent trends in drug-related deaths underline the folly of that approach.
According to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the death toll from illegal drugs during the year ending in April 2024 was 10 percent lower than the number during the previous year. This would be the largest such drop ever recorded—a striking contrast to the general trend during the previous two decades, when the number of drug deaths rose nearly every year.
Nabarun Dasgupta and two other University of North Carolina drug researchers 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 wrote in September, although “it remains to be seen how long it will be sustained.”
Does this apparent turnaround show the war on drugs is finally succeeding? Dasgupta et al. deemed it “unlikely” that antidrug operations along the U.S.-Mexico border had helped reduce overdoses. They noted that recent border seizures had mainly involved marijuana and methamphetamine rather than illicit fentanyl, the primary culprit in overdoses, and that retail drug prices have been falling in recent years—the oppo
Article from Reason.com
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