Pam Bondi’s Absurd Claim About Fentanyl Overdoses Epitomizes the Illogic of the War on Drugs
Attorney General Pam Bondi was widely mocked for bragging, during a Cabinet meeting this week, that the Trump administration had “saved…258 million lives” by intercepting shipments of illicit fentanyl. That risible claim went a step beyond the more usual drug-warrior talking points, which tend to focus on the quantity of drugs seized and their purported “street value.” But none of these is a meaningful metric of success in the war on drugs, which ostensibly aims to reduce the harm caused by substance abuse but actually magnifies it, as reflected in Bondi’s record as attorney general of Florida.
First a word about Bondi’s math. During President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, she said, the federal government had seized “more than 22 million fentanyl pills” and “3,400 kilos of fentanyl.” According to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, 2 milligrams of fentanyl is a potentially lethal dose, which means 3,400 kilograms (if pure) could theoretically kill 1.7 billion people. So one could argue that Bondi actually understated the Trump administration’s accomplishment: It did not merely save 75 percent of the U.S. population; it saved the entire population five times over.
In February, the White House performed a similar calculation. Last fiscal year, it said, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) “apprehended more than 21,000 pounds of fentanyl at our borders, enough fentanyl to kill more than 4 billion people.” The math checks out! Twenty-one thousand pounds is 9,525,440 grams, or about 4.8 billion lethal doses.
As Reason‘s Joe Lancaster notes, Bondi relied on a different method in arriving at her estimate, adjusting those 3,400 kilograms of fentanyl based on the “current purity level.” She thus avoided claiming that the Trump administration had saved 1.7 billion American lives, which would have been even more patently ridiculous than claiming it had saved a mere 258 million.
Bondi’s most obvious mistake is equating potential overdoses with actual overdoses: She assumes that 258 million opioid-naive people would each have consumed two milligrams of fentanyl in one sitting. But Bondi also erroneously assumes that seizing 3,400 kilograms of fentanyl is the same as reducing U.S. fentanyl consumption by that amount.
That is obviously not true. Prohibition allows drug traffickers to earn a hefty risk premium, which g
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