Recent Overdose Trends Underline the Folly of the War on Drugs
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 percent 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 percent drop between 2017 and 2018, which in retrospect looks like a blip. The upward trend resumed in 2019, and it included a record 30 percent jump in 2020, Trump’s final year in office.
Last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recorded a 3 percent 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 percent 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 conc
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