By Trump’s Logic, Biden Deserves Credit for a Dramatic Drop in Overdose Deaths
During the last year of Donald Trump’s first term as president, drug-related deaths in the United States rose by 30 percent—the largest annual increase ever recorded. During Joe Biden’s final year as president, according to preliminary estimates reported last week, that death toll fell by 27 percent—another record.
On the face of it, Biden did a far better job of waging the war on drugs than Trump. But that conclusion credits presidents with much more power than they actually have to curtail substance abuse by attacking the supply of illegal drugs—an impossible mission doomed by the economics of prohibition.
Attorney General Pam Bondi recently claimed the Trump administration had “saved…258 million lives” by intercepting shipments of illicit fentanyl. While Bondi’s risible math broke new ground, it reflected her boss’s simpleminded faith in the war on drugs.
“I’m going to create borders,” Trump promised during his 2016 campaign. “No drugs are coming in….Believe me, I will solve the problem.”
Trump did not, in fact, solve the problem. By the end of his first term, the annual number of drug deaths was 44 percent higher than it was the year before he took office.
That sorry record did not stop Trump from bragging, during his 2024 campaign, that “we took the drug and fentanyl crisis head on” and “achieved the first reduction in overdose deaths in more than 30 years.” He was referring to a 4 percent drop in 2018, after which the death toll resumed its upward trend.
During his first State of the Union address in 2022, Biden promised that he would “beat the opioid epidemic” and “stop the flow of illicit drugs
Article from Reason.com
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