If President Donald Trump had done nothing over the last six months, he could be crowing loudly about the country's success in fighting the opioid crisis right now.
In 2023, fatal overdoses dropped for the first time in five years. In 2024, they fell 24% from the previous year. A report from early 2025 showed that fatal fentanyl overdoses had gone down in every single state and the District of Columbia. It seemed that the nation was finally turning a corner after years of ever-worsening news from this "modern plague."
But rather than capitalize on what experts have called "historic" and "very, very exciting" trends, the Trump administration has spread misinformation, cut key funding and dismantled some of the most effective tools for preventing overdose deaths. Now it appears the U.S. may be backsliding, with the latest blow coming from a bill Trump signed on the Fourth of July.
The problem began at the very beginning of Trump's second term, when the White House made a series of inaccurate statements that immediately undermined its credibility on the opioid crisis. First, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt falsely claimed that fentanyl has killed "tens of millions of Americans." (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that deaths from all opioids between 1999 and 2022 add up to "nearly 727,000," which is horrifying enough, but nowhere near Leavitt's claim.)
This was followed by Attorney General Pam Bondi proclaiming that the Trump administration's fentanyl seizures have saved "over 119 million lives," an estimate she later raised to 258 million. (Both numbers have been thoroughly debunked by Slate and PolitiFact, but there are only 342 million Americans, so that would be somewhere between a third and three-fourths of the entire country.)
Elsewhere, Trump's White House cited fentanyl as a rationale for tariffs against Canada despite the fact that less than 1% of the U.S. supply of fentanyl originates from our northern neighbor. And to monitor the progress of this false-premise-based policy, the White House demanded information on fentanyl overdoses that, according to The New York Times, "does not exist."
Things got worse from there.
Read Philip Eil's full column here.
