Drug overdose deaths, especially those related to fentanyl, plunged in 2024, which is something every American should keep in mind before Donald Trump tries to take credit for the successes of others.
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Donald Trump loves to take credit for things he didn’t do while blaming others for the problems he has created.
The president himself succinctly summed up this approach in a recent interview in which he said that the “good parts [of the economy] are the ‘Trump economy,’ and the bad parts are the ‘Biden economy,’ because he has done a terrible job.”
Therefore, it is really important for Americans to understand what things were like when he took office to be able evaluate whether the new administration is doing a good job.
Going back to the economy, for example, they should all be aware that the US outperformed its peer nations at the end of Joe Biden’s term but that Trump’s tariffs are slowing growth and causing markets to drop.
But that’s not the only area in which Trump and his allies are trying to obfuscate the administration’s record.
A cornerstone of his purported agenda is keeping the country safe and sealing the borders to keep out immigrants and drugs.
Trump talks about this all the time, and, claiming that immigration amounts to an invasion, is trying to use various emergency powers to grant himself more authority.
A key part of the argument is that the US is flooded with drugs, especially fentanyl, from Mexico and Canada (with China playing a role in their production), which was also the justification for the initial rounds of tariffs the president slapped on these three countries.
And there is no doubt that fentanyl is a massive problem.
While it is not quite as bad as Attorney General Pam Bondi made it sound when she absurdly claimed that Trump had saved 258 million lives through seizing fentanyl at the border, overdoses related to the drug kill tens of thousands of Americans annually.
However, and this is really important to note when Trump tries to take sole credit for addressing this problem, the number of drug-related deaths was plummeting before he took office.
On Wednesday, the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics announced that drug overdose deaths in the US in 2024 dropped a whopping 26.9 percent to the lowest level since 2019.
Opioid deaths plunged an eye-popping 34 percent to 54,743 last year, which is still a lot.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that this is entirely owed to Biden’s policies or that the crisis is contained. For example, the availability of drugs that can reverse an opioid overdose have likely played a huge role in reversing recent trends.
However, what should be clear is that this decline has nothing to do with Trump’s election, and his own record has to be measured against the current trend of sharply dropping overdose deaths.
So, before he starts taking credit for this success, it is important to know the facts: namely, that opioid deaths doubled during Trump’s first term in office and only began flattening out during the Biden administration.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
