"The staggering number of overdose deaths caused by the drug has been used by Donald Trump's administration to justify attacking boats in the Caribbean, deploy militarized forces to detain legal citizens, and impose sweeping tariffs - despite having little data to prove that its target countries, including Canada, were actually to blame. The president went as far as to sign an executive order calling the highly addictive and extremely potent synthetic opiate a "weapon of mass destruction.""
"Yet the latest research shows something inconvenient for that narrative: a sharp reduction in fentanyl overdoses that started before Trump took office, almost certainly in response to policy under his predecessor Joe Biden. As researchers noted in a paper published in the journal Science this week, fatal overdoses from synthetic opioids like fentanyl plummeted after peaking at 76,000 in 2023 in the US, dropping by over a third by the end of 2024."
"The researchers proposed a possible explanation, writing that a "major disruption in the illicit fentanyl trade, possibly tied to Chinese government actions," may have "translated into sharp reductions in overdose mortality beginning in mid- or late-2023 and continued into 2024 across both the US and Canada." In other words, as Axiom reports, diplomatic pressure has proven far more effective than efforts to crack down on drug dealers on the street."
The United States enacted aggressive measures under the Trump administration in response to fentanyl, including maritime actions, militarized detentions, tariffs, and an executive order labeling fentanyl a "weapon of mass destruction." Research shows fatal overdoses from synthetic opioids peaked at 76,000 in 2023 and fell by over a third by the end of 2024, with provisional data suggesting further declines into 2025. Researchers link the sharp mortality reductions beginning mid- or late-2023 to a major disruption in the illicit fentanyl trade, possibly tied to Chinese government actions, and note diplomatic pressure outperformed domestic street-level enforcement.
Read at Futurism
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