Change! U.S. Sees First Sustained Drop in Fentanyl-Linked Overdose Deaths in Years
One reason, as explained by Sec. of War Pete Hegseth, is that “NO ONE wants to get into a narco boat” after U.S. military’s successful hits.
Finally, I have some good news to share about the illegal drug trade in this country!
U.S. overdose deaths, including those involving fentanyl, appear to have fallen markedly through 2024 and into 2025. This reverses a disastrous decades-long trend.
Federal data released Wednesday showed that overdose deaths have been falling for more than two years — the longest drop in decades — but also that the decline was slowing.
And the monthly death toll is still not back to what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, let alone where it was before the current overdose epidemic struck decades ago, said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University researcher who studies overdose trends.
“Overall I think this continues to be encouraging, especially since we’re seeing declines almost across the nation,” he said.
Overdose deaths began steadily climbing in the 1990s with overdoses involving opioid painkillers, followed by waves of deaths from heroin and — more recently — illicit fentanyl. Deaths peaked nearly 110,000 in 2022, fell a little in 2023 and then plummeted 27% in 2024, to around 80,000. That was the largest one-year decline ever recorded.
The legacy media won't show this:
> 2023 all-time highs in border encounters, illegal immigration, and fentanyl deaths
> 2025 lowest numbers in decades and still plummeting
Keep in mind not a single law changed
Trump just started enforcing the ones we already have, which had… https://t.co/3fPQ03txw6 pic.twitter.com/XJ9bThKb7X
— Arthur MacWaters (@ArthurMacwaters) January 16, 2026
The data is still provisional, and there are certainly areas of concern. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other experts offer a wide array of reasons for this development.
CDC officials reported that deaths were down in all states except Arizona, Hawaii, Kansas, New Mexico and North Dakota. But they noted it’s likely that not all overdose deaths have been reported yet in every state, and additional data in the future might affect that state count.
Researchers cannot yet say with confidence why deaths have gone down. Experts have offered multiple possible explanations: increased availability of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, expanded addiction treatment, shifts in how people use drugs, and the growing impact of billions of dollars in opioid lawsuit settlement money.
I would like to offer two others, which are the direct result of President Donald Trump and his follow-through in effectively attacking the fentanyl market in this country.
The first one is treating the drug as a weapon of mass destruction and targeting those bringing it into this country. When was the last time the Department of War hit a drug boat? Late December.
The Coast Guard ended its search for an unspecified number of survivors of an American airstrike on a suspected drug boat in the eastern Pacific Ocean.
The Coast Guard dispatched aircraft and personnel on Tuesday after American forces hit a trio of boats in Central American waters, leaving several survivors and killing three people. Late on Friday, Jan. 2, the Coast Guard announced it was ending its search. It was the most extensive search and rescue operation the U.S. has carried out since the military began airstrikes on suspected drug vessels in September. The spokesperson did not say if any of the survivors had been recovered yet.
The survivors were part of a three-ship convoy traveling in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Dec. 30. According to U.S. Southern Command, intelligence identified the ships as a convoy of “narco-trafficking vessels” and the military launched a strike on one of the ships. That killed three people onboard. The crews of the other two vehicles jumped ship. SOUTHCOM said the crews distanced themselves from the vessels, which were both sunk in “follow-on engagements.”
Thanks to the approach taken by the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, nobody wants to crew drug boats anymore.
“There haven’t been many boats sunk recently because we can’t find boats to sink… because NO ONE wants to get into a narco boat." – Sec War Hegseth pic.twitter.com/EKY4BDBQlL
— CrazyClips (@CrazyCrazyclips) January 16, 2026
Additionally, in November, China implemented new export controls and licensing rules to restrict shipments of key precursor chemicals used to manufacture illicit fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.
China’s Ministry of Commerce and four other government agencies added 13 chemicals to a list that require a license in order to be exported to the United States, Mexico and Canada.
The announcement appeared to be the latest step by Beijing to fulfill agreements made between the two countries when China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, met with President Trump in South Korea last month.
Taken together, the sharp decline in overdose deaths into 2025, the unprecedented kinetic strikes on maritime trafficking networks ordered under Trump’s directive to treat fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, and China’s fentanyl precursor controls all point to a genuine disruption of the illicit opioid supply chain, even if the underlying data remain provisional and uneven across states.
While experts rightly caution that factors are also playing important roles, the clear willingness of the Trump administration and Hegseth to raise the costs and risks for traffickers, whether on the high seas or in chemical export channels, offers real hope that this war on fentanyl can continue to be successful and drive deaths even lower in the years ahead.
It seems appropriate to end with an homage to someone who was a big backer of the enhanced targeting of death distributors:
Thank you, Scott Adams.
You lost your son to a fentanyl and made it one of your missions to stamp it out.
You did it, Scott, you did it. pic.twitter.com/kQwqnFMOKq
— Grummz (@Grummz) January 15, 2026
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Comments
Once again — we didn’t need new laws, just a new President.
And, the largest drop in Murder rates in the history of the USA.
Closing the border and deporting violent criminals is making America better.
Lowest fentanyl deaths in decades and not a single law changed. Trump just started enforcing the ones we already have.
Mira Lago raided with orders to shoot to and not a single law changed. Biden just started enforcing laws we don’t have.
Unfortunately, my county has seen a huge increase in Fentanyl overdoses in the last year. There’s still a ton of it coming over the New Mexico border into Albuquerque where it then heads east and west via I-40 and north into Colorado. And yes, Albuquerque is a sanctuary city. Our governor and legislature has managed to turn this state into a 3rd world hellhole that comes in dead last in every quality of life metric. Healthcare, education and government are the largest employers so we can’t seem to get free of the grip of union control.
The foremost mission of our fighting men is to keep our drug addicts safe from overdoses.
SF expanding its fleet of plain white coroner vans. They only hold 4 bodies, all they do is drive around SF all day picking up new loads. Fent trade in SF is mostly hondurans (hondos). They can make enough money in 5 years in SF they can buy huge mansions back in honduras, with 49ers flag flying out front. Arresting maduro is step in right direction. But cartels aren’t limited to venezuela. And dems in CA will do everything possible to oppose trump policies, because the homeless industrial complex needs to perpetuate their funding, billion dollar budgets for the so called non-profit orgs. CA corruption 10x minnesota.
If the coroner vans picked these bodies up a year earlier and took them out of the market place, these dealers would be living in cardboard shacks.
10% of the customers make up almost 50% of the demand. The math supports massive arrests for using.
You might be right. Free hotel rooms for homeless junkies just means they OD inside room where nobody finds the bodies for 5 days. If they OD on the sidewalks there is greater chance EMS can revive them with narcan and lucas machine. When they are revived, they just jump up and run down the sidewalk and don’t even say thanks for saving their life. Hondos swing by next day offering buy-one-get-one-free.
Start arresting and warehousing the customer base. America needs to face getting addicts clean or putting them in storage containers. An 8×12 with a path to a productive life is more humane than an urn emptied into the Potter’s field.
About 4 years ago a guy who grew up next door died homeless on the streets of Puyallup Wa. He was a few years older than me, but his dad was a commercial airline pilot in the 80s and made bank (talking 300k/year in the late 80s and early 90s). They had all the toys and all the opportunities. As an early teen he had a dirt bike. They had horses. He solo’d at 16 his dad bought him a bi plane. Both him and his sister ended up as addicts. She’s recovered by will never be a contributing member of society. He was so out of it, he didn’t show up for his own mother’s funeral.
I lost track of how many kids he fathered over the decades. While I doubt he ever would have matched the self made life his dad had forged from poverty, homeless and dead under an overpass was really lowballing his potential. From his trajectory early on it’s clear that only a very dramatic awakening early on could have transformed his lack of moral fiber. I have no illusion of that. You can’t put in what God left out. Drugs turned this underperformer into liability and a danger for the rest of us
Whatever zombie form he had taken in the final decade of his life, there’s no way society was better off for him walking the streets… let alone behind the wheel of a car.
Scott Adams used to question statistics and cause & effect. There is the possibility that, with all of the fentanyl related deaths decreasing the pool of users, the number of future deaths will drop.
We need to keep fentanyl and other poisons off the street. Keep up the good work, Trump Administration.
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