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 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.
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:
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