Trump falsely triples number of reported overdose deaths as he targets cartels

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The president claims that overdose deaths are really 300,000, when the government reports 90,000.

Analysis by Glenn Kessler

“They’re killing our people. They’re killing 250,000, 300,000 American people a year, not 100, like has been reported for 15 years. It’s probably 300,000.”

— President Donald Trump, while signing an executive order designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, Jan. 20

Trump often exaggerates statistics to hype the scale of a crisis. He did so again when he signed an executive order targeting drug cartels — and reiterated his plan to boost tariffs on Mexico and Canada to force a crackdown on drug organizations. He told reporters that although for “15 years” the number of overdose deaths was estimated at 100,000, it’s really 250,000 to 300,000 — “probably 300,000.”

He repeated the claim a day later, with the caveat “I think.” But, as on Monday, he made more definitive statements during a Turning Point political rally in December — “The United States has lost 300,000 people a year” — and at a November campaign rally — “We lose 300,000 people a year to drugs entering from Mexico.”

But his claim of 300,000 deaths is false. Drug overdose deaths only began to exceed 100,000 four years ago, in part a legacy of the coronavirus pandemic, but they started to decline in 2023. As of the 12 months ending in August, the most recent data available, the number of deaths was about 90,000, the CDC says.

Experts say there is no evidence the statistics, collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are faulty; in fact, they have improved after a boost in federal funding when the scope of the opioid crisis became clear during the Obama administration.

The Facts

The surge in drug overdoses has gone through three phases: deaths involving prescription opioids, following the introduction of OxyContin onto the market in 1996; heroin-involved overdose deaths after OxyContin was reformulated to make it difficult to crush into powder for snorting; and now deaths related to fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.

Traci Green, director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University, said that early in the crisis, many drug overdose deaths were missed because they were connected to prescription drug abuse, which was not on the radar of government statisticians. But that changed in the mid-2010s after Congress approved federal funding to combat the problem, so the statistics have become more accurate. “They have only gotten better,” she said, especially with machine-learning tools.

“We’re not missing 200,000 people, that’s for sure,” she said. In fact, “there has been a good deal of excitement because the numbers have been declining in the last year. It’s not the kind of epidemic we saw in Trump’s first term.”

Trump’s first term coincided with the third wave of the crisis, as heroin overdose deaths fell but overdose deaths involving fentanyl soared.

Overall overdose deaths reached a high of nearly 115,000 in the 12-month period ending in mid-2023, before declining in 2024. The number of overdose deaths is now estimated to be lower than when Trump left office in January 2021.

Trump is targeting drug cartels because he believes they are responsible for fentanyl crossing into the United States.

The president in his statements points the finger equally at Mexico and Canada, but Canada is a minor player. Just 43 pounds of fentanyl were confiscated at the northern border in the 2024 fiscal year — 0.2 percent of the volume at the U.S.-Mexico border, according to Customs and Border Protection statistics. In the first three months of the 2025 fiscal year, 10 pounds have been seized at the Canadian border, compared with 4,400 pounds on the Mexican border. Canadian authorities announced in November that they had dismantled the nation’s largest drug laboratory, discovered in rural British Columbia.

Moreover, most of the smuggling of fentanyl is done by U.S. citizens. Government statistics assembled by David J. Bier of the Cato Institute show that between 2019 and 2024, U.S. citizens were 80 percent of people caught with fentanyl during border crossings at ports of entry. Moreover, between 2015 and 2024, 92 percent of fentanyl seizures occurred at legal crossing points or interior vehicle checkpoints, not on illegal migration routes, Bier concluded.

The White House press office did not respond to an email requesting the source of Trump’s claim.

The Pinocchio Test

Opioid overdose deaths have started to decline, though they remain high. But Trump has no basis to claim that the statistics — generated by a government agency that he now oversees — are so inaccurate that the death toll is three times higher than reported. He is also wrong to claim that the number of overdose deaths was reported as 100,000 for 15 years. That only happened for 2½ years. He earns Four Pinocchios.

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