Drug experts say U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s statement ignores critical facts about fentanyl and drug seizures.
Not everyone is at risk of dying from a fentanyl overdose, experts say. To die from a fentanyl overdose, a person must consume fentanyl or an illicit drug laced with it. About 11% of people age 12 and older in the U.S. use illegal drugs.
Fentanyl seizures show only how much fentanyl didn’t make it into the U.S. It’s unclear how much fentanyl entered the U.S. that could lead to overdose deaths.
By Maria Ramirez Uribe
President Donald Trump’s 100th day in office fell on the same day as National Fentanyl Awareness Day. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi marked the milestone by crediting Trump with saving a third of the U.S. population from fatal fentanyl overdoses.
Fentanyl is a potent synthetic opioid that causes the majority of opioid overdoses in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Fentanyl is up to 100 times more potent than morphine. Its potency is what makes it so lethal.
"Today is Fentanyl Awareness Day. In President Trump’s first 100 days we’ve seized over 22 million fentanyl laced pills, saving over 119 Million lives," Bondi said April 29 on X. That’s about one-third of the U.S. population.
Bondi shared a clip from Fox News that included 2025 Drug Enforcement Administration fentanyl seizure data. As of April 28, the agency had seized 22.2 million fentanyl pills and 3,100 pounds of powdered fentanyl in 2025. The seizures "represent over 119 million deadly doses," the DEA website says, calculating 2 milligrams of fentanyl as a "potentially deadly dose."
At an April 30 Cabinet meeting, Bondi made a similar statement with larger numbers, crediting Trump with saving 75% of the U.S. population from fentanyl overdoses.
"Since you have been in office President Trump, your DOJ agencies have seized more than 22 million fentanyl pills, 3,400 kilos of fentanyl, since your last hundred days," Bondi said. "Which saved — are you ready for this, media? — 258 million lives."
It’s unclear how Bondi reached those figures about fentanyl seized or lives saved. The 3,100 pounds the DEA said it seized equates to 1,400 kilograms. The Department of Justice did not respond to PolitiFact’s request for comment. A department spokesperson told Slate that the 258 million estimate included FBI fentanyl seizures.
Drug policy experts say Bondi’s statements are an exaggeration premised on a distorted understanding of seizure data.
"Bondi’s statements demonstrate profound ignorance about fentanyl and interdiction," Dr. Ryan Marino, a Case Western Reserve University toxicologist and emergency room physician who studies addiction, said.
Bondi failed to account for the limitations in fentanyl seizure data, the caveats about fentanyl’s lethality and the fact that not everyone has the same chance of dying of a fentanyl overdose.
Also, Bondi’s statement assumes everyone in the U.S. planned to consume fentanyl.
"119 million Americans do not even use fentanyl, and to risk an overdose requires intentional ingestion of fentanyl (or another illicit drug contaminated with fentanyl)," Marino said. "Fentanyl overdose is not a risk for people who do not use drugs, as you cannot experience an overdose from touch, inhalation, or proximity to fentanyl."
CDC data shows that about 11% of people age 12 and older use illegal drugs.
Andrew Stolbach, a toxicologist and emergency doctor at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, told PolitiFact in 2023 that using fentanyl seizure data to make broad characterizations about how many people could have died or been saved "assume that all that drug was somehow going to get into everybody."
There’s likely enough water to drown everybody in the world. But that doesn’t mean everyone is going to drown, he said.
There are several discrepancies in Bondi’s calculation
Bondi’s numbers don’t make mathematical or logical sense.
Her X statement that seizing 22 million pills saved 119 million lives assumes that one pill would be shared by five people — and each of those people then die of an overdose. Drug experts say that’s unlikely.
"It does not make sense to say that seizing one pill saved five lives," Jonathan Caulkins, a Carnegie Mellon University drug policy researcher, said. "Usually a pill is only consumed by one person. It would be an odd situation for a single pill to kill five people."
Additionally, not every pill consumption leads to death. The DEA says that as little as 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be deadly for an adult. However, a dose’s lethality can vary based on a person's height, weight and tolerance from past exposure, drug experts say. The 2 milligrams lethal dose generally refers to people who have not previously consumed fentanyl.
"Usually when a pill is consumed, no one dies," Caulkins said. "There are high-frequency users consuming multiple pills per day for multiple years before they succumb, if ever, to an overdose."
Also the 2 milligrams refers to pure fentanyl. It’s generally unclear how much pure fentanyl is in the pills or pounds of powdered fentanyl that are seized, Marino said. Therefore, that the DEA seized 119 million lethal doses does not mean the Trump administration saved 119 million people.
Drug seizure data often distorted for political aims
Politicians have framed drug seizure data in positive or negative terms depending on their political aim.
For example,
the Homeland Security Department said in an April 28 press release that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had seized 64,000 pounds of fentanyl during former President Joe Biden’s administration. "Enough fentanyl to kill 14 billion people."
However,
using Bondi’s logic, DHS could have also said that Biden saved 14 billion lives, double the world’s population. Either way, the fact-check caveats we already discussed apply.
Some politicians cite rises in drug seizures as a sign of improved interdiction. Others say those same numbers are evidence that more drugs are getting into the country. But drug experts say it’s hard to tell who’s right given insufficient data.
"We don’t have any method I’m aware of for translating drug seizure data into any measure of overdose deaths averted," Alene Kennedy-Hendricks, a Johns Hopkins University health policy expert, said.
To know how much fentanyl is in the U.S., experts said we need to know how much fentanyl is being produced, how much is being sent to the U.S. and how much is seized. We only have data on how much fentanyl is seized.
That’s part of what makes Bondi’s statement wrong. That the DEA seized 22 million pills does not mean that it reduced 22 million people’s consumption of fentanyl pills, Caulkins said.
"When drugs are seized, the supply chain partially replaces those lost drugs," Caulkins said.
David Luckey, a senior international and defense researcher at Rand Corp., a global policy think tank, said that the lack of data about illicit fentanyl leads to statements that are "estimates at best, and a misuse of the data at worse."
Trends in fentanyl seizures
Fentanyl seizures have generally risen over the past decade. But they dropped in fiscal year 2024 to less than 22,000 pounds at U.S. borders compared with 27,000 in fiscal 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection figures show. Fiscal years start in October and end in September.
In the first two full months of the Trump administration, fentanyl seizures dropped compared to the last full month of Biden’s administration. In December, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized 1,200 pounds of fentanyl at U.S. borders. That dropped to 611 pounds and 760 pounds in February and March, respectively.
Fentanyl overdose deaths have been declining
Fentanyl overdose deaths also started dropping during the Biden administration. The CDC reported 50,000 fentanyl overdose deaths from December 2023 to November 2024, the latest available data. That’s a drop from more than 75,000 in the previous similar period.
It’s unclear whether the drop in overdose deaths will last and for how long.
Drug experts say that to reduce fentanyl overdose deaths, the focus can’t be only on drug seizures. Reducing the demand for fentanyl and expanding access to treatments, such as the opioid overdose reversal drug Narcan, also play a role.
Bondi said "in President Trump’s first 100 days we’ve seized over 22 million fentanyl laced pills, saving over 119 Million lives." A day later, she upped the number of saved lives to 258 million.
Neither figure is accurate.
The DEA said it has seized 119 million deadly fentanyl doses in 2025. Crediting that seizure with saving up to 75% of the U.S. population makes no mathematical sense.
Bondi’s calculation rests on the assumption that 2 milligrams of fentanyl is lethal. However, lethality varies based on a person’s height, weight and tolerance to the drug. It also assumes that all fentanyl seized is pure fentanyl, which is generally not the case.
Additionally, the number of people who die from opioid overdoses each year is in the tens of thousands. Drug experts say 119 million people in the U.S. do not consume fentanyl or illicit drugs that may be laced with fentanyl; people who do not consume illicit drugs are not at risk of dying of an overdose.
We rate this claim Pants on Fire!
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