At an Oval Office event today, Donald Trump made a claim that the number of people being killed by fentanyl was much higher than the official figure:
I believe they killed over the last five or six years per year, 200 to 300,000 people. You hear about 100,000, which is a lot of people, but the number is much higher than that. That’s been proven
He has made similar comments recently.
While he claimed that this has been proven, his claim runs against the US government numbers that are put out by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which haven’t been retracted since he took office. Their numbers say that total overdose deaths were around 100,000 in the past couple of years: “an estimated 80,391 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 2024—a decrease of 26.9% from the 110,037 deaths estimated in 2023.” Drug overdose death from opioids, which would encompass all fentanyl related deaths as well others, are only a portion of that, with the number at “an estimated 83,140 in 2023 to 54,743 in 2024.”
Around the time he said that, the White House put out a press release that at one point claims that “[t]he number of Americans dying from drugs has fallen every single month.” That links an X post from the White House Rapid Response account that is of a commercial released by the Department of Homeland Security, which cites the CDC as their source for their claim. So both the White House and the DHS think their numbers trustworthy, even if Donald Trump doesn’t.
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