Pam Bondi's Absurd Claim About Fentanyl Overdoses Epitomizes the Illogic of the War on Drugs
Even when they are less patently ridiculous, the metrics of success favored by government officials make little sense.
Attorney General Pam Bondi was widely mocked for bragging, during a Cabinet meeting this week, that the Trump administration had "saved…258 million lives" by intercepting shipments of illicit fentanyl. That risible claim went a step beyond the more usual drug-warrior talking points, which tend to focus on the quantity of drugs seized and their purported "street value." But none of these is a meaningful metric of success in the war on drugs, which ostensibly aims to reduce the harm caused by substance abuse but actually magnifies it, as reflected in Bondi's record as attorney general of Florida.
First a word about Bondi's math. During President Donald Trump's first 100 days in office, she said, the federal government had seized "more than 22 million fentanyl pills" and "3,400 kilos of fentanyl." According to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, 2 milligrams of fentanyl is a potentially lethal dose, which means 3,400 kilograms (if pure) could theoretically kill 1.7 billion people. So one could argue that Bondi actually understated the Trump administration's accomplishment: It did not merely save 75 percent of the U.S. population; it saved the entire population five times over.
In February, the White House performed a similar calculation. Last fiscal year, it said, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) "apprehended more than 21,000 pounds of fentanyl at our borders, enough fentanyl to kill more than 4 billion people." The math checks out! Twenty-one thousand pounds is 9,525,440 grams, or about 4.8 billion lethal doses.
As Reason's Joe Lancaster notes, Bondi relied on a different method in arriving at her estimate, adjusting those 3,400 kilograms of fentanyl based on the "current purity level." She thus avoided claiming that the Trump administration had saved 1.7 billion American lives, which would have been even more patently ridiculous than claiming it had saved a mere 258 million.
Bondi's most obvious mistake is equating potential overdoses with actual overdoses: She assumes that 258 million opioid-naive people would each have consumed two milligrams of fentanyl in one sitting. But Bondi also erroneously assumes that seizing 3,400 kilograms of fentanyl is the same as reducing U.S. fentanyl consumption by that amount.
That is obviously not true. Prohibition allows drug traffickers to earn a hefty risk premium, which gives them a strong incentive to find ways around any barriers the government manages to erect. Given all the places where drugs can be produced and all the ways they can be smuggled, it is not possible to "cut off the flow," as politicians have been vainly promising to do for more than a century. The most they can realistically hope to accomplish through interdiction is higher retail prices resulting from increased costs imposed on drug traffickers.
That strategy is complicated by the fact that illegal drugs acquire most of their value close to the consumer. The cost of replacing destroyed crops and seized shipments is therefore relatively small, a tiny fraction of the "street value" trumpeted by law enforcement agencies. As you get closer to the retail level, the replacement cost rises, but the amount that can be seized at one time falls.
These challenges—which are compounded in the case of fentanyl, a highly potent drug that can be transported or shipped in small packages containing many doses—explain why interdiction never seems to have a significant and lasting impact on retail prices. From 1981 to 2012, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the average, inflation-adjusted retail price for a pure gram of heroin fell by 86 percent. During the same period, the average retail price for cocaine and methamphetamine fell by 75 percent and 72 percent, respectively. In 2021, the Drug Enforcement Administration reported that methamphetamine's "purity and potency remain high while prices remain low," that "availability of cocaine throughout the United States remains steady," and that "availability and use of cheap and highly potent fentanyl has increased."
Bondi lives in a different world—one where the government seizes 3,400 kilograms of fentanyl and thereby reduces the supply available to consumers by that amount, preventing 258 million overdose deaths that otherwise would have occurred. Her claim not only beggars belief; it contradicts Trump's critique of the Biden administration's anti-drug record.
"Drugs are pouring in at levels never seen before," Trump said on Meet the Press in December. "They're just pouring in. We can't have open borders."
CBP fentanyl seizures rose from 7,330 pounds in 2020 to more than 25,000 pounds in 2023. That trend, Trump assumed, was not a triumph for interdiction. Rather, it signaled an increase in supply, which he blamed on President Joe Biden's weak border policies. That argument depended on the realistic assumption that "federal officials are only able to seize a fraction of the fentanyl smuggled across the southern border," as the White House conceded in February.
Now that Trump is in charge, however, a large volume of fentanyl seizures is a sign of success rather than failure, because seizing more fentanyl means preventing more overdoses. By Bondi's logic, the Biden administration saved 860 million American lives in 2023 alone.
Bondi's unjustified faith in the war on drugs blinds her to the ways in which prohibition makes drug use more dangerous. "Kids are dying every day because they're taking this junk laced with something else," she said during the Cabinet meeting. "They don't know what they're taking. They think they're buying a Tylenol or an Adderall [or] a Xanax, and it's laced with fentanyl, and they're dropping dead."
Prohibition is the reason drug users "don't know what they're taking." In a legal market, consumers know the contents and concentration of, say, a bottle of whiskey. In a black market, by contrast, drug composition is highly variable and unpredictable, which dramatically increases the risk of potentially fatal errors.
That problem is inherent in prohibition, and stepped-up enforcement of prohibition makes it worse. When she was Florida's attorney general, for example, Bondi garnered praise for cracking down on "pill mills." But that strategy predictably drove nonmedical opioid users toward black-market alternatives, replacing reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with products of unknown quality and purity. According to data from the Florida Department of Health, the age-adjusted rate of "deaths from drug poisoning" in that state nearly doubled during Bondi's eight years in office, and it continued rising after she left. If this is success, what would failure look like?