Fentanyl Awareness Day rife with absurd claims, lies, and budget cuts
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A few minutes after RFK Jr walked off the stage at the National Opioid Summit in Nashville last week, a draft budget report leaked showing Trump’s plans to cut about a dozen programs designed to help people with opioid addictions.
The draft budget proposal for HHS, which can be downloaded in its entirety here, clearly lays out plans to eliminate key programs, including the life-saving Narcan program.
RFK Jr. signaled his support for cutting the program, despite immediate backlash from medical professionals.
The proposed cuts don’t just undermine progress made in the last four years, but they undermine Trump’s own agenda.
Trump declared a public health emergency for the opioid epidemic in 2017 - and got bipartisan praise for it.
The Narcan program, in particular, is one of the most successful public health interventions of the last few decades.
There was a 24% drop in opioid overdose deaths last year, thanks in no small part to the $56 million Narcan program.
In 2024, nearly 300,000 Narcan kits were distributed across the country. Nearly 70,000 first responders have been trained under the program.
The CDC data shows that 27,000 lives were saved by this program last year.
And it costs all of 0.000008% of the federal budget.
Despite the resounding success and relatively low price tag, opioid deaths are still a major public health concern.
Drug overdose is the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18-44, and the downward trajectory of overdose deaths may reverse if the program is eliminated.
But Trump — at least publicly — has hardly abandoned the opioid-fighting agenda.
Just a month ago, on April 1, the Trump administration released a summary of their priorities in combatting opioid addiction and deaths, which included promises to not only maintain the programs but to consider expanding them.
And Trump is using his disastrous tariffs to make it seem like he’s accomplishing his goals on this front.
Trump during his address to Congress in March said that Canada and Mexico “have allowed fentanyl to come into our country at levels never seen before.”
That’s not true. And even if it were true, tariffs are applied to products sold legally — not illegal drugs.
In 2024, all of 43 pounds of fentanyl were seized at the northern border (0.19% of all fentanyl seized that year) according to Customs and Border Protection data; And most of the people trafficking fentanyl in the US are US Citizens.
And the lies keep getting worse from there.
On Fentanyl Awareness Day (Tuesday, April 29), Pam Bondi made absurd and false claims that Donald Trump had saved “hundreds of millions of lives” through seizures of fentanyl DOJ allegedly intercepted in the last three months.
She claimed 3,400 kilos of fentanyl had been seized — and that 75% of Americans would be dead if they had not stopped the drugs.
“In President Trump’s first 100 days we’ve seized over 22 million fentanyl laced pills, saving over 119 Million lives,” she lied in a Xitter post.
For that math to work, that means each pill would have to be split 5.4 ways.
That also means that 119 million people would have to take one of those fractions of a pill, even though research shows that less than 3 million people have an opioid use disorder.
And the trace amount of fentanyl in each would have to be a minimum of 2 milligrams per person to be deadly enough to kill each person who takes one-sixth of a pill, meaning 12 milligrams per pill.
The DEA puts the range of all fentanyl concentrations in pills they’ve seized to be between 0.02 mg and 5.1 mg.
The DEA says that only two-fifths (42%) of all fentanyl-laced whole pills seized have even 2 mg of fentanyl each.
So the math isn’t mathing, the numbers changed throughout Bondi’s presentation, and there’s no credibility to any of those claims.
She Floriduh’d the data.
Like a crowd of 250,000 ballooning into 1.5 million, the administration keeps lying about data, while cutting the programs that have made a real difference in helping the people they claim to be helping.