For many years, the United States has waged a bitter battle against fentanyl.
The staggering number of overdose deaths caused by the drug has been used by Donald Trump’s administration to justify attacking boats in the Caribbean, deploy militarized forces to detain legal citizens, and impose sweeping tariffs — despite having little data to prove that its target countries, including Canada, were actually to blame.
The president went as far as to sign an executive order calling the highly addictive and extremely potent synthetic opiate a “weapon of mass destruction.”
Yet the latest research shows something inconvenient for that narrative: a sharp reduction in fentanyl overdoses that started before Trump took office, almost certainly in response to policy under his predecessor Joe Biden.
As researchers noted in a paper published in the journal Science this week, fatal overdoses from synthetic opioids like fentanyl plummeted after peaking at 76,000 in 2023 in the US, dropping by over a third by the end of 2024. (Full numbers aren’t in yet for 2025, but provisional data from the CDC suggests another double-digit percentage drop.)
The researchers proposed a possible explanation, writing that a “major disruption in the illicit fentanyl trade, possibly tied to Chinese government actions,” may have “translated into sharp reductions in overdose mortality beginning in mid- or late-2023 and continued into 2024 across both the US and Canada.”
In other words, as Axiom reports, diplomatic pressure has proven far more effective than efforts to crack down on drug dealers on the street.
“That is heartening because street-level enforcement can result in large and racially disproportionate increases in incarceration while at the same time there is little evidence that tougher domestic enforcement, either at the street level or at the wholesale level, can make drugs more expensive or make them harder to acquire,” the paper reads.
The researchers used data from the US and Canadian governments, as well as discussions on Reddit, to come to their conclusion. They found that Beijing starting to shut down Chinese companies that were supplying Mexican criminal groups with precursor chemicals to fentanyl in 2023 was associated with the decline in fentanyl deaths.
In other words, a major supply chain disruption, which started long before Trump started his second term, was likely behind the decline.
The US Drug Enforcement Administration also noted in its 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment that Chinese chemical suppliers were “wary of supplying controlled precursors to its international customers, demonstrating an awareness on their part that the government of China is controlling more fentanyl precursors.”
“This demonstrates how influential China can be and how much they can help us — or hurt us,” Keith Humphreys, coauthor and former White House drug policy adviser under president Barack Obama, told the Washington Post.
It’s not a given that the positive trend will continue. For one, CDC data found that there was a small increase in fatal overdoses between January 2024 and January 2025, bucking seventeen months of declines.
University of North Carolina epidemiologist Nabarun Dasgupta suggested there may be a far simpler reason why overdoses dropped: the habits of drug users may have changed, with some choosing to cut back.
“It’s not a straight line between drug supply and overdose deaths because of protective behaviors that have been adopted in between,” he told WaPo.
More on fentanyl: Experts Puzzled as Drug Overdose Deaths Suddenly Start Dropping