Both Harris and Trump Cite Right-Wing Myths About Fentanyl in Border Policy

When it comes to the overdose crisis, Donald Trump would like you to believe that the problem — along with almost every other problem currently facing the United States — is rooted in immigration.

In a section of the 2024 GOP party platform titled “Secure the Border,” Republicans draw a clear line of connection from immigration to fentanyl, promising to both “use all resources needed” to stop what they refer to as the “invasion” of undocumented migrants, and to “impose a full Fentanyl Blockade on the waters of our Region.”

Similarly, the Republican National Convention in July featured a speech by Anne Fundner, whose 15-year-old son died tragically of a fentanyl overdose. She told the crowd that she blames President Joe Biden, “border czar” Vice President Kamala Harris and “every Democrat who supports open borders” for the death of her son. “We need a president who will seal the border, aggressively prosecute drug dealers, and stop communist China from poisoning our children,” she added. Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), has long weaponized his own family’s history with addiction to bolster anti-immigrant policies, including positing a conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden could have “open[ed] up the floodgates to the border” to allow fentanyl into the U.S. “to kill a bunch of MAGA voters.”

Of course, this rhetoric aims to sow fear; it is not rooted in truth. While the majority of fentanyl is seized at the U.S.-Mexico border, 93 percent of those seizures happened at legal crossing points last year. More than 86 percent of people sentenced for trafficking fentanyl in 2023 were U.S. citizens, and almost all fentanyl is smuggled for U.S. consumers.

Kamala Harris could have chosen to highlight these facts during the presidential debate on September 10. Instead, she used the segment on border security to hit on some of the same talking points favored by the GOP. Harris noted that she supported a bipartisan border bill, which would have “put 1,500 more border agents on the border” to help “stem the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States.” She added, “I know there are so many families watching tonight who have been personally affected by the surge of fentanyl in our country.”

Democrats’ and Republicans’ shared focus on fentanyl trafficking at the U.S.-Mexico border as the sole root of the overdose crisis is dangerously myopic. It fails to address the myriad causes or advance any much-needed solutions. Indeed, the U.S. is grappling with a serious public health crisis, as the country faces more than 100,000 deaths per year from drug overdoses, two-thirds of which are due to synthetic opioids like fentanyl. Twenty-seven thousand pounds of fentanyl were seized at the border last year, up from just 4,600 pounds in 2020. But militarizing the border — and promoting rhetoric that demonizes immigrants — will not save any lives.

Harris and Trump alike neglect to mention that law enforcement crackdowns on prescription opioids helped fuel the demand for illegal fentanyl, which can be far more lethal. From 2011 to 2019, drug overdose deaths rose as prescriptions for opioid painkillers plummeted.

While doctors received government mandates to aggressively taper opioid prescriptions — an initiative launched under President Barack Obama and expanded upon under the Trump administration — few received training on how to do so safely. Even fewer health care providers held licenses to prescribe buprenorphine, an opioid used to treat addiction.

Addiction experts have already noted that neither Democrats nor Republicans have offered policy proposals this election cycle that would adequately address the overdose crisis. Robust addiction treatment resources and harm reduction strategies are urgently needed in order to save lives. And it’s possible that we’re beginning to see positive outcomes from the harm reduction work already in place: New data, compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and released this month, shows a dramatic drop in overdose deaths from April 2023 to April 2024. At about 10 percent, the decrease is the largest on record, and the first time overdose deaths have decreased since 2020. Nonfatal overdoses also fell by about 10 percent. In some states, deaths from drug overdoses decreased even more radically: In North Carolina, for instance, fentanyl overdose rates fell by more than 30 percent.

Experts caution that it is difficult to attribute such data to any singular source; we need more studies over a longer period of time to determine what’s driving the plunge. Still, we can look to several recent developments as possible culprits: In December 2022, Biden signed the bipartisan Mainstreaming Addiction Treatment (MAT) Act, which removed the bureaucratic hurdles facing doctors who need to prescribe buprenorphine for opioid addiction treatment. Prior to the MAT Act in 2020, less than 6 percent of doctors were allowed to prescribe buprenorphine. Meanwhile, a naloxone nasal spray that can reverse opioid overdoses and save lives was approved to be sold as an over-the-counter medicine in March 2023. It has since become much more readily available.

This is a good start, but doctors are still calling for increased funding for addiction treatment and harm reduction services. Rural areas, as well as Black and Native American communities, especially face substantial barriers to accessing quality health care. Currently, Congress is considering a bipartisan bill, the Modernizing Opioid Treatment Access Act, which would expand access to methadone, a prescription drug used to treat opioid addictions. Unlike in several European countries, methadone is only obtainable in the United States at designated opioid treatment clinics and must be taken on-site — creating an unnecessary hurdle for those who live miles away from the closest clinic. Addiction recovery advocates also point toward the need for expanded telemedicine options, mobile methadone clinics and robust drug education campaigns as necessary tools to fight the overdose crisis.

Of course, Harris did not mention any of these potential solutions during the presidential debate, nor has she made the overdose crisis a major focus of her presidential campaign. In reducing the issue to a bullet point on “securing the border,” Harris has caved to right-wing media fearmongering. Biden is already favoring carceral border policies that flout international law, pushing to cement his ban on migrants seeking asylum at the border. Meanwhile, more than 200 people in the U.S. continue to die from opioid-related overdoses each day.