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This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Juana Summers.
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And I'm Mary Louise Kelly. President Trump has made the fight against street fentanyl a major part of his agenda, but a new study published today in the journal Science shows that under Joe Biden, the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. was already plunging. Overdose deaths were also falling fast. So how did Trump win the messaging war on fentanyl during the presidential campaign while Biden was making big progress? NPR's Brian Mann has our story.
BRIAN MANN, BYLINE: Let's start in 2024, when the presidential campaign was in its final fiery months, and Trump and the Republicans were seizing on the issue of street fentanyl as a major line of attack. Anne Fundner spoke in a prime-time slot during the GOP convention about her teenage son's death from a fentanyl overdose.
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ANNE FUNDNER: His whole future, everything we ever wanted for him was ripped away in an instant, and Joe Biden does nothing.
MANN: When asked about fentanyl during their only debate in June 2024, Trump hammered Biden, framing fentanyl as part of the wider border migrant crisis.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We were getting very low numbers, very, very low numbers. Then he came along. The numbers - have you seen the numbers now?
MANN: During that debate and during the wider campaign, Biden, and then Kamala Harris, echoed Trump's framing of fentanyl as a border problem still raging out of control. Here she is at a rally in Arizona.
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KAMALA HARRIS: It's a scourge in our country, and we have to take it seriously. And as president, I will make it a top priority to disrupt the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States.
MANN: NPR could find few instances throughout the campaign where candidates Biden or Harris talked about actual progress being made on fentanyl. Research shows when Harris gave that speech, the Biden team had already disrupted fentanyl smuggling dramatically. Stanford University researcher Keith Humphreys analyzed fentanyl samples collected in drug raids in 2023 and 2024.
KEITH HUMPHREYS: You're looking at about a 50% decline in the purity of fentanyl that was being seized. That's a big drop.
MANN: Humphreys is colead author of a new report published in the journal Science that found the purity of fentanyl and its availability on the streets in American communities dropped sharply under Biden. Humphreys thinks Biden used law enforcement to target drug cartels, then convinced China to curb the flow of chemicals needed to make fentanyl.
HUMPHREYS: Biden's people, the foreign policy people can feel very proud that they made a positive impact.
MANN: Biden officials also expanded public health and addiction treatment programs widely credited with helping save tens of thousands of lives a year. What's baffling to drug policy experts like Humphreys is that Biden and Harris never told that story to the American public.
HUMPHREYS: And I think it hurt them, because they had a story of success to tell.
MANN: A study by Nabarun Dasgupta, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, found that in many key battleground states that decided the presidential election, drug deaths fell even faster than the national average. Again, NPR couldn't find a single instance during the campaign where Biden or Harris talked about that progress. Dasgupta told NPR he thinks Trump simply outmaneuvered the Democrats on fentanyl.
NABARUN DASGUPTA: It was brilliant, rhetorically. It all became about the border and not about the empowering solutions.
MANN: NPR reached out to Kamala Harris and members of the Biden and Harris campaigns to ask about their messaging on the fentanyl issue. We also reached out to the White House and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. They didn't respond. We were able to speak with Hunter Biden, a controversial figure pardoned by Joe Biden before he left office. Hunter Biden himself struggled with addiction and served as an informal advisor during his father's campaign. He believes Trump managed to reframe fentanyl in the public mind in ways that are still keeping Democrats off-balance.
HUNTER BIDEN: Competent governance for a nuanced issue like fentanyl doesn't equal clicks. And Trump figured that out a long time ago. He's turned it into an art form that I don't believe any Democrat or Republican has been able to counter effectively yet.
MANN: Drug policy experts interviewed for this story say the failure of Biden and Harris to tell the story of their fentanyl success brought sweeping consequences. Trump has dismantled many of Biden's fentanyl policies, including programs credited with saving lives. He continues to use the fear of fentanyl and exaggerated claims about overdose deaths to justify a range of policies from trade tariffs to an increasingly militarized drug war.
Brian Mann, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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