To understand the 2024 US presidential election, it is essential to understand the politics of fentanyl. Americans have been traumatized by a years-long wave of overdose deaths caused by the synthetic opioid.
To understand the 2024 US presidential election, it is essential to understand the politics of fentanyl.
Presidential candidates are seizing on the issue to firm up support from party faithful and woo voters whose allegiances may have shifted due to the crisis. For President Joe Biden, a Democrat, and former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, fentanyl is also a way to talk about everything from immigration and border security to China and crime.
Registered voters were most likely to hold US drug users and Mexican cartels responsible for the epidemic, according to the Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll. Voters from both parties agree the US should work with Mexico and Canada to combat drug trafficking. In Arizona—a swing state along the Mexico border that has seen a recent rise in synthetic opioid overdose deaths—fentanyl’s intersection with US political divisions is plain to see. Emergency medical services in Tempe, home to Arizona State University, receive roughly two calls a day, on average, related to opioids. Wastewater surveillance shows pervasive fentanyl use in the city of roughly 186,000 people just east of Phoenix. Last year, local law enforcement said they helped seize 4.
Some people who have been directly affected by the crisis say that neither candidate did enough to get fentanyl under control during their time in the White House. ‘Trump was all talk and no action on the opioid crisis, declaring an emergency and then failing to allocate additional resources or even to develop a national opioid strategy as required by law,” said spokesperson Lauren Hitt. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has focused on solutions that are popular among both Democrats and Republicans, she said.
US Google search interest for the term fentanyl, meanwhile, has generally surpassed interest for its broader class of drugs, opioids, since early 2022 and hit an all-time high in September of that year, according to data from Google Trends. State legislatures meanwhile introduced more than 600 bills about fentanyl in 2023 and enacted at least 103 laws, according to a report by the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Fatima Saidi, the national campaign director for We Are All America, which advocates for immigrant and refugee rights, said politicians are conflating criminals with people seeking safety. “When you’re angry, you need something to punch—and it’s the most vulnerable who are taking the punching,” she said. “Immigrants and refugees at the border should not be their punching bags.”
The death toll from the opioid crisis has been slowing but remains near all-time highs. Reported opioid overdose fatalities were down about 2.3 percent in the 12 months through October, according to provisional data from the CDC, and deaths from synthetic opioids like fentanyl, a subset of opioid-related deaths, were down about 0.3 percent.
“This bill would save lives and bring order to the border,” Biden said in this year’s State of the Union speech.