Trump Again Overstates Number of Drug Overdose Deaths in U.S. – FactCheck.org

Reviving an unfounded claim he has made for several years, President Donald Trump on Sept. 5 overstated the number of Americans who died in 2024 of drug overdoses, saying that he believed 300,000 or “350,000 people died last year from drugs.” A spokesperson for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told us the provisional number of drug overdose deaths in 2024 was 79,383, and an expert in addiction medicine told us Trump’s number was “a gross exaggeration.”

Trump made the overestimate at the White House while signing an executive order renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War. Asked by a reporter about the recent U.S. military buildup in the southern Caribbean Sea near Venezuela, Trump said those actions were in response to drug trafficking. Eight U.S. warships carrying attack aircraft, an attack submarine and Navy surveillance planes have been deployed to the southern Caribbean, the New York Times reported.

On Sept. 2, the president announced on Truth Social that a boat in international waters carrying what he said were “positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists” with illegal drugs was hit in a U.S. airstrike that “resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action.” Trump shared a black-and-white video showing an open boat with passengers being blown up. The administration hasn’t provided more information about who was on board or what was being transported.

Asked about the subsequent U.S. military buildup, Trump said: “Well, I just think it’s strong. We’re strong on drugs. We don’t want drugs killing our people. I believe we lost 300,000. You know, they always say 95[,000], 100,000. I believe they’ve been saying that for 20 years. I believe we lost 300,000 people last year.”

“Whether it’s 100,000, but it’s not — it’s 300[,000], 350,000 people died last year from drugs. And we’re not going to let that happen to this country,” he later added. 

The most recent provisional overdose death data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicate that drug overdose deaths had decreased more than 24% from 105,007 deaths in 2023 to 79,383 in 2024, CDC spokesperson Gabriel Alvarado told us in an email.

Dr. Daniel Ciccarone, a professor of addiction medicine at the University of California San Francisco, told us via email that Trump’s estimate was “a gross exaggeration” and the number of drug overdose deaths in the U.S. has never been as high as 300,000 in a year.

Looking at data provided by NCHS going back 10 years, drug overdose deaths peaked at 111,466 in the 12-month period ending June 2023, followed by an “impressive drop to the latest figure,” Ciccarone said, which is about 75,000 for the 12-month period ending in March 2025.

NCHS data show that the majority of overdose deaths in 2024 were from opioids. Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids, which include fentanyl, declined from 74,091 in 2023 to 48,661 in 2024, a decrease of 34%.

Unfounded Claim About NCHS Data

Regarding Trump’s suggestion that the overdose death data may be undercounted, Ciccarone said, “Counts can be over or under for any statistic; we call this ‘error,’ or ‘variance.’” But the NCHS data “are considered widely to be reliable, authoritative, and while there is some variance, it is estimated to be low,” he said.

“Death investigations involving drug overdose can take a long time and, in some cases, the cause of death may still be a pending investigation when we finalize the data for the year,” the CDC’s Alvarado said. “Our best estimate of the undercount in recent years is roughly 1-1.5%.”

As we’ve written, Trump has inflated the number of U.S. drug overdose deaths before and said the numbers being reported were too low. He claimed during a 2024 campaign rally in Phoenix, “300,000 people are dying a year. Those are the real numbers. They like to say 100[,000]. They like to say 90[,000]. It’s been that number for a long time. It’s 300,000 people, and it’s probably more than that, and we’re going to have to take very strong action because we can’t let that happen.”

At a rally in Waco, Texas, in 2023, Trump said the overdose figures provided by the NCHS were a “lie” and the annual deaths were “probably” five times as high, as we wrote then.

Christopher Ruhm, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, told us in 2023 that he had “not yet seen convincing evidence that the number of overall drug deaths is drastically underreported or even necessarily underreported at all.” Incomplete death certificates had led to opioid drug deaths being “understated” in the past, Ruhm wrote in a 2018 paper. But he told us that reporting on death records had improved and that “undercount has fallen over time.”

We reached out to the White House for evidence supporting Trump’s claim about the number of drug overdose deaths in 2024, but we did not receive a response.

Factors Causing Decline in Overdose Deaths

“At this moment it is unknown what is causing the last year decline in overdose,” Ciccarone told us. “It is likely to be a complex mix of supply and demand forces.”

U.S. Customs and Border Protection data show that seizures of fentanyl “from [Mexico] across the US/Mex border has gone down in the last year,” Ciccarone said. “This has been attributed more to precursor controls in China,” he said, referring to the production of chemicals used to make fentanyl in China, “and subsequent reduced Mexican cartel production of fentanyl. There also [has] been effective action against one of the largest Mex cartels, the Sinaloa cartel, which may have impacted the fentanyl trade significantly.”

The Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico is “one of the world’s oldest and most powerful drug cartels” and “one of the largest producers and traffickers of fentanyl and other illicit drugs to the United States,” according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

“Keep in mind that overdoses had started to drop during the Biden administration,” Ciccarone said. “Although [drug overdose] deaths peaked just before Trump came into office, many eastern states were seeing drops from peak as early as 2021/22. The success of the Chinese regulation of fentanyl and precursors is due to policies/high level decisions/diplomacy during the Biden administration. The Sinaloa cartel intervention can be evenly attributed as success to both administrations.”

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