This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 26 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Even allies of President-elect Donald Trump are admitting that his plan for tariffs will drive up the cost of pretty much everything for consumers. So why do it?
Well, one of the ostensible reasons Trump had for launching this potential trade war was to end the scourge of fentanyl, a real and enormous problem facing the United States. Fentanyl is a powerful opioid that contributes to about 100,000 U.S. overdose deaths a year. For the past decade, it has been laced into lots of other drugs and caused users of those drugs to overdose unwittingly.
Fentanyl is a powerful opioid that helps contribute to about 100,000 U.S. overdose deaths a year.
The problem is massive. Back in 2021, U.S. life expectancy dropped to its lowest level in two decades. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that after Covid, drug overdoses, largely from synthetic opioids like fentanyl, were the primary drivers of shorter American lifespans. That’s a real problem and a problem that big doesn’t have a fast or easy fix.
But something seems to be changing recently. As The New York Times reports, “After years of relentless rises in overdose deaths, the United States has seen a remarkable reversal. For seven straight months, according to federal data, drug fatalities have been declining.”
The difference is dramatic. There are a lot of reasons at play for that decrease, like more funding for better treatment, education and prevention measures. Back in September, when people first started asking about the drop and its causes, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra joined “All In” to talk about these harm reduction measures taking hold across the country — like making test strips and Narcan, a drug that reverses an opioid overdose, more readily available.
All of those efforts helped steadily change the curve. But drug policy experts tell the Times they believe “there is another, surprising reason: changes in the drug supply itself, which are, in turn, influencing how people are using drugs.”
For the first time since 2021, the Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA, says the potency of street fentanyl in America has gone down. Pure fentanyl is becoming scarcer and more expensive. In part because of law enforcement efforts, the White House says.
But there is another factor and this brings us back to Trump and tariffs and what he is trying to do now. Last year, President Joe Biden met with Chinese President Xi in California. The big takeaway from that meeting was that both sides signed an agreement on stopping the flow of the chemical precursors that are used to make fentanyl from China to Mexico and the United States.
It was a rare area of open cooperation between U.S. and Chinese officials, helping reduce the supply chain of fentanyl in this country. And again, it’s all these factors working together. There’s no simple silver bullet here, but all of these policies combined are having an effect.
That’s a story almost no one knows in America. It wasn’t part of the Democratic campaign. But it’s a good reminder of a hard truth: Building and fixing things is a lot more difficult than breaking them. Solving difficult problems like an overdose epidemic requires a bunch of people coordinating their efforts.
It also shows that doing the work of governing is much harder than populist posturing about the problems, which is what Trump and his team are skilled at. There’s no simple silver bullet here, but all of these policies combined are having an effect. “When you lose a son or a daughter to fentanyl, or a wife, or anybody else … your life is destroyed, their life is destroyed,” Trump told NBC News in 2023. “They’ve destroyed so many families. It comes from Mexico. Something’s got to be done.” That something, for Trump, is to “get tough” and “crack down” to stop these other countries from humiliating us. But there is a record to look at here. Trump campaigned on stopping the fentanyl crisis when he won in 2016. He even created a task force to address the issue. However, despite his hard-line politics and his tough talk and his best efforts, overdose deaths just kept going up on his watch. They plateaued a bit in 2018, then skyrocketed. Almost as if promises are easier than results. This is the fundamental issue we face. Trump is not a person interested in all the difficult, serious things you have to do to fix stuff, but he is adept at channeling people’s frustration about these big, complex problems, at making them feel seen, and agreeing with them that this system sucks. However, that does not actually fix their problems. That is not what Trump is in this for. The good news is it is possible to make improvements in people’s lives. We know how; it takes hard work by a lot of people over a long time. The bad news is it has become even harder for the Democratic Party, and Biden in particular, to communicate that and sell it to Americans. Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
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