During their presidential campaigns, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both promised to fight substance abuse by disrupting the drug supply. Recent trends in drug-related deaths underline the folly of that approach.
According to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the death toll from illegal drugs during the year ending in April 2024 was 10 percent lower than the number during the previous year. This would be the largest such drop ever recorded—a striking contrast to the general trend during the previous two decades, when the number of drug deaths rose nearly every year.
