Trump Officials Credit Cartel Busts for Reducing Overdose Deaths, but Experts Say It’s More Complicated

Inside the domed rotunda of the Luzerne County Courthouse last month, the Trump administration’s top drug warriors made their case that the war on cartels is saving American lives. Two weeks later, the congressman who stood beside them lost his seat.The Drug Enforcement Administration credits two enforcement surges against global cartels with 1,287 arrests and the seizure of more than 1.8 million counterfeit pills. Its administrator, Terry Cole, carried that tally to Wilkes-Barre, a former coal city in northeastern Pennsylvania, whose county has lost more than 650 people to overdoses since 2021.Beside him stood the attorney general, Todd Blanche; Senator Dave McCormick, a Republican; the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Sara Carter; and Representative Rob Bresnahan, a Republican who represents the area. The officials first met privately with prosecutors and police leaders at a roundtable before stepping out to the cameras.The region, they said, sits on a trafficking corridor along Interstates 81 and 80 that moves drugs through the state and beyond. Mr. Blanche says lethal doses of fentanyl have fallen by 59 percentage points since President Trump took office, which he credits largely to the closing of the southern border.Mr. Cole says the agency kept about 14 million fentanyl pills off American streets every two months last year. Researchers who study drug markets, however, are less certain those numbers translate into lives saved.“Perhaps the arrests and seizures since 2024 have contributed to the decline in fatal overdoses since then, but neither DEA nor any research group has shown that through systematic analysis,” a professor of public policy and criminology at the University of Maryland, Peter Reuter, tells The New York Sun. “In the past such efforts have had at most modest effects on drug prices and availability.”If overdose deaths are falling faster than at any time in a generation, who, or what, deserves the credit?The Numbers Washington Is CitingThe first enforcement surge targeted the Sinaloa Cartel. Over five days in late August 2025, DEA agents arrested 617 people and seized 480 kilograms of fentanyl powder along with 714,707 counterfeit pills, according to the agency.The Jalisco New Generation Cartel came next. Between September 22 and September 26, 2025, a second sweep produced 670 arrests and turned up 92.4 kilograms of fentanyl powder and roughly 1.1 million fake pills.Both groups had been designated months earlier as foreign terrorist organizations. This July, the Sinaloa Cartel’s co-founder, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, was sentenced to life in prison and ordered to forfeit $15 billion.The FBI’s Operation Summer Heat 2.0, which ran this year from June 1 to September 30, added 8,927 arrests and 687 kilograms of fentanyl. Mr. Blanche says that compared to the previous administration, DEA arrests are up 181 percent and fentanyl seizures are up 14 percent.Big numbers, however, do not necessarily mean a smaller supply.“Remember, just like department stores anticipate that some of their products will get stolen, cartels anticipate that some of their supply will get seized,” the managing director of the Department of Research and Academic Engagement at the Drug Policy Alliance, Sheila Vakharia, tells the Sun. “These are the costs of doing business.”What rattles supply, another analyst observes, is losing something hard to replace.“Law enforcement might take down a key leader who is hard to replace, and that disrupts supply for long enough to matter,” a professor of operations research and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, Jonathan Caulkins, tells the Sun.Seized drugs, by contrast, are easily restocked. Mr. Caulkins points out that unless enforcement damages the “throughput capacity” of a trafficking network, “the lost drugs themselves would have been quickly replaced.”In other words, a seizure is a dent a cartel can quickly repair. Taking out a hard-to-replace leader, smuggling route, or chemical supplier is what can actually choke the flow. A pile of confiscated pills on a press conference table does not reveal which kind of blow was struck.What the Overdose Data ShowNobody disputes that fewer people are dying. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the number of overdose deaths last year at roughly 70,000, according to its latest estimate, down nearly 14 percent from 2024.The toll has now dropped three years running, and so far it has kept falling in 2026. The CDC predicts 66,478 deaths over the 12 months through May, down about 11.5 percent nationwide from the year before, and down almost 20 percent in Pennsylvania.The fight is over when the slide began. A KFF analysis shows opioid deaths turning downward in the second half of 2023, while President Biden was still in office. In Pennsylvania, deaths topped out in 2021 and had fallen by more than a third three years later.Many researchers trace the turn to China, where most fentanyl precursor chemicals originate.Fentanyl deaths “have plummeted across North America because in mid-2023 there was a major supply shock, probably initiated by Chinese interdiction against precursor chemicals,” a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University, Keith Humphreys, tells the Sun.Beijing has kept tightening. On October 1, it extended class-wide controls to orphines, a newer family of synthetic opioids that had begun turning up in American toxicology reports.“One reason China does this is that the U.S. government, including DEA, engages with them and asks them to,” Mr. Humphreys says. “That has much more impact than seizing drugs, because synthetic drugs can be replaced fairly quickly.”The drop has also shown up where no crackdown took place.“The decline occurred both in places that saw big enforcement initiatives, and others that didn’t,” an assistant professor of medicine and health policy at Brown University and former police chief, Brandon del Pozo, tells the Sun.In 2023, Mr. del Pozo and his colleagues examined two years of police data from Marion County, Indiana, home to Indianapolis. Their study found that fatal overdoses near the site of an opioid seizure tended to rise over the next three weeks.One possible explanation the researchers offered is that users who lose their regular dealer may turn to riskier sources. Even so, Mr. del Pozo has not given up on going after traffickers.“We should applaud police for their intense focus on bringing cartels to justice, but to save lives, it needs to be complemented by things that change people’s risky behavior when it comes to illegal drugs,” he says.A Local Story With Many AuthorsLuzerne County, Pennsylvania, illustrates why assigning credit is so hard. Overdoses killed 208 people there in 2021, the most the county has ever recorded. Since then, the count has dropped every year, down to 89 by 2024. Two local tallies for 2025 don’t quite match: The district attorney puts it at 79, while the coroner’s figure is 71. Either way, most of the decline came on Mr. Biden’s watch.The district attorney, Sam Sanguedolce, reported this year that fentanyl’s presence in the county had sharply decreased. He called it a major driver of the drop, supporting the supply story officials told at the courthouse.The county’s drug and alcohol administrator gives at least as much credit to local treatment programs and the country’s free distribution of naloxone, which can reverse an opioid overdose. The same report noted that methamphetamine use is climbing. Fentanyl hasn’t gone away, either; in September, county officials warned that cocaine cut with fentanyl had killed 12 persons over the previous three months.Supporters of the White House see a different story. Customs and Border Protection data show fentanyl seizures at the southern border running at about half the prior year’s pace for much of 2025. They say that drop means less of the drug is being smuggled, not that agents are catching less of it.In October 2025, during a meeting with Xi Jinping in South Korea, Mr. Trump halved the fentanyl-justified tariff on Chinese imports, bringing it down to 10 percent. Beijing agreed to clamp down on the trade in return.That gave Washington a way to push for tighter Chinese controls on fentanyl’s chemical ingredients, the kind of restrictions researchers believe helped cut deaths. A few months earlier, in July, Mr. Trump had signed the HALT Fentanyl Act, which keeps fentanyl-related substances in Schedule I permanently.A veteran of the agency that ran the surges says enforcement has earned its share.“Law enforcement deserves significant credit for disrupting trafficking networks, seizing fentanyl, and targeting cartel leadership,” a retired assistant special agent in charge at the DEA, Wesley Tabor, tells the Sun.The decline, he underscores, reflects “changes in the illicit drug supply by enforcement and successful border security,” along with treatment, naloxone and public awareness. “We cannot attribute the reduction solely to arrests and seizures,” Mr. Tabor says.Mr. Caulkins agrees that the supply side probably made a difference. “We believe that actions in China may well have been an important ingredient in the onset of that perfect storm, but precursor controls alone rarely have effects that persist this long, so ongoing enforcement efforts in Mexico, the U.S. and in Canada could well deserve credit,” he says.Protesters Outside, a Flipped Seat Weeks LaterThe courthouse visit came 15 days before an election in one of the country’s most contested House races. Mr. Bresnahan had won Pennsylvania’s 8th District in 2024 by less than 2 points, and Inside Elections rated his race against the Democratic mayor of Scranton, Paige Cognetti, a toss-up. Outside groups poured more than $10 million into the contest.That contest followed the officials to the courthouse door. A handful of protesters gathered outside of the building, identifying themselves as health care union members and Cognetti supporters. They chanted against the congressman, and their signs demanded release of the Epstein files.On November 3, it was not close. Ms. Cognetti beat Mr. Bresnahan by about 8.7 points, according to unofficial results. That is the second-largest margin since the district was redrawn in 2018. She had hammered him over his stock trading and campaigned on restoring Medicaid cuts, and her win was part of a midterm wave that handed Democrats control of the House.Mr. Bresnahan, who lost a 16-year-old family member to an opioid overdose, voted for the HALT Fentanyl Act and the Stop Chinese Fentanyl Act. Ms. Cognetti says Scranton has put millions of dollars into its police department to fight drug trafficking and that she will work with anyone serious about stopping fentanyl. Mr. McCormick and Ms. Carter both say the fight belongs to neither party.Some researchers wish politicians would treat it that way.“Efforts to combat OD don’t need to be fodder for partisan politics,” Mr. Caulkins says.Keeping the Decline GoingThe bigger risk to the progress, researchers say, may lie in the budget. Medicaid covers nearly half of nonelderly adults with opioid use disorder and more than half of those receiving medication to treat it. The tax and spending law Mr. Trump signed in July 2025 adds work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks. The Congressional Budget Office projects 10 million more uninsured Americans by 2034. Come January, those cuts will face a Democratic House majority that campaigned against them.“Increasing, or at least maintaining, treatment availability is the most important measure,” Mr. Reuter says.He expects the number of persons receiving treatment for their opioid disorders to fall in the next year because of changes in Medicaid and grants to states.Mr. Humphreys stresses that the tighter drug supply has made addiction a more unpleasant experience, which makes this the moment to encourage treatment. Yet much of that treatment “is paid for by Medicaid, which Congress and the Trump administration have slashed to an unprecedented extent,” he continues.Another researcher looks further upstream.“The big thing more people need to focus on is preventing people from initiating use,” a professor of population health at New York University, Joseph Palamar, tells the Sun.Even with the improvement, an estimated 69,973 Americans died of overdoses in 2025, according to the CDC, or about 192 a day.When one synthetic opioid is banned, chemists tend to come up with a replacement. Mr. Caulkins doesn’t think any one approach will solve the problem. Most reasonable people, he says, agree that “efforts from both the supply and demand side can be constructive.”The retired DEA official says Washington is still counting the wrong things.“We should have learned from the last 40 years of enforcement that we cannot kill or arrest our way out of this problem,” Mr. Tabor adds. “The true measure of success isn’t how many kilograms of fentanyl we seize or how many traffickers we arrest; it’s how many American lives we save.”

Trump Officials Credit Cartel Busts for Reducing Overdose Deaths, but Experts Say It’s More Complicated

Trump Officials Credit Cartel Busts for Reducing Overdose Deaths, but Experts Say It’s More Complicated

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