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Senior fellow for health policy at the Cato Institute, Dr. Jeffrey Singer, states “President Trump recently claimed that fentanyl-related overdose deaths were 300,000 last year, a figure five times the CDC’s reported number of just under 60,000 for the year ending August 2024. Such exaggeration only fuels fear-driven policies that have historically failed and have harmful unintended consequences. Decades of drug war tactics have failed, merely shifting production of fentanyl precursors from China to India, Myanmar, other parts of Southeast Asia, and even Canada. Canadian authorities report “superlabs” are shipping fentanyl to drug dealers in Australia and New Zealand and, to a lesser amount, to the US. And now we are seeing more dangerous forms of fentanyl, like the elephant tranquilizer carfentanil, as well as other synthetic opioids like nitazenes, detected in overdose toxicology reports and DEA drug seizures. The iron law of prohibition—“the harder the enforcement, the harder the drugs”—guarantees that as long as prohibition persists, traffickers will find new ways to supply drug users increasingly potent and deadly substances—fueling, rather than preventing the crisis.”
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