President Biden and former President Trump were each given the chance on Thursday to speak to a kitchen-table issue plaguing the nation: the addiction and drug overdose epidemic claiming over 110,000 American lives each year.
One word was conspicuously absent from both of their answers: “treatment.”
Instead, during the first debate of the 2024 presidential campaign, the current and former president each offered circuitous answers that, at least vaguely, spoke to border security. Trump at one point cited his administration’s purchase of drug sniffing dogs. Biden, meanwhile, noted that Trump is currently blocking an immigration bill that would provide funds for the purchase of fentanyl-detection machines.
That neither Biden nor Trump even mentioned treatment was especially surprising given the specific question posed by Jake Tapper, one of the CNN moderators. He asked how the candidates would “help Americans in the throes of addiction right now, who are struggling to get the treatment they need.”
Neither candidate used the question as an opportunity to speak to Americans struggling with addiction or who’ve lost loved ones to overdoses, or to tout their administrations’ attempts to save lives.
Trump first ignored the question altogether, returning instead to an unfinished answer about China and trade deficits. Only when Tapper prompted him again did Trump address the issue, blaming rising drug deaths during his tenure on the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We were doing very well on addiction until the Covid came along,” Trump said. But after the pandemic began, “the drugs pouring across the border, it started to increase.”
It is true that drug deaths jumped sharply amid the Covid-19 pandemic, but false that they weren’t rising before. Overdose deaths had jumped even before the pandemic’s onset, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, climbing from roughly 65,000 per year when Trump took office in 2017 to 74,000 per year in March 2020.
The totals soared to record levels during Biden’s first years as president, however — a fact that Trump took care to highlight.
“We got great equipment, we bought the certain dog that’s the most incredible thing you’ve ever seen, the way they can spot it,” Trump said. “We did a lot, and we were getting very low numbers,” Trump said, adding that “the number of drugs coming across our borders now is the largest we’ve ever had by far.”
Overdose deaths, driven largely by fentanyl, have hovered around all-time highs for the last several years. And while the Biden administration has declined to make the drug crisis a marquee issue, it has notched a number of substantive policy achievements that the sitting president declined to tout.
In particular, the Biden administration has taken a historically open stance toward the practice of harm reduction — in essence, strategies that help people stay safer while using drugs, while conceding that demanding instant abstinence is rarely practical.
Biden has also sought to significantly expand access to methadone and buprenorphine, two common medications used to treat opioid addiction. Under Biden, Democrats in Congress eliminated the “X-waiver,” a requirement that prescribers undergo hours of special training before being allowed to treat patients with buprenorphine. More recently, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration put forward new regulations that allow methadone clinics to treat patients with far more flexibility and compassion.
Biden also didn’t mention the slight dip in overall drug deaths between 2022 and 2023, the first decrease in five years — and he avoided altogether the subject of his son, Hunter, despite having publicly offered his support amid his struggles with addiction.
“Fentanyl and the byproducts of fentanyl went down for a while, and I wanted to make sure we used machinery that can detect fentanyl, these big machines that roll over everything that comes across the border,” Biden said, blaming Trump for blocking a bill that would have funded the acquisition of those machines. “That’s what we have to do: We need those machines.”