How Biden made big gains battling street fentanyl but lost the messaging war to Trump

During his first year back in office, President Trump made the fight against street fentanyl a major part of his agenda, arguing that a far more aggressive approach is needed to prevent overdose deaths.

But a growing body of research, including a new study published in the journal Science, shows that under then-President Joe Biden, the flow of fentanyl smuggled into the U.S plunged, with overdose deaths also falling at an unprecedented rate.

Drug policy experts say they’re baffled that Biden’s team was able to make historic gains battling fentanyl, while failing to tell that story to the American people. “I think it hurt them because they had a story of success to tell,” said Keith Humphreys, a researcher at Stanford University and a co-author of the new report.

Among his team’s findings: The potency of illegal fentanyl being sold in U.S. communities was cut roughly in half during the final year of Biden’s presidency. “You’re talking about a 50% decline in the purity of fentanyl being seized [in drug raids],” Humphreys noted. “That’s a big drop.”

Trump reframed fentanyl as a border issue

During the 2024 presidential campaign, however, the public heard almost nothing about that progress. Republicans used the fentanyl crisis successfully as a major attack line against Biden and Kamala Harris, often using false, outdated or exaggerated claims.

At the Republican National Convention that summer, the GOP gave a prime-time speaking slot to Anne Fundner, whose son had died of a fentanyl overdose. “His whole future, everything we ever wanted for him, was ripped away in an instant,” Fundner said. “And Joe Biden does nothing.”

Trump’s campaign narrative on fentanyl was powerful, simple and often factually wrong. He argued that Biden’s team had fumbled border security and in the process had also failed to slow fentanyl trafficking from Mexico.

“We were getting very low numbers, very, very low numbers — then he came along. Have you seen the numbers now?” Trump said when asked about drug deaths during what turned out to be his one debate with Biden, in June 2024.

The facts are more complex. Fentanyl smuggling and deaths began to surge during the final year of Trump’s first term. Drug interdiction efforts with Mexico also collapsed. After Biden took office, deaths from the synthetic opioid continued to rise to catastrophic levels during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 and 2022, according to provisional overdose data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But during Biden’s final two years in office, drug deaths and fentanyl smuggling were falling fast. Yet NPR could find few instances where candidate Biden pushed back against Trump’s narrative. After replacing Biden at the top of the ticket, Harris, too, seemed to echo Trump’s framing of fentanyl as a border problem that was still largely raging out of control.

“It’s a scourge in our country, and we have to take it seriously,” she said at a rally in Arizona. “As president, I will make it a top priority to disrupt the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States.”

Historic success on fentanyl, silence on the campaign trail

What Harris failed to mention was that by the time she gave that speech, the Biden administration had already disrupted the flow of fentanyl dramatically. The new study published in Science shows the purity of fentanyl and its availability on American streets began plunging in 2023.

Researchers used social media records from 2023 and 2024 to track online discussion of the collapse of the criminal fentanyl supply chain.

According to Humphreys, they looked for terms like “shortage” or “weaker” in discussions of street fentanyl supply. “There was an explosion, a 14-fold increase in the mention of these phrases, right when overdoses start dropping,” he said. According to the Science report, deaths from fentanyl dropped by an astonishing 37% from 2023 to 2024.

Humphreys believes Biden’s team used law enforcement effectively to target the drug cartels, while also convincing China to curb the flow of industrial “precursor” chemicals used to make fentanyl. “Biden’s people, the foreign policy people, can feel very proud that they made an impact,” Humphreys said.

This study builds on a growing body of data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and independent researchers who study street supplies of fentanyl, that all point to a rapid drop in availability, potency, and purity of the deadly drug on American streets.

“Fentanyl purity declined throughout 2024, consistent with indicators that many Mexico-based fentanyl cooks are having difficulty obtaining some key precursor chemicals,” DEA officials concluded in their assessment, published in May 2025.

The Biden administration was disrupting fentanyl traffickers — arresting and prosecuting key drug cartel leaders. Federal officials were also expanding public health and medical insurance programs, funneling more dollars to harm-reduction efforts and making it easier for people to access medications like naloxone and buprenorphine that help prevent overdoses.

“Those things were setting up the stage for declines [in overdose deaths] to be lasting in ways the declines in the past never had been,” said Nabarun Dasgupta, who studies street drugs at the University of North Carolina.

Silence from the candidates is even more remarkable given Dasgupta’s research, which shows that in three of the key battleground states that decided the 2024 election — Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — fentanyl deaths began dropping in 2021 and 2022.

NPR couldn’t find a single instance where Biden or Harris talked on the campaign trail about that progress.

Dasgupta thinks that while Biden’s team was making significant public health gains against fentanyl, Trump managed to seize the narrative. “It was brilliant rhetorically. It all became about the border and not about the empowering solutions,” he said.

NPR reached out to the White House with questions about Trump’s narrative on fentanyl. In a statement, spokeswoman Anna Kelly pointed again to border security, military strikes and diplomatic efforts with China as evidence that Trump has been more aggressive than Biden battling fentanyl.

“President Trump is using every tool at his disposal to save lives,” Kelly said.

Why didn’t policy gains translate into political gains?

NPR also reached out to Harris, as well as to Democratic operatives involved in the Biden and Harris campaigns, to ask about their fentanyl messaging. We got no response.

We were able to speak with Hunter Biden, a controversial figure pardoned by then-President Biden in December 2024 for drug-related firearms convictions and other charges. Hunter Biden himself struggled with addiction and served as an informal adviser during his father’s campaign. He believes Trump managed to reframe fentanyl in the public mind in ways that are still keeping Democrats off balance.

“Competent government for a nuanced issue like fentanyl doesn’t equal clicks,” Biden said. “Trump figured that out a long time ago. He’s turned it into an art form that I don’t believe any Democrat or Republican has been able to counter effectively yet.”

Regina LaBelle, who served briefly as acting head of Biden’s Office of National Drug Control Policy and who teaches drug policy at Georgetown University, agrees that the Democratic campaigns failed to tell the story of Biden’s fentanyl response.

“Those are messaging issues that probably could have been addressed in a more compelling way,” she said.

LaBelle believes part of the challenge is that Democrats felt obligated to talk about a complex issue like drug addiction in nuanced ways, especially at a time when tens of thousands of people in the U.S. are still dying from fatal overdoses.

“Even when you bring the numbers down, we have to be careful how we talk about this,” she said.

Drug policy experts generally agree that Biden and Harris failed to tell the story of their success on fentanyl, with sweeping consequences. Since returning to office, Trump has portrayed many Biden-era policies as a failure, slashing funding for Medicaid, the insurance program that covers most addiction treatment in the U.S, and ending federal support for harm-reduction efforts widely credited with saving lives.

The Trump administration also continues to use fentanyl as a key part of its political narrative. Trump and his Cabinet officials often exaggerate the risk and scale of overdose deaths as justification for everything from trade tariffs to tougher immigration policies to an increasingly militarized drug war.