Trump Says Tariffs Will Stop When Opioid Deaths Fall. They’ve Already Fallen.

One month ago, President Trump agreed to delay tariffs on Canada and Mexico after the two countries agreed to help stem the flow of fentanyl into the United States. On Tuesday, the Trump administration imposed the tariffs anyway, saying that the countries had failed to do enough — and claiming that tariffs would be lifted only when drug deaths fall.

But the administration has seemingly established an impossible standard. Real-time, national data on fentanyl overdose deaths does not exist, so there is no way to know whether Canada and Mexico were able to “adequately address the situation” since February, as the White House demanded.

“We need to see material reduction in autopsied deaths from opioids,” said Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, in an interview on CNBC on Tuesday, indicating that such a decline would be a precondition to lowering tariffs. “But you’ve seen it — it has not been a statistically relevant reduction of deaths in America.”

In a way, Mr. Lutnick is correct that there is no evidence that overdose deaths have fallen in the last month — since there is no such national data yet. His stated goal to measure deaths again in early April will face similar challenges.

But data through September shows that fentanyl deaths had already been falling at a statistically significant rate for months, causing overall drug deaths to drop at a pace unlike any seen in more than 50 years of recorded drug overdose mortality data.

According to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, fentanyl deaths in the United States have been falling since January of last year.

Monthly fentanyl deaths include deaths from other similar drugs and are estimated using provisional data adjusted for lags in cause-of-death reporting. Nevertheless, recent data may still underestimate the death count.

Source: Times analysis of C.D.C. data

By The New York Times

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