from the drug-math-is-the-worst-math dept
Our long national nightmare is over. More lives have been saved than have possibly ever lived. And that’s just since earlier this year.
Using the same drug math that turns a couple of kilos into something with tens of millions of dollars of “street value,” Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly claimed Trump’s return to office has prevented this nation from dwindling to a more-than-merely-decimated republic populated by less than 100 million people.
As Joe Lancaster reports for Reason, Bondi’s first announcement was just as stupid but not quite as absolutely surreal. Following a late April tour of a DEA forensic lab, Bondi claimed the seizure of 22 million pills had saved only “119 million lives.” But that number grew exponentially when Bondi returned to the White House to pay fealty to King Donald.
During a televised Cabinet meeting the following day, she effusively praised Trump for the accomplishments of his first 100 days. “Since you have been in office,” she gushed, “your DOJ agencies have seized more than 22 million fentanyl pills, 3,400 kilos of fentanyl, which saved—are you ready for this, media?—258 million lives.” That figure amounts to roughly three out of every four Americans, or nearly the entire adult population according to the most recent U.S. Census.
Literally laughable. That may be math, but it’s not the sort of math anyone would consider to be credible, unless credibility isn’t your actual goal. It’s not just Bondi being literally unbelievable. It’s the DOJ itself, which seems to think doing an insane amount of extrapolation is the best way to deliver drug seizure stats.
A DOJ spokesman told Slate’s Jim Newell that they multiplied 3,400 kilograms seized by its “current purity level,” then divided that amount into 2-milligram doses—yielding just over 258 million individual deadly drams.
Of course, that’s not how drug use, much less drug distribution, works. Seizing drugs may keep those (and only those) drugs from reaching their final destination. But it hardly puts a dent in drug distribution networks, which are fully cognizant of the fact that there’s a certain amount of shrinkage (to use a retail term of art) inherent to the illicit substance business.
But the more stupid claim is that taking this much off the streets is equal to saving this many millions of lives. Even if drug dealers were just hurling fistfuls of pills into the street like candy at a parade, there’s no way 258 million people would be able to grab them, much less decide the sudden gifting of fentanyl pills demands immediate consumption of a possibly fatal dose.
To be sure, fentanyl does kill a lot of people. But the war on drugs isn’t doing much to prevent these tragedies from happening. If anything, years of non-productive busywork has done little more than increase the potency of available substances and ensure no drug user truly knows what they’re ingesting because it’s an entirely unregulated market in which potency and purity can vary wildly.
Finally, it’s just an insanely idiotic claim to make publicly, something made even worse by the DOJ’s decision to back up Bondi’s bootlicking with a mathematical equation that spells out exactly how incredibly stupid her claim was. Lots of things are capable of killing someone, but no one ever claims each seized bullet, gun, car, or tainted consumable is the equivalent of one saved life. That’s because it’s simply not true. Just because this involves the drug boogeyman du jour doesn’t make these claims any more excusable.
The government can and should do what it can to prevent fentanyl overdoses. But making literally absurd claims in public doesn’t do a damn thing but expose those making these claims as the idiotic opportunists they are.
Filed Under: bullshit, dea, doj, fentanyl, pam bondi, war on drugs
