Many posts have discussed myths and misinformation. Some whoppers involve drugs.
In recent months, federal prosecutors indicted a Georgia man for “possessing enough fentanyl to kill up to 500,000 individuals.” A sheriff in South Carolina announced the seizure of fentanyl that “had the potential to kill more than 800,000 people.” Perhaps most impressively, California Highway Patrol officers estimated they seized enough of the opioid to kill “a quarter of the population” of the entire state — some 10 million people.
Last week, however, Attorney General Pam Bondi put other law enforcement to shame with a staggering new claim: that drug busts during the first 100 days of the Trump administration had saved 119 million lives. (She soon issued a correction, announcing at last week’s Cabinet meeting that the true figure was more than twice as high: 258 million.)
The claim is implausible on many levels. Nowhere near 258 million Americans use drugs that could even potentially contain fentanyl. The large majority of fentanyl is consumed by a tiny subset of Americans with vastly higher tolerances than the 2-milligram dose that officials say could cause an overdose in unwitting users. Even when overdoses do occur, many can be reversed using naloxone and other techniques. And by Bondi’s logic, if law enforcement continued to seize fentanyl at the same rate for another month or so, the Trump administration could claim credit for saving every single American from a fatal drug overdose.
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In the 1930s, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics called marijuana “the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.” For decades, drug enforcement officials have warned of Halloween candy tainted with drugs, though no such occurrence has ever been documented. And in recent years, numerous police officers have claimed to experience opioid “overdoses” during routine interactions — despite the de facto impossibility of breathing in fentanyl or absorbing it through skin.
