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.
The declines can be seen in provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which compiles death records from states, which in turn collect data from medical examiners and coroners in cities and towns. Final national data generally takes more than a year to produce. But, as the drug overdose crisis has become a major public health emergency in recent years, the C.D.C. has been publishing monthly data, with some holes, at around a four-month lag.
The most recent numbers from that provisional report, published in early February, are from September, and they show more than a year of declining drug deaths. An estimated 2,700 Americans died from a fentanyl overdose in September, according to a New York Times analysis of the data, down from over double that number in May 2023.
Even with the recent reductions, drug overdoses remain a major public health problem, killing more Americans than car crashes or guns.
The causes of the declines are not clear. But many public health researchers credit efforts to expand access to naloxone, a drug that can reverse an overdose, as well as more addiction treatment. Others point to changes in the drug supply itself — variations in adulterants and potency can affect the rate of drug deaths. There is also some evidence that Mexican cartels have recently curtailed production of fentanyl.
A White House spokesman did not respond to questions about Mr. Lutnick’s sources of data.
Determining the cause of death from drug overdoses often requires toxicology screening and other tests that can take weeks or months. Gathering the data from local authorities and bundling it up to a national level takes even longer.
“It takes a while, because it’s a resource issue,” said Bob Anderson, the chief of statistical analysis and surveillance in the C.D.C.’s center for health statistics, in a recent interview. “We’re all sort of used to watching ‘CSI’ or ‘NCIS’ where toxicology is ready in 15 minutes. But that’s not typically the way it works.”
It’s possible to look for signs in overdose trends at the local level. But because deaths can cluster — overdoses can surge in a single neighborhood if there is a bad batch of drugs — it is hard to get a nationally representative picture quickly. Compare recent drug deaths in two areas with more recent public data: In Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago, a decline continues, while in King County, Wash., which includes Seattle, deaths spiked in November.
Even the recent provisional data has its omissions. Hawre Jalal, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa who has studied trends in drug overdose mortality, said he worried that any numbers more recent than December 2023 might be too incomplete to fully understand the national picture. He said overdose deaths — which spiked during the Covid pandemic — may have simply returned to their more long-term upward trend. “I’m very hopeful that it’s declining,” he said. “I can’t say that yet.”
By that conservative measure, it could take years to know whether Canada and Mexico have met the Trump administration’s declared standard for tariff relief.
Noah Weiland contributed reporting.
