Dawn Allen wasn’t just a voting booth Democrat — she knocked on doors and donated money, including to President Joe Biden.
But after her son died from fentanyl poisoning last year, she grew frustrated by what she viewed as Biden’s hands-off approach to the opioid crisis. Now she says she won’t vote for a Democrat, and she finds herself more in line with the candidate who has focused sharply on the deadly fentanyl epidemic: former President Donald Trump.
“It feels like a really bad breakup,” the 47-year-old mother of three other children said from her home in a Chicago suburb. “I’m really, really hurt.”
Allen is part of a network of opioid-affected families who are pressing government officials to do more to address what experts call the worst drug epidemic in U.S. history. Among that group, many say Trump’s tough talk on drugs resonates with them, according to a series of interviews with activists and grieving family members, even though fentanyl deaths nearly doubled during his administration.
The fentanyl awareness movement “leans to the right – no question,” said Andrea Thomas, who lost a daughter in 2018 and has become a leader of grieving parents seeking to boost the government’s response to the crisis. “Our U.S. government is almost complicit, and now there is such an unlimited supply of this poison here it’s indicative of stockpiling.”
The government says fentanyl kills around 70,000 Americans each year – more than car accidents and shootings combined. The crisis has impacted Americans of all regions, income levels, races and political persuasions.
But Republicans appear to have placed a greater emphasis on the issue in their public messaging. To cite one example: The GOP’s national convention in July featured an emotional prime-time speech from a mother who lost a child to fentanyl. By contrast, no prime-time speaker at the Democratic National Convention mentioned the opioid crisis.
Trump speaks about fentanyl frequently; Harris less so.
“We’ll bust up and dismantle the gangs, savage criminal networks, and bloodthirsty cartels. And we will stop the fentanyl,” Trump said during a recent campaign appearance in Michigan.
Trump has called for expanding the death penalty for drug dealers, using the military to target Mexican cartels and halting illegal border crossings to stop the importation of the drug.
Many experts say none of those things would stanch the flow of the dangerous chemical. The federal death penalty is rarely carried out, even when Trump was president; Mexican cartel leaders have vast resources at their disposal to hide themselves, even if Trump took the radical step of upending the U.S. relationship with Mexico by mounting unilateral attacks; and the government says most fentanyl is smuggled in by Americans, through lawful points of entry.
“Getting to a situation where there is no fentanyl coming to the United States – it’s just not realistic,” said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has studied illegal drugs for decades.
But fentanyl activists say Trump is at least drawing attention to the issue, whereas the Biden administration, they say, is not.
“We don’t feel seen, we don’t feel heard,” said Allen. “I’m surprised that somebody hasn’t realized or figured out that this is a huge population of people, that if we believe that you were going to respond to this and do something about it, you could very easily earn our favor.”
White House officials dispute the idea that the Biden administration has failed to highlight the fentanyl crisis, and they say they have implemented sound policies to attack it. They say they have met with hundreds of opioid-affected families, made historic investments in treatment and seized a record amount of fentanyl at the border.
“President Biden and Vice President Harris have taken more action and provided more funding to address this crisis than ever before,” said President Biden’s director of national drug control policy, Dr. Rahul Gupta.
Some grieving families are frustrated with both parties. Jim Rauh, who lost his son Thomas to fentanyl poisoning, runs a group called Families Against Fentanyl, which put up billboards with messages calling attention to the crisis at the sites of both political conventions.
He said he tries to take a nonpartisan approach to his advocacy, but, he added, “it’s obvious who brings it up more often.”
No magic bullet
The reality of fentanyl is that neither party has a magic-bullet solution.
A legal drug with medicinal uses as a strong painkiller, fentanyl has been around for years, and for a long time it was not a major factor in the American opioid crisis. But because it is cheap to make and powerful in small amounts — therefore easy to smuggle — drug dealers began selling it to opioid addicts and adulterating other drugs with it.
Overdoses and poisonings began to spike. By 2017, the year Trump took office, there were 28,000 deaths from fentanyl. By the time he left in January 2021, the number had topped 50,000.
In 2019, the Trump administration scored a major win by getting China to regulate the production of fentanyl, which led to a reduction in illegal exports from there. But Mexican cartels then began importing from China the chemical ingredients needed to make the drug. And experts say those cartels made the business decision that an increase in deaths among their customers was a small price to pay for the profitability of using fentanyl in nearly every illegal drug.
The powerful substance is now present in all manner of drugs and counterfeit pills, so people who think they are buying cocaine, methamphetamine or Percocet often end up ingesting fentanyl, sometimes with deadly results.
In 2021, during Biden’s first year of office — when many Americans were still stuck at home amid the pandemic — fentanyl deaths rose by 23% to more than 70,000.
Felbab-Brown said the administration responded in part by removing barriers to drug treatment and increasing funding for it.
“The Biden administration, following on what was started in the Obama administration, crucially expanded coverage, medical coverage, insurance coverage to also include substance use disorder,” she said. “This is absolutely critical to get people into treatment.”
Last year, fentanyl deaths declined by 2%, which experts say is likely due to the increased use of Narcan that reverses overdoses —something Biden made widely available.
Under Biden, seizures of fentanyl have steadily increased, and U.S. law enforcement agencies took custody of three major Mexican players in the fentanyl trade. Biden also has targeted sanctions at Chinese makers of precursor chemicals, although that has not stopped their flow to Mexico.
Felbab-Brown said the administration deserves significant credit for re-engaging China on fentanyl, but, she said, “Where I think the policy is really falling short, is how we deal with the Mexican government.”
Even when Mexico’s president publicly and falsely proclaimed fentanyl was not produced in Mexico, the Biden administration was reluctant to publicly criticize him. Analysts say the Biden team has treated Mexico very gently even amid inaction and corruption that has allowed to thrive.
Felbab-Brown and others say that is mainly because the U.S. badly needs Mexico’s help in slowing the flow of migrants to the southern U.S. border, an issue that has become a huge political liability for Democrats.
Trump repeatedly blames the increase in fentanyl deaths on the influx of 10 million migrants who crossed the border during the Biden. But statistics on fentanyl seizures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection tell a different story.
More than 95% of the fentanyl seized at the border is actually brought in via passenger vehicles driven by U.S. citizens, the government says. As of last year, less than 2% of those cars were scanned for fentanyl.
In 2021, the Department of Homeland Security purchased machines to scan passenger vehicles for fentanyl but a significant number have still not been installed.
NBC News reported in March that 56 of more than 100 scanners were sitting idle for three years because of a lack of funding for installation. Shortly afterward, Congress approved $200 million to install the machines. Since then, the percentage of cars crossing the border that are scanned has risen to 8%, according to a senior DHS official.
A compromise bill designed to address border security would have provided more money for more machines, but the bill died after Trump instructed his allies to oppose it.
A spokesperson for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign said she will continue Biden’s drug control policies. Harris also wants to revive the border security bill and seek more funding for drug treatment, the spokesperson said.
“While Donald Trump killed the toughest bipartisan border bill in decades that would dramatically increase our ability to stop fentanyl at the border — siding with fentanyl traffickers over the border patrol and the American people — the Vice President and President have surged resources to stop fentanyl at every stage of the supply chain and fought for more support for Americans fighting addiction,” a spokesperson said in a statement to NBC News.
Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, said the campaign is regularly contacted by families who have lost loved ones to fentanyl.
“Fentanyl overdose is the leading cause of death for Americans and Kamala Harris and Joe Biden don’t talk about it,” she said.
Grieving families won’t stop pressing the issue
While the politicians squabble, April Babcock said she will keep pressuring whoever is in power.
After losing a son in 2019, she started an advocacy organization, Lost Voices of Fentanyl, which now has almost 35,000 followers on Facebook.
She said she’s glad to see that deaths are dropping but she attributed that to Narcan, adding, “We’re not going to Narcan our way out of this.”
Her group rallied with former Trump Homeland Security officials at the base of the Washington Monument this summer, raising concerns about border security.
Babcock said the parents in her organization have already picked the date for their 2025 D.C. rally. “Whoever gets in that office, we are going to hold their feet to the fire,” she said. “Even if it’s Trump.”