Dishonest framing wrecks a genuine accomplishment

Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the administration saved 258 million lives in 100 days.

Check it out:

Media was not ready for that

This claim is… not true. To do the same math that I’m sure every other blog did, 258 million fentanyl deaths would be more than 75% of America’s living population.¹ I thought that this was a funny slip of tongue - perhaps the AG meant 258 thousand lives were saved, or even 2.58 million lives. But no, this was a deliberate upgrade from an earlier statement that 119 million “lives” were saved (rookie numbers, in retrospect) and the admin stood by the 258 million “lives saved” figure in writing.²

Rest easy, friends - there was never danger that 3/4 of all US residents were going to overdose. Honorable Bondi was actually just reframing (to put it politely) what the DEA calls “potentially deadly doses” - a simple metric that divides the total volume of seized material by the amount that can be fatal.³ If this were taken to literally mean “lives saved”, the roughly 380 million doses seized in 2023 would have otherwise wiped out the population of the US by Thanksgiving. 17 years later, everyone on earth would be dead.

I’m going a bit batty because this clumsy framing might obscure a genuine accomplishment. If we take these figures at face value, it might mean the administration has more than doubled fentanyl capture rate. Putting aside opinions about drug policy, doubling capture would be a meaningful outcome worthy of public attention.

Instead, political appointees undermined any earnest work. The statement’s absurdity practically begs the public not to take any of this seriously. And one wonders: if the AG is willing to deliberately and unapologetically misrepresent the bottom-line figure, why wouldn’t they be willing to fudge the component factors?⁴ How can we trust the purity figure, the volume of captured material, the timeframe of capture (none of which can be independently verified)? There would have been nothing wrong with saying, “We intercepted 258 million deadly doses in four months, doubling last year’s capture rate,” but now we’re forced to wonder if 258 million is an inflated figure in the first place. I can only imagine how frustrated the professional staff behind these numbers must be.

I hope in the next chapter of America’s saga, our leaders might feel that they can simply acknowledge the gaffe and confess, “What I meant to say was…”.