The crisis that neither presidential candidate wants to talk about

And while you may not hear about the overdose deaths themselves, both parties have referred extensively to the drug that is causing them pain—fentanyl. The Republican Party platform mentions the drug, and Democrats reference it 16 times in their own platform. But instead of connecting the synthetic opioid to the ongoing public health crisis, politicians have cynically wrapped “fentanyl” into an entirely different problem: using it to inflate the ongoing political culture war over border security and immigration.

In multiple ads touting her border security credentials, Kamala Harris promises to take a tougher approach to fentanyl as president, including investing in fentanyl detection technology to stop it from entering the country. Republicans, meanwhile, are directly implicating migrants, with Donald Trump frequently blaming migrants for a rise in fentanyl overdoses. All of this has had damaging effects on how people think about asylum seekers: a 2022 poll, for example, found that many Americans, particularly Republicans, believe migrants are smuggling fentanyl across the U.S. border. This is, of course, an outright lie: Most fentanyl enters the country through border crossings and is carried by U.S. citizens.

Predominantly talking about overdoses as a border security issue not only falsely links people seeking asylum to overdose deaths, it also obscures real solutions to this crisis while inhibiting their potential effectiveness. Fentanyl is a dangerous drug, but it’s talked about as if it were a “weapon of mass destruction” and treated as a national security threat—like anthrax—rather than something that contributes to overdoses and substance use disorders. What this misses is how fentanyl affects the drug supply and who uses drugs in the United States.