MEXICO CITY — President Biden understated the number of deaths caused by fentanyl Monday when raising the issue with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — after critics blasted Biden for not paying enough attention to the deadly scourge.
Biden said that fentanyl has killed “100,000” Americans, when official data actually link the potent synthetic opioid to about 196,000 US deaths in 2018-2021 alone.
The toll in 2022 is feared to be even worse than the 71,000 fentanyl deaths in 2021, potentially putting US fatalities over five years close to 300,000 as the drug is increasingly mixed into non-opioid drugs and counterfeit prescriptions.
