On the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, President Joe Biden urged world leaders to not “let up” on efforts to tackle synthetic drugs and the overdose crisis and called on nations to sign on to a new global coalition pledge.
“Drug manufacturers and cartels continue to adapt their practices, develop new chemicals, move fast to evade our efforts. We have to move faster,” Biden said in New York on Tuesday. “They continue to exploit the global supply chains to expand their networks. We've got to cut them off.”
The new pledge, Biden said, includes three commitments: disrupting the production and distribution of illicit drugs, stepping up communication between countries on drug threats and increasing access to life-saving medication and treatments.
“It's possible – It's about disrupt, detect, prevent and treat,” Biden said. “Together, we're making it clear: enough is enough is enough.”
Deaths from drug-related overdoses surged in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic, rising from 71,000 in 2019 to 93,000 in 2020, and to 107,000 in 2021, according to the National Institutes of Health.
In remarks before Biden on Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted that fentanyl is the number one killer of Americans between the ages of 18 and 49.
Last year, the U.S. recorded its first annual decrease in drug overdose deaths since 2018, according to provisional data from CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. The data showed 107,543 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 2023—a decrease of 3% from the 111,029 deaths estimated in 2022.
And Biden on Tuesday touted new data that he said showed “the largest decrease on record.”
“I'm proud to announce, for the first time in five years, overdose deaths are actually coming down across America,” Biden said. “The latest data shows a 10% drop, that's the largest decrease on record.”
The president touted his efforts to take on the issue both at home and abroad, including by making the overdose reversal medication Naloxone available over-the-counter, investing more than $80 billion to expand access to addiction treatment and issuing sanctions on cartel leaders involved in the spread of synthetic opioids.
He noted the creation of the Trilateral Fentanyl Committee with Mexico and Canada as well as his agreement with Beijing’s Xi Jinping after a closely-watched summit last November, to crack down on the flow of precursor chemicals and pill presses from China to the Western Hemisphere.
“This is a global challenge,” Biden said. “It requires global solutions.”