Fact check: Haley compares U.S. fentanyl deaths to war deaths
Addressing a conference room full of New Hampshire voters, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley recently shared a grave statistic about the synthetic opioid fentanyl.
Posted — UpdatedATKINSON, N.H. — Addressing a conference room full of New Hampshire voters, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley shared a grave statistic about the synthetic opioid fentanyl.
"We’ve had more Americans die of fentanyl than the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam wars, combined," the former South Carolina governor said Dec. 14 at the Atkinson Resort and Country Club in Atkinson.
Federal data shows Haley’s math is accurate when measuring national fentanyl deaths against U.S. military deaths. About 127,000 Americans died from drug overdoses involving a synthetic opioid other than methadone (primarily fentanyl) in 2020 and 2021 alone compared with 65,278 U.S. military personnel who died in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.
Although public officials have long compared drug deaths with war fatalities, U.S. health officials approach addiction issues as public health matters and typically compare opioid deaths with deaths from other public health causes.
Military and drug overdose deaths
With just a few years worth of data, it is clear that the fentanyl death toll surpasses the wartime death toll Haley specified.
We have seen this war death comparison before
This is not the first time we have seen war deaths used to illustrate a public health issue’s direness. Politicians and television commentators have used military conflicts to illustrate the toll of gun violence, and more recently President Joe Biden used them to quantify deaths from COVID-19.
Drugs-and-war parallels have been hard to avoid since 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared a "war" on illegal drugs.
"Comparing deaths linked to public health crises to war deaths, and especially the Vietnam War, is a pretty common thing," said David Herzberg, a drug historian and professor at the University at Buffalo. "And on its face it is a reasonable strategy for conveying gravity," or seriousness of a crisis.
But experts like David Luckey, a senior international and defense researcher at the global policy think tank Rand Corp., said that this sort of comparison can "show the scope of this problem" and put the scale of the illicit fentanyl crisis in a perspective that people can understand.
Comparing the fentanyl death toll to other public health crises such as heart attacks or car accidents, "would technically be more accurate," said Herzberg, "but might not get the idea across because the public may not know whether those other things are really big problems or not — so they aren’t as useful as a benchmark."
Fentanyl as a Chinese threat
Haley’s other comments hint at why she’s invoking war numbers. She said fentanyl deaths are among many reasons why she believes China is the United States’ leading national security threat. "China has been preparing for war with us for years," Haley said.
PolitiFact ruling
Haley said, "We’ve had more Americans die of fentanyl than the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam wars, combined."
Her numbers are right. About 127,000 Americans died from drug overdoses involving a synthetic opioid other than methadone (primarily fentanyl) in 2020 and 2021 compared with 65,278 U.S. military personnel who died in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam.
We rate this claim True.
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