Was 2024 the “fentanyl election”? A recent article in The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells suggests that the effect of the drug crisis on certain communities made their residents more likely to vote for Donald Trump. Perhaps this was another so-called sleeper issue. Though voters didn’t mention it like they did the economy and democracy, the issue was indeed weighing on people’s minds in the voting booth.

Wallace-Wells cites a recent study comparing counties that pharmaceutical companies targeted back in the ‘90s for sales of oxycontin (because of higher cancer rates, and therefore more customers in need of pain medication) with those that were not. The authors found that “while controlling for measures of economic hardship and social disorder, they could isolate the effects of a community’s opioid exposure from those of a more general decline.”

And those communities that were targeted turned out to be leaning increasingly Republican. In 2020, Wallace-Wells wrote, they “moved toward the Republicans by an extra 4.6 percent in the … House elections.” That movement toward Republicans continued in 2024 and gave Trump a decisive victory in those areas.

Wallace-Wells suggests that the Democrats weren’t paying enough attention to the drug crisis. And that all of the rhetoric expended by Trump and his supporters on closing the borders in order to limit the flow of drugs into this country may have tipped some voters toward supporting Republicans. Democrats might have countered this, according to Wallace-Wells, by pointing the finger somewhere else. “Bernie Sanders might look at this material and, not unfairly, call the ongoing suffering of the opioid epidemic a Purdue Pharma plot.”

Maybe. But blaming pharmaceutical companies is not a new strategy, and it has been widely adopted by members of both parties. Indeed, this has been going on so long that a number of states have already started spending money from multimillion-dollar settlements paid by those companies. This is not to say that the companies shouldn’t share in the blame. Voters may have been more sympathetic to the idea that drugs are flowing freely through our southern border — since it’s been made clear how porous that border actually is.

But the other possibility is that voters are unhappy with the attempts made to deal with the drug crisis in this country now. And the policies associated with Democrats have become more unpopular. In California, voters rolled back laws that made many felony drug crimes into misdemeanors. Marijuana legalization efforts failed in Florida, North Dakota and South Dakota. Meanwhile, after years of pushing harm reduction policies, including “safe” injection sites, some on the left are finally rethinking this approach.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently vetoed a bill that would have legalized safe injection sites, and even noted that such facilities do not have “well-documented, vetted, and thoughtful operational and sustainability plans.” New York already has two such sites, and advocates are pushing for more around the country. As my colleague Howard Husock recently noted, “It may be that safe injection sites have a role to play in mitigating the damage of widespread hard drug use. But acquiescence in drug use can signal acceptance.”

Then there’s the Narcan strategy, touted by so many political leaders, where everyone just carries around the nose spray so that they can bring their friends and colleagues back from the brink of death. This does not inspire the kind of confidence from Americans that some people think.

I recently spoke with a woman whose son died of a drug overdose. She recalled the third time he was revived with Narcan. His 14-year-old sister was making him a sandwich and walked into his room to find him unconscious. The next thing the mother knew, the ambulance had arrived, and he was sitting up and promising not to use again. Of Narcan, she said, “It’s just prolonging the problem; it’s not fixing it.”

Indeed, and for Americans who have been devastated by more than 100,000 overdose deaths per year, acceptance may be the last thing they want. Our political leaders may have confused the idea that Americans feel sorry for drug addicts and don’t want to punish them for their use with the idea that drug use is just another choice that we should “destigmatize.” We can blame a lack of border security or greedy pharmaceutical executives. But perhaps it’s time to focus not just on the supply of drugs, but also on the demand. Americans may be growing weary of the current approach to the drug crisis, which amounts to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Maybe it’s time to try something else.