Youngkin touts success in cutting fentanyl deaths, maybe a little too aggressively

Gov. Glenn Youngkin is to be commended for the effort to reduce fentanyl overdoses from just under 2,000 in 2022 to in the area of 800 in 2025.

I’m hedging there because the Youngkin administration didn’t give out specific numbers in the press release that it sent out touting its efforts, so I had to do math.

A 2024 Virginia Department of Health report had the number of fentanyl deaths in Virginia in 2022 at 1,986; the Youngkin PR claimed a 59 percent decrease from 2022 to 2025, so, I did the math, and came up with the number 825.

There’s also some math in the Youngkin PR that doesn’t add up.

The release reported that federal, state and local law enforcement has seized 858.81 pounds of fentanyl under the Youngkin administration enforcement effort, and that the fentanyl seized could have led to more than 87 million fatal overdoses.

Stop doing that, basically, is my message here.

Eighty-seven million is each of us – Virginia population: 8.8 million – dying approximately 10 times.

We’re not idiots.

Just take your victory lap on having done a good thing, on your way into political oblivion.

“With an average of five Virginians dying each day in 2022, we launched a comprehensive effort to stop the scourge of fentanyl. Today, Virginia leads the nation and has cut fentanyl overdose deaths by more than half,” Youngkin said at an event in Richmond on Thursday.

There, that wasn’t hard.

Fentanyl specifically, and opioids generally, have been a scourge in our part of the world since the beginning of the aggressive prescription of opioids as pain-management drugs in the 1990s.

Fentanyl specifically is cheaper for the bad guys to produce, and many times more powerful – and lethal than heroin, which had a run as the go-to drug of choice when it became more difficult for the bad guys to get their hands on prescription opioids.

A combination of enforcement, education and interdiction efforts enacted under Youngkin has things moving in the right direction.

We need to see the incoming Spanberger administration and Democrats in the General Assembly build on the positive momentum.

You won’t see me agreeing with Jason Miyares, the outgoing MAGA attorney general, on much, but there is this:

“We cannot afford to slow our efforts. Now is the time to double down on our commitment to fighting addiction and supporting every Virginian on the path to recovery,” Miyares said on the topic.

Indeed.

But, no, we didn’t all almost die 10 times because of what y’all did.