It has been more than two months since Trump announced his intention to declare the crisis a national emergency; he still hasn’t formally done so.

While he mentioned the subject frequently on the campaign trail, it has been largely in the background during Trump’s presidency. He has posted about it a few times on Twitter, and he signed an executive order in March establishing a commission to study the problem. Beyond that, it hasn’t featured prominently in his rhetoric.

AD

AD

Instead, Trump has been hammering on another issue: the crime rate.

Trump’s campaign was predicated on the idea that crime was out of control. It’s a recurring theme on his Twitter account. He traveled to Long Island to rail against crime and immigrants, in a speech in which he encouraged police officers to be a little rough with suspects. He regularly points to places like Chicago as evidence of Democratic politicians’ inability to address a serious crisis.

“Chicago is out of control,” he said during an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity last week. “I don’t know what they’re doing in Chicago to have this many shootings, this many killings and all of the different things that are going on. This is not like it’s the United States of America. And, pure and simple, that’s bad management. That’s bad politics. It’s incredible.”

AD

AD

Crime, for Trump, is inextricable from immigration, the border wall and Mexico — even crime in Chicago, he once claimed, is a function of illegal immigration. (It isn’t.)

Hearing Trump speak, one might be forgiven for thinking that murder is a dire threat to the American public while the opioid epidemic is a secondary crisis. In fact, the opposite is true. In 2016, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 64,000 people died of drug overdoses, most of them from natural or synthetic opioids. That’s more than 3.7 times as many people as were murdered.

The CDC has specific data from 2015 for 21 states. (Determining the cause of overdose deaths is a slow process.) We can compare the number of overdose deaths last year with the number of homicides, using data from the FBI. More important, though, we can also include data from 2015, to get a sense of how those numbers have changed.

Here is the data from the 21 states (and New York City) for which the CDC has final tallies.

In each case, the blue-green line — the number of overdose deaths — is above the red line, which indicates the number of murders (or, technically, the number of homicides and non-negligent manslaughters). In many cases, the blue-green line also angles up more sharply than the red line, suggesting that the rate of increase for opioid deaths is often higher than the rate for homicides.

AD

AD

In fact, in 11 of the above regions, the rate of increase in opioid deaths was higher than the rate of increase in murders. (In some cases, there was a smaller decrease in both rates.) In 18, the change in the raw number of deaths from overdoses was higher than the number of additional murders.

This summer, the New York Times tried to estimate the number of drug deaths nationally last year. Its estimate, between 59,000 and 65,000 people, was close to the CDC’s 2016 tally. What was particularly useful about that report, though, was that it put those estimates into context. The number of drug overdose deaths in the United States last year was higher than the highest number of gun deaths in any year, a peak the nation hit in 1993. There were more overdose deaths than the all-time peak number of deaths from AIDS, reached in 1995. And there were more overdose deaths in 2016 than deaths from car accidents in a single year — ever.

In another context, Trump might say that this was “bad management,” pure and simple. Bad politics. That would get awkward around the West Wing, because Indiana’s overdose deaths climbed 28 percent from 2015 to 2016 under the management of then-Gov. Mike Pence.

AD

AD

But, again, Trump’s fretting about the crime rate is often not so much about crime as about making the case for cracking down on immigration. He has tried to tie the opioid problem to immigration, too.

“That wall is also going to help us, very importantly, with the drug problem and the massive amounts of drugs that are pouring across the southern border,” he said in August.