Date July 9, 2026

Progress, problems and partisanship: Americans’ view of the drug crisis

By Carl Dimitri

Professor Brendan Saloner’s analysis of 25 years of polling data reveals cognitive bias in how Americans view the war on illicit drugs.

Since the early 1970s, when the Nixon administration launched the “war on drugs,” Gallup has been asking Americans how they feel about problems surrounding illicit drugs. But the war has not gone well and Gallup’s surveys reflect the public’s opinion on a drug crisis that has worsened over time.

Over the last 25 years alone, 1.2 million Americans have died from an overdose, making it the leading cause of unintentional death in the United States. Overdose deaths decreased by three percent in 2023 for the first time in five years. But the problem has still grown considerably since 2000, when there were 300% fewer deaths than there are today.

A new study by Brendan Saloner, Donald G. Millar Distinguished Professor of Alcohol and Addiction Studies in Brown’s School of Public Health, analyzed Gallup Poll Social Survey data from 2000-2025 to understand how Americans view the effectiveness of drug policy, both nationally and in their own communities. Here’s what he found:

In the majority of years between 2000-2025, fewer than half of Americans perceived progress against illicit drugs. Perceived progress was at its lowest ebb in 2023, at just over 23%, and rose in 2025 to 44%.
Saloner also found that we are more likely to perceive progress when our preferred politician is in the White House. This partisan effect, which has grown since the mid-2010s, is illustrated by the 54-point increase in Republican perceptions of progress between 2023-2025.
Finally, the study shows that most Americans see drugs as a serious problem nationally, while only a minority see a drug problem in their own communities.

We spoke with Professor Saloner about his new study and what widening political polarization could mean for an effective national drug control strategy.

What surprised you most about your findings?

Saloner: A few things really stuck out to me. The first thing I would note is that, overall, there’s no year in which a majority of people say we’re making progress, which is interesting. People are not, generally speaking, seeing this as an issue that we’re winning.

Then there’s the element of partisanship, which is not surprising. People tend to say that many issues get better when people from their party control the government, whether it’s education, crime or health care. That’s true regardless of whether, objectively, the measured progress is increasing.

But partisanship is increasing a lot on drug policy issues. If you go back to October 2000, which was right at the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Democrats were feeling a little bit better than Republicans. Now, fast forward to the start of the first Trump presidency, and then going into the Biden years, and now into Trump II — you see these huge swings in public perception.

The period of 2023-2025 perfectly encapsulates that. In 2023, Republicans registered very low rates of approval with the drug issue. By 2025, their approval rate had shot up by over 50 points. Democrats, on the other hand, weren’t feeling great about it in 2023, and they felt maybe even a little worse in 2025. So people are really interpreting and understanding this issue through the lens of their own political affiliation.

It’s also worth mentioning that beginning in October 2025 the Trump administration began blowing up alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. They were saying that they were going to go to war on drug cartels in Mexico. They were going to put tariffs on Canada because of fentanyl. They were making a big set of statements around the fentanyl crisis, and I guess, within a certain constituency, that was being well received. I think that’s what these data would tell us.

Another trend in the data is that people are much more likely to see drugs as a problem nationally, than in their own communities. That’s always been true. But the interesting thing is that Republicans are starting to feel worse over time about the general state of the drug problem, while Democrats are generally feeling a little bit better. This is surprising to me both because Democrats are more likely to say that someone in their family has a drug problem and because the drug problem is getting worse on a lot of measures.

The drug overdose rates today are much worse than they were in 2000. So, in that sense, there’s not a lot of correlation between the objective situation and what people are perceiving.

People are really interpreting and understanding this issue through the lens of their own political affiliation.

Brendan Saloner Donald G. Millar Distinguished Professor of Alcohol and Addiction Studies in Brown’s School of Public Health

Why do you think Americans view illicit drugs as a national problem and not a local one? What does it tell us about how we form opinions about social issues?

It’s fascinating to me. To some extent there’s a general thing in surveys where people are more likely to give a better rating to their own local experience than to a national problem. For example, people often say the health care system is poor overall, while rating their own doctor highly. People are more likely to say there’s a local drug problem if they live in a county with a high overdose death rate, so there was at least that level of consistency in the survey.

The things you know through direct experience tend to produce a more nuanced view than the picture you’re fed from a distance.

There aren’t many feel-good stories on TV about drugs at the national level. During the pandemic, if you turned on TV news, there was a lot of coverage of places like Kensington, Philadelphia or Harlem, or Portland, Oregon or Los Angeles or the Tenderloin in San Francisco. There was a lot of imagery that made it very salient how affected people had been by fentanyl. So, I think people often latch onto the most extreme version of the problem and see that as representative. That’s my working theory, anyway.

What are the practical implications of these findings for policymakers, public health officials and advocates working to address overdose deaths?

I think it’s a question of messengers and messages. It pains me to say this, but public health officials are not viewed as credibly and with as much deference as they used to be. The pandemic really soured a lot of people on their state and local public health agencies, particularly among conservatives. So, there may need to be other kinds of messengers — faith leaders, people from law enforcement who can speak on these issues — so that people don’t immediately tune out the message.

I often think that if we could frame drug policy around the things people value about government, that might point us toward a more productive path forward.

The number one thing I like about the town I live in is the people who plow the snow and collect the trash. There’s a tangible, direct connection between the service they provide and the benefit I receive.

I think drug policy has the same challenge. People need to feel like they’re benefiting from it, which isn’t always easy. But in some communities, it’s absolutely essential. If you live in a place with discarded syringes, for example, keeping sidewalks clean is a visible way government can improve daily life. When people can see that their government is making their community safer and cleaner, they’re more likely to feel that it works for them.

That’s the paradox. We experience the issues related to drugs in personal and direct ways, whether it’s in our own life, in our family, in the place that we live. And yet the idea of drug policy seems so removed, so abstract, so far from our own lives. Finding ways to reduce that gap, I think, is key to a more successful strategy.

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