“Federal drug prosecutions have gone down in recent years. We’re going to be bringing them up and bringing them up rapidly. At the end of 2016, there were 23 percent fewer than in 2011. So they looked at this scourge and they let it go by, and we’re not letting it go by.” — President Trump, remarks before a briefing on the opioid epidemic, Aug. 8, 2017
President Trump — who two days after this briefing said he would declare the opioid epidemic to be a national emergency — not so subtly tried to pin the blame on the Obama administration. “They looked at this scourge and they let it go by,” the president said, citing statistics that federal drug prosecutions have declined 23 percent since 2011.
But there’s a problem: These stats don’t tell you much about opioids.
The Facts
The White House did not respond to a query, but the president appears to be referring to a March report by the Pew Research Center. That study showed that federal criminal prosecutions of all types reached a peak in 2011 and had fallen to the lowest level in two decades. As the president said, drug charges fell by 23 percent, with 24,638 defendants in fiscal 2016, compared with 32,062 in fiscal year 2011.
To fairly compare what happened under the Obama administration, we’d have to go back to 2008, President George W. Bush’s last year. From fiscal 2008 to 2016, drug prosecutions dropped 15 percent.
But these numbers are for all drug prosecutions — and the data does not break out opioid-related prosecutions. Instead, the data shows only two categories: marijuana and then all other drugs. Because marijuana was legalized in some states during President Barack Obama’s term, marijuana prosecutions fell 39 percent from 2011 to 2016. Without marijuana in the totals, the decline for drug prosecutions between 2011 and 2016 is 18 percent.
“In 2013, for example, after two states legalized the recreational use of marijuana, the department announced new charging priorities for offenses involving the drug, which remains illegal under federal law,” the Pew report noted. That same year, Pew noted, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced a policy change that prosecutors make sure each case “serves a substantial federal interest,” a reason overall federal prosecutions may have fallen. Under the “Smart on Crime Initiative,” prosecutors were told to focus finite resources on more serious drug cases and leave low-level offenders to state prosecutors. (Many drug cases are handled in state courts, and there is even less data on that.)
“The data don’t specifically break out opioid prosecutions, so there’s no way to know what happened on that front,” said John Gramlich, who wrote the Pew report.
Trump’s statistic thus does not really tell you much about Obama’s handling of opioids. Our colleagues at FactCheck.org cited data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission — which shows how many people were actually sentenced for drug crimes — that indicates Trump is falsely attacking the former president.
Again, there are not good breakdowns for opioids. But there is data for heroin, which shows the number of people who were sentenced for federal heroin offenses rose by 56 percent from fiscal 2011 to 2016. Separately, the number of people convicted of trafficking in oxycodone rose sharply from 2008 to 2014, before falling in 2015 and 2016. But there isn’t data on other crimes involving oxycodone, hydrocodone or fentanyl.
Obama’s handling of the crisis is certainly open to criticism. If Trump wanted to be specific, he could have cited a Washington Post investigation that showed the Drug Enforcement Administration, under pressure from drug companies, softened enforcement of wholesale companies that distributed pills to the corrupt pharmacies that illegally sold the drugs for street use.
The jury is still out on whether Trump can improve on Obama’s numbers. In a report released July 27, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University said that drug prosecutions have continued to decline during the first five months of the Trump administration, so that “fewer drug offenders were federally prosecuted over the past 12 months than at any time during the last quarter century.”
The Pinocchio Test
This is a good example of data being used incorrectly. Federal prosecutions have gone down since 2011, but that does not indicate that the Obama administration ignored the opioid epidemic. The number cited by Trump was the result of a decline in marijuana prosecutions and a change in policy to focus on bigger, more important cases. Moreover, there is not enough detail in the data to show whether opioid prosecutions declined, as Trump suggested.
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BEIJING — China won’t come to North Korea’s help if it launches missiles threatening U.S. soil and there is retaliation, a state-owned newspaper warned on Friday, but it would intervene if Washington strikes first.
The Global Times newspaper is not an official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, but in this case its editorial probably does reflect government policy and can be considered “semiofficial,” experts said.
China has repeatedly warned both Washington and Pyongyang not to do anything that raises tensions or causes instability on the Korean Peninsula, and strongly reiterated that suggestion Friday.
“The current situation on the Korean Peninsula is complicated and sensitive,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said in a statement.
“China hopes that all relevant parties will be cautious on their words and actions, and do things that help to alleviate tensions and enhance mutual trust, rather than walk on the old pathway of taking turns in shows of strength, and upgrading the tensions.”
In this U.S. Department of Defense, a B-1B Lancer prepares to take off from Andersen Air Force base, Guam on Aug. 7. (Richard P. Ebensberger/AFP/Getty Images)
In an editorial, The Global Times said China should make it clear to both sides: “when their actions jeopardize China’s interests, China will respond with a firm hand.”
“China should also make clear that if North Korea launches missiles that threaten U.S. soil first and the U.S. retaliates, China will stay neutral,” it added. “If the U.S. and South Korea carry out strikes and try to overthrow the North Korean regime and change the political pattern of the Korean Peninsula, China will prevent them from doing so.”
The Global Times warning comes at the end of a week of threat and counterthreat between Washington and Pyongyang, and as the United States weighs up its options to deal with the threat of North Korea’s nuclear and missile program.
The Global Times said both sides were engaging in a “reckless game” that runs the risk of descending into a real war.
The brinkmanship weighed on world financial markets for a fourth consecutive day. Main indexes were down in Frankfurt and Paris, and London’s FTSE 100 touched its lowest level since May. Asian markets also slumped, including South Korea’s KOSPI dropping 1.8 percent. Wall Street futures were down.
On Tuesday, President Trump threatened to respond to further threats from North Korea by unleashing “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Pyongyang in turn threatened to strike the U.S. territory of Guam in the Western Pacific with ballistic missiles.
The Global Times also cited reports that the Pentagon has prepared plans for B-1B strategic bombers to make preemptive strikes on North Korea’s missile sites, and a strongly worded ultimatum from Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis that North Korea should not consider “actions that would lead to the end of its regime and destruction of its people.”
“The key point is in the first half of the sentence; China opposes North Korea testing missiles in the waters around Guam,” said Cheng Xiaohe, a North Korea expert at Renmin University of China in Beijing.
With the situation on the Korea Peninsula sliding dangerously toward the point of no return, Chinese media are starting to declare their positions on any potential war, he said. “Secondly, in a half-official way, China is starting to review and clarify the 1961 treaty.”
China has become deeply frustrated with the regime in Pyongyang, and genuinely wants to see a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. But it has always refused to do anything that might destabilize or topple a regime which has long been both ally and buffer state.
That’s because Beijing does not want to see a unified Korean state allied to the United States right up against its border: indeed, hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers died during the 1950-53 Korean War to prevent that happening.
So for now, the current uneasy status quo for China still seems better than the alternatives.
That is doubly true ahead of an important Communist Party Congress in the fall, at which President Xi Jinping wants to project an aura of stability and control as he aims to consolidate his power at the start of a second five-year term.
Nevertheless, experts said debate is underway behind the scenes in China about its support for the North Korean regime.
In an article on the Financial Times China website in May, for example, Tong Zhiwei, a law professor at the East China University of Political Science and Law in Shanghai, argued that China should make terminating the 1961 treaty a near-term diplomatic goal, because North Korea, also known as the DPRK, had used it as cover to develop its nuclear program and avoid punishment.
That, he wrote, was not in China’s interests.
“In the past 57 years, the treaty has strongly protected the security of the DPRK and peace on the Korean Peninsula, but it has also been used by the North Korean authorities to protect their international wrongful acts from punishment,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, China has reacted strongly to the United States sending a warship close to an island it controls in the South China Sea.
The U.S. Navy destroyer, USS John S. McCain, traveled close to Mischief Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands on Thursday, in the third “freedom of navigation” exercise in the area conducted under the Trump administration, Reuters reported.
China’s Defense Ministry said two Chinese warships “jumped into action” and warned the U.S. ship to leave, labeling the move a “provocation” that seriously harms mutual trust.
China’s Foreign Ministry said the operation had violated international and Chinese law and seriously harmed Beijing’s sovereignty and security.
“The Chinese side is strongly dissatisfied with this and will lodge solemn representations to the U.S. side,” the ministry said in a statement.
Shirley Feng in Beijing and Brian Murphy in Washington contributed to this report.
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