Fentanyl.

Today I saw this graph on the news and the way it’s being used every damn time I see it  because the audacity of it all is hard to sit with. Yes. Fentanyl deaths are falling.

That part is real. And that matters.

But any number above zero is not a victory. It’s not a trophy to place on any one person. And watching people crown Trump a victor over a line on a chart while cheering “blow the boats out of the water” feels like watching human lives flattened into statistics and turned into a victory lap.

That rhetoric would only make sense to connect with a line graph if those were somehow unmanned monstrous machines that somehow statistically were actually carrying fentanyl. They aren’t. That’s not how this drug moves. Fentanyl isn’t bulk cargo. It’s potent, lightweight, and trafficked through global supply chains — ports of entry, mail systems, commercial shipping, chemical precursor networks. Shooting at boats doesn’t solve that. It just kills people.

And that’s what keeps getting erased: people.

These numbers aren’t abstract to me. I’ve lost someone. A lot of us have. When cruelty becomes policy and spectacle becomes strategy, the cost isn’t theoretical. It shows up in empty chairs. In unfinished conversations. In lives that stopped too early.

Fentanyl is deadly but these deaths don’t exist in a vacuum. This is a man-made, more potent, deadlier turn in a crisis almost as old as the poppy itself. Addiction is ancient. Pain is ancient. And every generation invents new ways to outrun it some innovative, some catastrophic. This one just happens to be unforgiving.

For me, that cost has faces.

It’s the tiny, annoying old man whose nit-picks, laugh and stupid-ass jokes I miss every fucking time I walk into the job he mentored me in.

It’s a fellow artist I truly admired someone who never looked down on a stupid kid on Facebook reaching out, who gave me guidance and wisdom when it actually mattered, and helped me believe in who I am and the things that inspire me.

It’s someone who saw me at my worst and still stayed and had my back in all ways one of my first and best friends, who shared my interests and let me hang around even though I couldn’t skate who’s core values I still carry.

And it’s still a voice that soothed me to sleep, someone who listened to me yell and cry more than one annoying or stressful night of school or work, someone I promised eternity to, just to feel it fall away in moments.

That’s what this graph contains.

What’s behind the recent decline isn’t punishment or border theatrics. It’s slow, imperfect, deeply human work: harm reduction, overdose reversal, people being kept alive long enough to get help, and pressure aimed at the systems that make fentanyl possible in the first place.

That work is fragile.

As we move into 2026, there are real reasons these numbers could reverse a more volatile supply, exhausted outreach systems, funding cuts, housing instability, and rhetoric that pushes people back into hiding instead of toward help. Risk hasn’t vanished. It’s shifted.

Drugs don’t disappear under isolationism or punishment. Historically, they adapt. They reroute. They find the gaps. You can tariff a car. You can’t tariff a molecule.

There is hope here. Real hope.

But it lives in people staying alive. If we get naloxone where it matters,  fight to keep treatment well funded and well intentioned not as punishment but as a resource. If we can keep the doors open between outreach workers, friends and family, a welcoming community. In refusing to allow these kinds of people to turn suffering into spectacle.

For me, this isn’t data.

It’s people.

It’s memory.

It’s love.

It’s names.