Former President Donald Trump returned to North Carolina for a rally Friday night, addressing supporters at Wilmington International Airport.
Over the course of his speech, which was nearly an hour and a half long, Trump made a number of false or misleading claims, including some frequent claims he has embraced since leaving office, regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 election.
The News & Observer is fact-checking some of Trump’s claims here.
Claim: “Drug overdose deaths have risen in North Carolina at a level nobody has ever seen before, at least 26%.”
During a portion of his remarks about how the economy, inflation and crime were worse since he left office, Trump raised two statistics specific to North Carolina.
First, he claimed that drug overdose deaths in North Carolina had increased by at least 26%. It wasn’t clear what time frame he was referring to, but the most recent data released by the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services showed that drug overdoses increased by 40% between 2019 and 2020. Trump left office in January 2021.
Provisional data for 2021 was expected to show an increase between 2020 and 2021, DHHS said in March. The sharp increase between 2019 and 2020 was in part due to “stress, loss of housing and loss of employment for those in recovery caused by the COVID-19 pandemic,” DHHS Secretary Kody Kinsley said at the time.
Drug overdoses increased by 26% in 2017, before falling by 7% in 2018...
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