Regina LaBelle
Role at the time: Professor of addiction policy and practice at Georgetown University, in an email interview with PolitiFact
Challenged the characterization
Response to this claim
Maine’s decrease in overdose deaths in 2025 and 2026 occurred because the Trump administration sealed the border.
“It is very difficult to parse out with certainty the specific policies that caused overdose deaths to come down.”
Open source (opens in a new tab)Maine drug overdoses are down. Is Vance right that Trump’s border policies are the cause?Expert interviews and ruling
Reports named interviews with University of Maine, Carnegie Mellon, University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Brown drug-policy and public-health researchers, plus a response from the vice president’s office.
Why we used this label
The statement challenges confidence in identifying a single policy cause.