|
Jay Shackford
Editor’s Note: Get real, Nori. It’s 1,729 nautical miles from Venezuela to the shores of South Florida. In small, speed boats such a trip would require five or more refueling stops — not something drug smugglers would like to do.
Moreover, most of the fentanyl entering the U.S. comes through Mexico at official ports of entry in cars and trucks and is smuggled in by U.S. citizens, according to DEA as Joan previously noted.
Finally, even if these boats are carrying small amounts of cocaine or other drugs, the three or four men operating the boats are small time operators who can be easily replaced. Normally, DEA and other drug enforcement agencies would stop and search the boats and try to get the smugglers to talk — providing names and evidence so they could move up the chain of the gang or drug-smuggling operation. Blowing the boats out of the water might look good for the MAGA crowd on TV but it isn’t drug enforcement — it’s murder.)
PolitiFact Fact-Check on Trump’s Claims for Saving 25,000 Lives for Each Boat Strike
President Donald Trump said U.S. military strikes on five Venezuelan boats have saved more than 100,000 lives because the maneuvers thwarted drug smuggling.
“Every boat that we knock out we save 25,000 American lives so every time you see a boat and you feel badly you say, ‘Wow, that’s rough;’ It is rough, but if you lose three people and save 25,000 people,” Trump said in an Oct. 15 press conference, according to Politifact.
The administration did not supply PolitiFact with evidence that the boats were carrying drugs. Drug experts told PolitiFact that Venezuela plays a minor role in trafficking drugs that reach the U.S. The legality of the strikes also is unclear. After the first attack, some legal experts told PolitiFact that the military action was illegal under maritime law or human rights conventions and the attack contradicted longstanding U.S. military practices.
Trump has used the figure repeatedly and also says he would consider similar strikes on land.
“Every one of those boats is responsible for the death of 25,000 American people, and the destruction of families,” Trump said in an Oct. 5 speech to U.S. Navy sailors. “So when you think of it that way, what we’re doing is actually an act of kindness.”
“We’ve taken a very hard stand on drugs … the water drugs — the drugs that come in through water they’re not coming — there are no boats anymore, frankly there are no fishing boats, there’s no boats out there period,” Trump told Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Oct. 7. “We’ve probably saved at least 100,000 lives, American lives, Canadian lives, by taking out those boats.”
Several aspects of Trump’s statement make it wrong.
There is no way of knowing how many lives are saved as a result of drug interception efforts, drug experts have told PolitiFact.
Additionally, if Trump’s statement were accurate, the strikes on five boats in less than two months would have saved nearly double the number of U.S. lives lost to drug overdoses in an entire year.
The Trump administration hasn’t specified what type of drug or what quantity was on the boats that were struck. So it’s impossible to calculate how many deadly doses could have been destroyed.
Trump said the boats were carrying fentanyl during the Oct. 15 press conference.
“And you can see it, the boats get hit, and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean,” Trump said. “It’s like floating in bags. It’s all over the place.”
He has shared aerial videos of some of the boat strikes on Truth Social, and no bags of drugs are visible in the videos.
Additionally, most illicit fentanyl in the U.S. comes from Mexico, not Venezuela. It enters the U.S. mainly through the southern border at official ports of entry, and it’s smuggled in mostly by U.S. citizens, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
If the boats each carried 25,000 lethal doses, that doesn’t mean the strikes stopped 125,000 people from dying of a drug overdose.
“When drugs are seized, the supply chain partially replaces those lost drugs,” Jonathan Caulkins, a Carnegie Mellon University drug policy researcher, previously told PolitiFact.
Overdose drug deaths have been declining for the past couple of years, before there were any strikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC reported more than 73,000 drug overdose deaths from May 2024 to April 2025. For Trump’s statement to be accurate, the drugs on five boats would have been responsible for 125,000 deaths, nearly double the number of overdose deaths in one year.
Trump isn’t the first person to equate drug enforcement with saving lives. Over the years, we’ve fact-checked other politicians when they said that a quantity of drugs seized at the U.S. border was enough to kill a specific number of people, or that those seizures saved a specific number of lives.
Generally, the politicians we have fact-checked referred to fentanyl seizures. The synthetic opioid is the leading cause of U.S. overdose deaths. Politicians’ statements about lives saved rely on the lethal dose for fentanyl — 2 milligrams. So if authorities seized 10 milligrams of fentanyl, for example, that saved five lives, politicians say.
But there are caveats to that calculation because a dose’s lethality can vary based on a person’s height, weight and tolerance from past exposure, drug experts say. And statistics about how many drugs were stopped from entering the U.S. don’t account for how many drugs make it into the country.
“We don’t have any method I’m aware of for translating drug seizure data into any measure of overdose deaths averted,” Alene Kennedy-Hendricks, a Johns Hopkins University health policy expert, told PolitiFact in May.
Regarding boat strikes off the coast of Venezuela, Trump said, “Every boat that we knock out we save 25,000 American lives.”
Trump said the five boats the U.S. military has struck off the coast of Venezuela were carrying drugs heading to the U.S. However, experts on drugs and Venezuela told PolitiFact the country plays a minor role in trafficking drugs that reach the U.S.
The administration has provided no evidence about the type or quantity of drugs it says were on the boats. This lack of information makes it impossible to know how many lethal doses of the drugs could have been destroyed.
Even if the boats were carrying 25,000 lethal drug doses each, that doesn’t mean that destroying them saved 125,000 lives. There were 73,000 U.S. drug overdose deaths from May 2024 to April 2025. That means the drugs on five boats would have been responsible for 125,000 deaths, nearly double the number of U.S. overdose deaths in one year.
The amount of drugs that are stopped from entering the U.S. doesn’t indicate how many lives were saved.
We rate Trump’s statement Pants on Fire!
|
