President Donald Trump has been utilizing fictional figures to justify his controversial navy strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats within the Caribbean close to Venezuela.
“Every boat kills about 25,000 people,” Trump said in a speech final week. “Every one of those boats is responsible for the death of 25,000 American people, and the destruction of families,” he said in a speech Sunday. “Probably saved at least 100,000 lives, American lives – Canadian lives – by taking out all those boats coming in,” he said whereas sitting with Canada’s prime minister on the White House on Tuesday.
These numbers don’t make any sense.
The complete variety of US overdose deaths from all medication in 2024 was about 82,000, based on provisional federal data. (Even including in reported Canadian opioid and stimulant deaths doesn’t convey the whole to 100,000.) Trump is basically claiming, in different phrases, that his determination to assault a small variety of boats within the Caribbean – there have been at least four US strikes since the beginning of September – prevented greater than a full yr’s value of deaths.
The president’s figures “are absurd,” mentioned Carl Latkin, a professor on the Johns Hopkins University college of public well being with a joint appointment at its medical college.
“He’s claiming that he’s solved the overdose mortality crisis” with 4 boat strikes, and “that does not have any semblance of reality,” Latkin mentioned in an electronic mail. “The overdose crisis continues to destroy the lives of many hard-working American families.”
There are different points with Trump’s claims. The White House and Defense Department haven’t introduced proof that the boats had been carrying both medication usually or the “fentanyl, mostly” Trump claimed last week they had been carrying, nor that the folks on the boats had been planning to attempt to get such medication into the US. The Caribbean is not known to be a major fentanyl-smuggling route, and Venezuela is not considered a major supply of the illicit fentanyl trafficked into the US. That fentanyl is primarily manufactured in Mexico and smuggled throughout the US border in autos – usually by US citizens.
But even when the boats Trump ordered destroyed did certainly comprise fentanyl or different medication, and even when the folks aboard had been attempting to get these medication to Americans, there isn’t a foundation for the claim that every such boat kills anyplace near 25,000 folks.
Trump wrote on social media final week that one of many boats the US attacked was “loaded with enough drugs to kill 25 TO 50 THOUSAND PEOPLE.”
Though Trump’s “50 thousand” determine is much more clearly inaccurate than the “25 thousand” determine he has been saying at public occasions, his “enough drugs to kill” language is notably softer than his spoken claims that every Venezuelan drug boat truly kills tens of 1000’s of individuals. It’s harking back to earlier claims from various political and legislation enforcement officers that police busts or border seizures found sufficient fentanyl to kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.
But public well being consultants warn that even those claims are overblown.
Officials’ calculations about hundreds of thousands of potential deaths are usually primarily based on the quantity of fentanyl that would possible be deadly to somebody who had no acquired tolerance for the drug. But “the people buying and using fentanyl mostly have a tolerance” as a result of “most people who use illicitly manufactured fentanyl do so on purpose, repeatedly,” mentioned Chelsea Shover, an epidemiologist who’s affiliate professor-in-residence on the University of California, Los Angeles medical college. So whereas some Americans do die from unintentionally consuming fentanyl whereas attempting to make use of different substances, Shover mentioned in an electronic mail, the amount of fentanyl required for many customers to fatally overdose is “much higher” than the supposed deadly dose officers have a tendency to make use of of their “enough to kill” math.
Regardless, the president’s public remarks are going a lot additional than the acquainted “enough to kill” claims. His assertions that any Venezuelan drug boat is definitely accountable for killing 25,000 Americans don’t have any grounding actually.