Does each boat strike off the coast of Venezuela save 25,000 US lives?
United States President Donald Trump has said recent military strikes on five Venezuelan boats have saved “at least 100,000 lives” because the manoeuvres have 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,” President Donald Trump said at an October 15 media conference.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 US. The legality of the strikes is also unclear. After the first attack in early September, some legal experts told PolitiFact that the military action was illegal under maritime law or human rights conventions, and the attack contradicted longstanding US 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 October 5 speech to US 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 any more, frankly, there are no fishing boats, there’s no boats out there, period,” Trump told Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on October 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 US lives lost to drug overdoses in an entire year.
Trump administration has presented no evidence
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 at the October 15 media conference that the boats were carrying fentanyl.
“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, but no bags of drugs are visible in the videos.
Additionally, most illicit fentanyl in the US comes from Mexico, not Venezuela. It enters the US mainly through the southern border at official ports of entry, and it’s smuggled in mostly by US citizens, according to the United States Sentencing Commission.
