President Donald Trump claimed that his deadly strikes on “narco-terrorist” vessels were justified because “drugs killed 300,000 Americans last year.”
Trump has cited similarly high figures on U.S. drug deaths before and reinforced the claim following the administration’s latest attack off the coast of Colombia on an alleged drug-carrying vessel, killing two people on board.
“We’re allowed to do that, and if we do by land, we may go back to Congress, but we have, this is a national security problem,” Trump said Wednesday during an Oval Office press conference when asked by a reporter if his administration had the authority.
“They killed 300,000 people last year,” the president claimed without presenting his evidence for the figure. “Drugs, these drugs coming in, they killed 300,000 Americans last year, and that gives you legal authority.”
But critics have pointed out that Trump’s math on the number of drug deaths in the U.S. doesn’t add up.
The number of Americans who died due to a drug overdose in the last year, while still high, was approximately 75,000, according to provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
In September, while he didn’t specify he was referring to Americans, Trump told a reporter that “300 million people died from drugs last year” after he was quizzed about Venezuela. The U.S. population is about 340 million.
Tuesday’s operation, announced by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, brings the death toll from the administration’s campaign to more than 30, as the United States declares itself at war with drug cartels in an expanding military campaign across South America.
During an October 15 press conference, Trump also claimed without evidence that every boat his administration takes out “saves 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…” the president said.
Drug experts, however, told the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact that “there is no way of knowing” how many lives are saved as a result of the administration’s drug interception efforts.
“We don’t have any method I’m aware of for translating drug seizure data into any measure of overdose deaths averted,” Johns Hopkins University health policy expert Alene Kennedy-Hendricks told the nonprofit.
“Even if the boats were carrying 25,000 lethal drug doses each, that doesn’t mean that destroying them saved 125,000 lives,” the organization reasoned.
The Trump administration’s latest strike — believed to be the eighth attack since September — raises the death toll from the administration’s attacks to at least 34 people, who Hegseth compared to the terror group behind 9/11.
Critics have argued the campaign amounts to illegal extrajudicial killings, while members of Congress and civil rights groups are pressing the administration for evidence and the legal memos shared among White House officials to justify the attacks.
Alex Woodward contributed reporting
