The lethal strikes on 23 boats have not saved anything close to 25,000 American lives in total, much less in any one attack.
A loose end on my last post about “narco-terrorism” loose ends.
I noted President Trump’s whopper about how each suspected drug boat our armed forces destroy by missile strikes saves 25,000 American lives. That would compute to 575,000 saved lives (23 boats have been destroyed since September 2). In reality, total U.S. deaths traceable to illegal drugs numbered about 80,000 last year. That’s a sharp decline from the spike during the Covid era, when there were between 105,000 and 110,000 deaths each year from 2021 through 2023.
If the boats that the Trump administration is striking with missiles are ferrying drugs, it is cocaine they are transporting. Far more deadly synthetic opioids, particularly the fentanyl that is smuggled into our country, are mostly manufactured in Mexican labs with Chinese precursors. Fentanyl shipment from South and Central America, where the drone strikes are occurring, is negligible.
In the main, cocaine use is recreational. (That’s not an endorsement, it’s just a fact. I have no regrets about the many years I spent prosecuting cocaine traffickers.) Deaths related to cocaine overdoses appear to have topped out at around 30,000 in 2023, and were sharply down, to about 22,000, last year (consistent with the aforementioned decline in drug deaths after the pandemic).
To be sure, this is still an alarming rise over more than a decade. There were less than 5,000 cocaine-related deaths in 2011. The marked increase could be due to other drugs, like fentanyl, which often factor into cocaine-related deaths these days.
Still, even at the high of 30,000, cocaine use resulting in death represented a tiny fraction of overall annual use. It’s impossible to say how many Americans use cocaine once or more annually, but it is easily in the millions. By comparison, many more Americans drink alcohol than use cocaine (not surprisingly, given that it’s legal and socially approved), and about six times as many Americans die each year from alcohol-related causes than from cocaine.
And let’s not forget, it is not clear that all or even most of the suspected drug boats are headed to the United States. (You may have noticed that the administration now usually talks about narcotics trafficking, rather than narcotics importation.) The Caribbean serves a global market for cocaine that includes Europe and West Africa. Because of the distance from the Caribbean to the Southern U.S. — around 1,500 or more miles, depending on the route — the speedboats have to make fuel stops, and it’s not always possible to tell, when a boat is in a Caribbean leg of its journey, whether it is destined for America or someplace else.
Typically, speedboats that transport cocaine in the Caribbean will carry about one to two metric tons of cocaine (i.e., up to about 2,000 kilograms). Carrying much more than that would compromise speed, making interdiction more likely. Given the huge amount of cocaine that enters the U.S. each year and the tiny percentage of cocaine-related deaths that result, we can confidently say that the missile attacks on 23 boats — even if we generously assumed that those boats collectively carried 46 metric tons of cocaine and were all destined for the U.S. — have not saved anything close to 25,000 American lives in total, never mind in any one strike.