No evidence for Trump claim that each ‘drug boat’ could kill 25,000 Americanspublished at 11:21 BST
Joshua Cheetham
BBC Verify journalist, reporting from Washington DC
President Donald Trump has defended the US strikes against alleged drug boats off the coast off Venezuela and now in the eastern Pacific Ocean, claiming “everyone one of those boats that gets knocked out is saving 25,000 Americans lives”. We could not find where this figure comes from, so we asked the White House.
A spokesperson did not provide any evidence for the number, but said “any boat bringing deadly poison to our shores has the potential to kill 25,000 Americans or more”.
After each strike, the Trump administration has released grainy video but no proof of what was on board and no details about the nature and quantity of the drugs, making it impossible to independently assess how lethal the boat’s alleged cargo could be.
Trump shared a video on his Truth Social platform last week of an alleged drugs boat being targeted
According to the latest provisional data, external from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there were 73,690 reported deaths from drug overdoses in the US between April 2023 and April 2024.
So, using Trump’s figure, stopping three “drug boats” would be enough to prevent a whole year’s worth of drug overdose deaths. “I don’t see a universe in which it [Trump’s claim] could be possibly be true,” Chelsea Shover, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of California Los Angeles told us.
The majority of US overdose deaths in the period we looked at were linked to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid.
Shover pointed out that almost all fentanyl consumed in the US is smuggled overland from Mexico, rather than coming in boats from Venezuela.
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