This article was originally published on PolitiFact.
President Donald Trump said U.S. military strikes on five Venezuelan boats saved more than 100,000 lives because the maneuvers thwarted drug trafficking.
“Every boat we destroy, we save 25,000 American lives, so every time you see a boat and you feel bad, you say, ‘Wow, that’s hard; “It’s tough, but if you lose three people and save 25,000 people,” Trump said at an October 15 press conference.
The administration did not provide PolitiFact with proof that the boats were transporting drugs. Drug experts told PolitiFact that Venezuela plays a minor role in drug trafficking reaching the United States. The legality of the strikes is also unclear. After the first attack, some legal experts told PolitiFact that the military action was illegal under maritime law or human rights conventions and that the attack contradicted long-standing U.S. military practices.
Trump has used this figure several times and has also said he would consider similar ground strikes.
WATCH: Trump considers ground strikes in Venezuela following attacks on suspected drug boats
“Each of these boats is responsible for the deaths of 25,000 Americans and the destruction of families,” Trump said in an October 5 speech to U.S. Navy sailors. “So when you think about it that way, what we’re doing is actually an act of kindness.”
“We’ve taken a very strong stance on drugs…water drugs – drugs that come in through the water, they don’t come in – there are no boats left, frankly, there are no fishing boats, there are no boats there,” Trump told Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on October 7. “We probably saved at least 100,000 lives, American lives, Canadian lives, by eliminating these boats.”
Several aspects of Trump’s statement make it false.
There’s no way to know how many lives are saved through drug interception efforts, drug experts told PolitiFact.
Additionally, if Trump’s statement was accurate, the strikes on five ships in less than two months would have saved nearly double the number of American lives lost to drug overdoses in an entire year.
The Trump administration has presented no evidence
The Trump administration did not specify what type of drugs or how much were on board the struck boats. It is therefore impossible to calculate how many lethal doses could have been destroyed.
Trump said the boats were carrying fentanyl during the October 15 press conference.
“And you can see, the boats are being hit and you’re seeing this fentanyl all over the ocean,” Trump said. “It’s like floating in bags. It’s everywhere.”
He shared aerial videos of some of the boat collisions on Truth Social, and no bags of drugs are visible in the videos.
Additionally, most of the illicit fentanyl in the United States comes from Mexico, not Venezuela. It enters the United States primarily through the southern border, at official ports of entry, and is smuggled primarily by U.S. citizens, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.
Even if there was fentanyl on board, Trump’s statement is mathematically dubious
If the boats each carried 25,000 lethal doses, that doesn’t mean the strikes stopped 125,000 people from dying of drug overdoses.
“When drugs are seized, the supply chain partially replaces lost drugs,” Jonathan Caulkins, a drug policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, previously told PolitiFact.
Drug overdose deaths declined over the past two years, before there were boat strikes off the coast of Venezuela, according to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC reported more than 73,000 drug overdose deaths between May 2024 and April 2025. For Trump’s statement to be accurate, drugs on board five boats would have been responsible for 125,000 deaths, nearly double the number of overdose deaths in one year.
Drug Intercept Data Does Not Show How Many Overdose Deaths Were Prevented
Trump is not the first person to equate the war on drugs with saving lives. Over the years, we have fact-checked other politicians when they claimed that a quantity of drugs seized at the U.S. border was enough to kill a specific number of people, or that those seizures saved a specific number of lives.
Typically, the politicians we checked referred to fentanyl seizures. Synthetic opioid is the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States. Politicians’ claims about lives saved are based on the lethal dose of fentanyl – 2 milligrams. So if authorities seized, say, 10 milligrams of fentanyl, that saved five lives, politicians say.
But that calculation has caveats, because the lethality of a dose can vary depending on a person’s height, weight and tolerance from prior exposure, drug experts say. And statistics on the number of drugs banned from entering the United States do not account for the number of drugs entering the country.
“To my knowledge, we don’t have a method to translate drug seizure data into a measure of overdose deaths prevented,” Alene Kennedy-Hendricks, a health policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, told PolitiFact in May.
Our decision
Regarding the boat strikes off the coast of Venezuela, Trump said: “Every boat we destroy saves 25,000 American lives. »
Trump said the five boats the U.S. military struck off the coast of Venezuela were carrying drugs bound for the United States. However, drug and Venezuela experts told PolitiFact that the country plays a minor role in drug trafficking arriving in the United States.
The administration provided no evidence about the type or quantity of drugs it said were on board the boats. This lack of information makes it unclear how many lethal doses of drugs could have been destroyed.
Even if the boats each carried 25,000 lethal doses of drugs, that doesn’t mean their destruction saved 125,000 lives. There were 73,000 overdose deaths in the United States between May 2024 and April 2025. This means that drugs on board five boats would have been responsible for 125,000 deaths, almost double the number of overdose deaths in the United States in one year.
The amount of drugs banned from entering the United States does not indicate how many lives were saved.
We evaluate Trump’s statement, Pants on Fire!
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