OPINION — “In the 12-month period ending in October 2024 [Fiscal Year 2024], 84,076 Americans died from a drug overdose, according to the most recent available provisional statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), underscoring the devastating effect these cartels have on our country.
Although these numbers show a 25 percent decline since the same 12-month period last year [Fiscal Year 2023] – when the country lost 112,910 people to drug poisonings – demonstrating positive momentum in the fight against these drugs and the organizations trafficking them, the threat remains grave. The trend is hopeful, however. October 2024 was the eleventh consecutive month in which the CDC reported a reduction, and the current statistics represent the largest 12-month reduction in drug overdose deaths ever recorded.”
The above was excerpted from the 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment, an annual report from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which was published May 12, 2025, by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice and the DEA.
I refer to that 84,076 American death-by-drug overdose figure because – although it is far higher than acceptable — it is much lower than figures used recently by President Trump to justify his recently stepped up U.S. military operations against drug cartels and particularly alleged narco-traffickers off the Venezuelan coast.
Back on September 5, when President Trump was defending the September killing of 11 alleged Venezuelan narco-traffickers, he said, “We’re strong on drugs. We don’t want drugs killing our people. I believe we lost 300,000. You know, they always say 95[,000], 100,000. I believe they’ve been saying that for 20 years. I believe we lost 300,000 people last year.”
On September 15, during an Oval Office meeting, President Trump said of drug cartels, “They killed 300,000 people in our country last year and we’re not letting it happen anymore.” Later that same day, at an impromptu airport press conference, President Trump mistakenly said, “the fact that 300 million people died last year from drugs, that’s what’s illegal.”
Only President Trump knows why he inflates the number of American drug deaths in this country that his own DEA officials have provided to the public. But to me, it shows he wants to justify this recent tactic of blowing up Venezuelan speedboats on the Caribbean Sea.
The September 2, September 15, and September 19 attacks reportedly have killed 17 individuals without the U.S. military first stopping any of the speedboats to determine whether they are narco-trafficking or not – as they did with a Venezuelan fishing boat on September 13.
However, for the three attacks, President Trump provided video tapes which he said showed the speed boats each being destroyed. In addition, both he and Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth said with the first two, there are voice intercept tapes proving drugs were involved and that they were destined for the U.S. “We have recorded proof and evidence,” Trump told reporters on September15, “We know what time they were leaving, when they were leaving, what they had, and all of the other things that you’d like to have.”
But neither those voice tapes nor any other specific evidence has been made public.
In his September 4, letter to Congress, required by the War Powers Act after the September 2 attack, Trump wrote, “I directed these actions consistent with my responsibility to protect Americans and United States interests abroad and in furtherance of national security and foreign policy interests, pursuant to my constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive to conduct foreign relations.”
Meanwhile, many legal experts, including retired Pentagon lawyers, have questioned the legality under the law of wars, maritime law or human rights conventions for these U.S. attacks. Such attacks also contradict longtime U.S. military practice.
My further concern is that at his September 15, Oval Office exchange with reporters, President Trump mused that “there’s no drugs coming by sea, but they do come by land. And you know what? We’re telling the cartels right now, we’re going to be stopping them, too. When they come by land, we’re going to be stopping them the same way we stop the boats.”
The notion that Trump would order such an attack on another country’s land is not far-fetched.
Back in the summer of 2020, during his first term in office, Trump privately asked his then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, about launching missiles into Mexico to destroy drug labs, according to Esper’s 2022 memoir A Sacred Oath.
Early last month, both NBC and The New York Times reported that Trump had reportedly sent a secret directive to the Pentagon asking for options to attack Latin American drug cartels after they had been named as terrorist organizations.
Last Friday, The New York Times published a story that said, “Draft legislation is circulating at the White House and on Capitol Hill that would hand President Trump sweeping power to wage war against drug cartels he deems to be “terrorists,” as well as against any nation he says has harbored or aided them, according to people familiar with the matter.”
That Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill are contemplating legislation to justify what they are already doing shows they recognize some legal authority is needed. However, what’s also missing from much of the current media coverage is what the U.S. had initiated during the Biden administration to counter hemisphere drug cartels.
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Back in February 2025, The New York Times disclosed that the CIA under the Biden administration had, as part of bilateral cooperation with Mexico, begun secret drone flights well into Mexico to hunt for fentanyl labs, and that the Trump administration was increasing them.
CIA officers in Mexico passed information collected by the drones to Mexican officials, according to the Times, but the Mexican government was slow to take action against the labs, although the Mexican authorities did use some of the CIA information to make arrests.
During a February 19, 2025, news conference, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum described the CIA drone program as part of Mexico’s longstanding cooperation with U.S. forces. However, on September 10, Reuters published a more extensive story about CIA’s counter-drug activities in Mexico, its reporters having spoken to more than 60 current and former U.S. and Mexican security sources, including former CIA officers and diplomats and military officers from both countries.
With the permission of the Mexican government, Reuters said, the CIA had, in a previously covert, years-old program, individually vetted, trained and equipped two Mexican military units – a Mexican Army group and a special Mexican Navy intelligence outfit. The Army outfit is comprised of hundreds of CIA-trained special forces and, Reuters said, “is seen as the military force in Mexico most capable of nabbing heavily armed drug lords holed up in fortified mountain hideouts.
For example, Reuters reported, “The CIA’s Mexican Army group in January 2023 nabbed Ovidio Guzmán López, the son of the imprisoned cartel kingpin Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán.’”
More recently, CIA under the Trump administration, has created a new Americas and Counternarcotics Mission Center, Reuters has said, with top counterterrorism officials reassigned to work on Mexican cartels. The agency also has increased its already existent drone surveillance flights south of the border.
However, I join Washington Post Columnist David Ignatius when he questions: “Why has the [U.S.] military been so silent as the Trump administration has pushed the bounds of law by…attacking alleged Venezuelan drug-smuggling boats abroad?”
As I have noted in previous columns, on February 21, Hegseth, at a time when the top Navy Judge Advocate General (JAG) had just retired, fired the top Army and Air Force JAGs giving as his only stated reasons that he considered them not “well suited” for the job. Hegseth also said he wanted to avoid “roadblocks to orders that are given by a Commander-in-Chief.”
Ignatius pointed out, “The Trump team has gutted the JAGs — judge advocate generals — who are supposed to advise commanders on the rule of law, including whether presidential orders are legal. Without these independent military lawyers backing them up, commanders have no recourse other than to comply or resign.”
President Trump, who wanted to win a Peace Prize, it seems is now firmly on a war path.
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