The White House is using the opioid epidemic to justify lethal strikes and other policies.
“Please be warned that we will blow you out of existence,” President Donald Trump said during his speech at the United Nations on Tuesday, issuing a politely phrased mortal threat to would-be drug traffickers. Already, the administration has killed 17 people—“narco-terrorists,” Trump calls them—in air strikes on three boats allegedly from Venezuela and loaded with what the president has described as “big bags of cocaine and fentanyl.”
Trump and his aides have justified the extrajudicial killings as a decisive measure to protect Americans from dangerous drugs, especially fentanyl, the synthetic opioid behind the worst overdose epidemic in U.S. history, which accelerated during his first term in office.
“We have no choice,” Trump told the United Nations General Assembly. “Each boat that we sink carries drugs that would kill more than 25,000 Americans.”
But here’s the thing: Although the United States Coast Guard interdicts staggering quantities of illegal drugs in the Caribbean each year, it does not encounter fentanyl on the high seas. South American cocaine and marijuana account for the overwhelming majority of maritime seizures, according to Coast Guard data, and there isn’t a single instance of a fentanyl seizure—let alone “bags” of the drug—in the agency’s press releases.
Last month, the U.S. cutter Hamilton returned to Florida with what the agency called “the largest quantity of drugs offloaded in Coast Guard history”: 61,740 pounds of cocaine and 14,400 pounds of marijuana (that’s the weight of about three city buses). The haul, gathered by multiple federal agencies during 19 seizure incidents in the Caribbean as well as the Pacific, had an estimated street value of $473 million. But there wasn’t any fentanyl on the boat.
Steve Roth, a Coast Guard lieutenant commander and spokesperson for the agency, wrote to me that Coast Guard crews confiscated a “historic amount of cocaine” during the 2025 fiscal year that ends this month, but no fentanyl. He offered a bank-shot rationale for Trump’s claims, arguing that other illegal drugs, such as cocaine, generate profits that “fuel and enable Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Transnational Criminal Organizations to produce and traffic illegal fentanyl threatening the U.S.”
Trump has spoken in personal terms about the devastating toll of the fentanyl crisis, and has long tied it to his efforts to fortify the southern border and crack down on immigration. Anne Fundner, the mother of a 15-year-old who overdosed from a fentanyl-laced pill, gave an emotional speech at the Republican National Convention last year, blaming her son’s death on the Biden administration’s border policies.
