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President Donald Trump claimed that it is fatal Attacks on “narco-terrorist” ships were justified Because “Drugs killed 300,000 Americans last year.”
Trump has previously cited similar high figures on US drug deaths and reportedly strengthened the claim after the administration’s latest attack off the coast of Colombia. medicine shipTwo people on board died.
“We are allowed to do this, and if we do this from the ground up, we can get back to Congress, but we have to, this is a national security problem,” Trump said this during the Oval Office on Wednesday When a reporter asked at a press conference whether his administration had the authority.
“They killed 300,000 people last year,” the president claimed, without offering his evidence for the figure. “Drugs, these drugs that are coming in, they killed 300,000 Americans last year, and this gives you legal rights.”
But critics have pointed out that Trump’s math doesn’t match up with the number of drug-related deaths in the US.
The number of Americans who died from drug overdose last year, while still high, was about 75,000, According to provisional data From the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In September, although he did not specify whether he was referring to Americans, Trump told a reporter when asked about Venezuela that “300 million people died from drugs last year”. The population of America is approximately 340 million.
The death toll from Tuesday’s operation, announced by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, is administration campaign More than 30, because the United States has declared itself at war with drug cartels Expansion of military operations throughout South America.
During an October 15 press conference, Trump also claimed, without evidence, that each boat put out by his administration “saves 25,000 American lives.”
“So every time you see a boat and you feel bad you say, ‘Wow, that’s tough.’ It’s tough, but if you lose three people and save 25,000 people…” the President said.
However, drug experts told the Poynter Institute political facts that “there is no way to know” how many lives have been saved as a result of the administration’s drug interdiction efforts.
“We don’t have any method that I’m aware of to translate drug seizure data into any measure of overdose deaths,” Ellen Kennedy-Hendrix, a health policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, told the nonprofit.
The organization argued, “Even if each boat contained 25,000 doses of the lethal drug, this does not mean that destroying them saved 125,000 lives.”
The Trump administration’s latest attack – believed to be the eighth since September – raises the death toll from the administration’s attacks to at least 34 people, which Hegseth compared to the terrorist group behind 9/11.
Critics have argued the campaign This is tantamount to illegal extrajudicial killingsWhile members of Congress and civil rights groups are pressing the administration for evidence justifying the attacks and for legal memos shared among White House officials.
Alex Woodward contributed reporting