Validating Trump’s claim that every boat that hits the coast of Venezuela saves 25,000 lives

This article originally appeared on PolitiFact.

President Donald Trump said that US military strikes on five Venezuelan boats saved the lives of more than 100,000 people because the maneuvers thwarted drug smuggling.

“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 tough.’ It’s tough, but if you lose three people and you save 25,000 people,” Trump said at a news conference on October 15.

The administration did not provide PolitiFact with any evidence that the boats were carrying drugs. Drug experts told PolitiFact that Venezuela plays a minor role in drug trafficking that reaches 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 repeatedly used this number, and has also said he would consider similar strikes on the ground.

He watches: Trump is considering launching ground strikes in Venezuela after attacks on suspected drug boats

“Each one of those boats is responsible for the deaths of 25,000 Americans, and the destruction of families,” Trump said in an October 5 speech to US 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 tough stance on drugs,” Trump told Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on October 7. “Aquatic drugs — drugs that come through waters that don’t come in — there are no more boats, frankly no more fishing boats, no boats out there. We probably saved at least 100,000 lives, American lives, Canadian lives, by destroying those boats.”

There are several aspects of Trump’s statement that make it wrong.

Drug experts told PolitiFact there is no way to know how many lives have been saved as a result of drug interdiction efforts.

Additionally, if Trump’s statement was accurate, the raids on five boats in less than two months would have saved nearly twice the number of lives lost in the United States to drug overdoses in an entire year.

The Trump administration has provided no evidence

The Trump administration did not specify the type or quantity of drugs that were on the boats that were struck. It is therefore impossible to calculate how many lethal doses would have been destroyed.

Trump said the boats were carrying fentanyl during the October 15 press conference.

“And you can see it, the boats are getting hit, and you see 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 strikes on Truth Social, and no drug bags were visible in the videos.

Additionally, most of the illicit fentanyl in the United States comes from Mexico, not Venezuela. It enters the United States mainly through the southern border at official ports of entry, and is smuggled mostly by U.S. citizens, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Even if there was fentanyl on board, Trump’s statement is mathematically questionable

If each boat carried 25,000 lethal doses, that does not mean that the strikes prevented 125,000 people from dying from a drug overdose.

“When drugs are seized, the supply chain partially replaces those 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 any attacks on boats off the coast of Venezuela, according to interim data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC reported more than 73,000 drug overdose deaths from May 2024 to April 2025. For Trump’s statement to be accurate, the drugs on five boats were responsible for 125,000 deaths, nearly double the number of overdose deaths in one year.

Drug interception data does not show how many overdose deaths were prevented

Trump is not the first person to equate drug enforcement with saving lives. Over the years, we have fact-checked other politicians’ statements when they said that the amount of drugs seized at the US border was enough to kill a specific number of people, or that those seizures saved a specific number of lives.

In general, the politicians we examined cited fentanyl seizures. Synthetic opioids are the leading cause of overdose deaths in the United States. Politicians’ statements about saving lives are based on the lethal dose of fentanyl – 2 milligrams. Politicians say that if authorities confiscated 10 milligrams of fentanyl, for example, it would save five lives.

But drug experts say there are caveats to this calculation because the risk of a dose can vary based on a person’s height, weight and ability to withstand previous exposure. Statistics on the number of drugs banned from entering the United States do not take into account the number of drugs entering the country.

“We have no way to my knowledge of translating drug seizure data into any measure of overdose deaths,” Aline Kennedy Hendricks, a health policy expert at Johns Hopkins University, told PolitiFact in May.

Our rule

Regarding the boat strikes off the coast of Venezuela, Trump said: “For every boat we destroy, we save the lives of 25,000 Americans.”

Trump said the five boats struck by the US military off the coast of Venezuela were carrying drugs destined for the US. However, experts on drugs and Venezuela told PolitiFact that the country plays a minor role in drug trafficking that reaches the US.

The administration did not provide any evidence about the type or quantity of drugs it says were on board the boats. This lack of information makes it impossible to know how many lethal doses of drugs would have been destroyed.

Even if each of the boats carried 25,000 lethal drug doses, this does not mean that their destruction saved the lives of 125,000 people. There were 73,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States from May 2024 to April 2025. This means that drugs found on five boats were responsible for 125,000 deaths, nearly double the number of overdose deaths in the United States in one year.

The amount of drugs prevented from entering the United States does not indicate the number of lives saved.

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