United States President Donald Trump has said recent military strikes on five Venezuelan boats have saved “at least 100,000 lives” because the manoeuvres have thwarted drug smuggling.
“Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives, so every time you see a boat and you feel badly you say, ‘Wow, that’s rough’: It is rough, but if you lose three people and save 25,000 people,” President Donald Trump said at an October 15 media conference.
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The administration did not supply PolitiFact with evidence that the boats were carrying drugs. Drug experts told PolitiFact that Venezuela plays a minor role in trafficking drugs that reach the US. The legality of the strikes is also unclear. After the first attack in early September, some legal experts told PolitiFact that the military action was illegal under maritime law or human rights conventions, and the attack contradicted longstanding US military practices.
Trump has used the figure repeatedly and also says he would consider similar strikes on land.
“Every one of those boats is responsible for the death of 25,000 American people, and the destruction of families,” Trump said in an October 5 speech to US Navy sailors. “So when you think of it that way, what we’re doing is actually an act of kindness.
“We’ve taken a very hard stand on drugs … the water drugs – the drugs that come in through water, they’re not coming – there are no boats any more, frankly, there are no fishing boats, there’s no boats out there, period,” Trump told Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on October 7. “We’ve probably saved at least 100,000 lives, American lives, Canadian lives, by taking out those boats.”
Several aspects of Trump’s statement make it wrong.
There is no way of knowing how many lives are saved as a result of drug interception efforts, drug experts have told PolitiFact.
Additionally, if Trump’s statement were accurate, the strikes on five boats in less than two months would have saved nearly double the number of US lives lost to drug overdoses in an entire year.
Trump administration has presented no evidence
The Trump administration hasn’t specified what type of drug or what quantity was on the boats that were struck. So it’s impossible to calculate how many deadly doses could have been destroyed.
Trump said at the October 15 media conference that the boats were carrying fentanyl.
“And you can see it, the boats get hit, and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean,” Trump said. “It’s like floating in bags. It’s all over the place.”
He has shared aerial videos of some of the boat strikes on Truth Social, but no bags of drugs are visible in the videos.
Additionally, most illicit fentanyl in the US comes from Mexico, not Venezuela. It enters the US mainly through the southern border at official ports of entry, and it’s smuggled in mostly by US citizens, according to the United States Sentencing Commission.
Even if there were 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 a drug overdose.
“When drugs are seized, the supply chain partially replaces those lost drugs,” Jonathan Caulkins, a Carnegie Mellon University drug policy researcher, previously told PolitiFact.
Overdose drug deaths have been declining for the past couple of years, before there were any strikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela, according to provisional 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 would have been responsible for 125,000 deaths, nearly double the number of overdose deaths in one year.
Drug interception data doesn’t show how many overdose deaths were prevented
Trump isn’t the first person to equate drug enforcement with saving lives. Over the years, we’ve fact-checked other politicians when they said that a quantity 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.
Generally, the politicians we have fact-checked referred to fentanyl seizures. The synthetic opioid is the leading cause of US overdose deaths. Politicians’ statements about lives saved rely on the lethal dose for fentanyl, two milligrams. So if authorities seized 10 milligrams of fentanyl, for example, that saved five lives, politicians say.
But there are caveats to that calculation because a dose’s lethality can vary based on a person’s height, weight and tolerance from past exposure, drug experts say. And statistics about how many drugs were stopped from entering the US don’t account for how many drugs make it into the country.
“We don’t have any method I’m aware of for translating drug seizure data into any measure of overdose deaths averted,” Alene Kennedy-Hendricks, a Johns Hopkins University health policy expert, told PolitiFact in May.
Our ruling
Regarding boat strikes off the coast of Venezuela, Trump said: “Every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives.”
Trump said the five boats the US military struck off the coast of Venezuela were carrying drugs heading to the US. However, experts on drugs and Venezuela told PolitiFact the country plays a minor role in trafficking drugs that reach the US.
The administration has provided no evidence about the type or quantity of drugs it says were on the boats. This lack of information makes it impossible to know how many lethal doses of the drugs could have been destroyed.
Even if the boats were carrying 25,000 lethal drug doses each, that doesn’t mean that destroying them saved 125,000 lives. There were 73,000 US drug overdose deaths from May 2024 to April 2025. That means the drugs on five boats would have been responsible for 125,000 deaths, nearly double the number of US overdose deaths in one year.
The amount of drugs that are stopped from entering the US doesn’t indicate how many lives were saved.
We rate Trump’s statement False.
