The United States has a drug problem. Provisional data (as of May 14, 2025) from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics indicate there were an estimated 80,391 drug overdose deaths in the United States during 2024—a decrease of 26.9% from the 110,037 deaths estimated in 2023. That’s more deaths than from kidney disease and less than from diabetes. Opioid use disorder affects 2.1 million people in the US, statistic as of 2024.
Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have decided that the most effective way to deal with this problem is to kill people with small boats off South America, which may be trafficking narcotics. They accuse the people they are killing of “poisoning” Americans.
The standard treatments for opioid use disorder involve social and psychological interventions, along with supportive medication to lessen the effects of the opioids. The Trump administration has cut money for such treatments.
The accusation of “poisoning” and the claims for the numbers of American lives saved with each boat destroyed make sense only if a network of attackers are forcibly injecting Americans with the drugs. Those Americans use the drugs themselves as a result of psychological and physical disabilities. The numbers are absurd – 25,000 lives per boat out of a total of 80,000 deaths last year.
If the boats being destroyed are carrying drugs, which the administration has asserted but not shown to be the case, they may not be headed for the United States, but other points in the Caribbean and Central America. Major drug trafficking routes to the US come in other directions.
The administration also claims that the sales of these drugs support the control of cities by drug cartels, another assertion not proved. While there may be skirmishes between gangs, none are in control of any cities.
The Coast Guard has been interdicting drug runners for decades. They stop the boats, confiscate the cargoes, and turn the people over to law enforcement.
There is no reason to use the military for this civil problem. We all know this, but I thought it was worth spelling out.
In Trump 1.0, professionals were sometimes able to curtail the worst impulses of Trump and his closest cronies. In Trump 2.0, these people get pushed out:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shocked official Washington in mid-October when he announced that the four-star head of U.S. military operations in the Caribbean was retiring less than a year into his tenure.
But according to two Pentagon officials, Hegseth asked Adm. Alvin Holsey to step down, a de facto ouster that was the culmination of months of discord between Hegseth and the officer. It began days after President Trump’s inauguration in January and intensified months later when Holsey had initial concerns about the legality of lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, according to former officials aware of the discussions.
Not long after, Hegseth announced that Holsey would be retiring.
Hegseth’s move, which hasn’t been previously reported, sheds new light on a brewing controversy over the legality of the military’s campaign in the Caribbean, and raises questions over whether servicemembers with concerns about the attacks are being listened to.
While Hegseth has dismissed a number of high-ranking military leaders since taking over the Pentagon, the ouster of a commander during an unfolding military operation was an extraordinary move, lawmakers and experts note.
“Having [Holsey] leave at this particular moment, at the height of what the Pentagon considers to be the central action in our hemisphere, is just shocking,” says Todd Robinson, who served as assistant secretary for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs until January.
Remember that Hegseth’s support of war criminals was the main reason Trump selected him in the first place.