Fentanyl Doesn’t Come Through the Caribbean
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/archive/2025/09/fentanyl-trump-venezuela-caribbean-boats/684373/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo
Posted by theatlantic
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“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,” Nick Miroff writes. “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,” Miroff writes: “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.
“… In his second term, Trump has taken what was once a right-wing talking point—treating smuggling organizations as terrorist groups rather than criminal syndicates—to create an emergency justification for the use of lethal force. If the U.S. military can kill terror suspects plotting to blow up Americans, then it can also use lethal force on smugglers trying to poison them with drugs, this thinking goes. But the administration has not said what specific legal authority it is using to kill trafficking suspects with no due process, aside from loosely claiming that the United States is ‘at war.’”
Read more: [https://theatln.tc/0yI55iR3](https://theatln.tc/0yI55iR3)
Genuine question. Didn’t they use reaper drones on whoever they felt like in the Middle East?
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