https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/11/17/trump-hegseth-venezuela-boat-strikes/
Channeling his inner Humpty Dumpty(“‘When
I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — nothing more nor less’”), Donald Trump has decided that this hypothetical fentanyl from Venezuela might be a “chemical weapon” (like mustard gas or sarin?). An odd one, that Americans pay for and ingest.
If the boats are, as U.S. intelligence sources supposedly know, carrying drugs (intelligence sources
knew Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction existed), they are pulled to America by the demand for drugs by Americans who poison themselves. The national tragedy of 80,000 U.S. fatal overdoses last year is not ameliorated by, it is deepened by, terminological obfuscations that erase the agency of drug users.
The president says each boat strike prevents 25,000 overdose deaths. Reason’s Jacob Sullum says this means he already has saved 350,000 lives, six times the number of U.S. lives lost in Vietnam. But, then, Attorney General Pam Bondi has said that in his first 100 days in office, Donald Trump saved “258 million lives” (75 percent of the U.S. population) by intercepting fentanyl shipments.