Trump’s Venezuela Takeover Won’t Stop Overdoses in the U.S.

In mid-August 2025, reports surfaced that a U.S. naval task force was being assembled in the Caribbean. Its rumored purpose was to counter a previously unrecognized Venezuelan “narco-terrorist” threat to the US. Within a few months, it included the largest U.S. aircraft carrier, 10 other warships, 70 aircraft, a nuclear submarine carrying cruise missiles, and 15,000 members of the armed forces.   

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By December, what the White House called the “greatest armada” in the history of the Western Hemisphere had blown up 35 small Venezuelan boats, many traditionally used for fishing. They produced no evidence of drug cargos. President Trump claimed that at least 25,000 American lives had been saved by each strike, or the cumulative equivalent of about eight years of U.S. overdoses. 

Then on Jan. 3, 2026, “Operation Absolute Resolve” succeeded in capturing the President of Venezuela and his wife so they could be added to the inmate population of an overcrowded Brooklyn jail and face drug trafficking charges. After announcing that the U.S. would take over Venezuelan oil operations and “run” the country, President Trump issued stern warnings to other nations across the globe, including Denmark and Greenland, that similar operations could be launched against them, presumably as “narco-terrorists.” 

Overdoses are the number one killer of Americans aged 18 to 44. The vast majority of these deaths are caused by illicit fentanyl which experts report is typically synthesized in Mexico from precursor chemicals provided by Chinese operatives and brought into the United States via vehicles passing through official ports of entry. Venezuela is a major transit hub of cocaine destined primarily for Europe. It has virtually no role in illicit opioids entering the U.S. The stimulant class of drugs—which includes cocaine, methamphetamine and a variety of illicit and prescription drugs (e.g., Ritalin) —accounts for approximately 15% of overdose deaths in the United States, primarily among older adults with cardiovascular disease. In contrast to the surge in opioid fatality numbers of the past decade, deaths attributable to cocaine have shown little increase. Even a total interdiction of Venezuelan drugs is unlikely to produce a detectable reduction of U.S. overdose deaths. 

Regardless of what the White House will do next about “narco-terrorists,” there is one topic about which the diverse views of those who study drugs agree: it is functionally impossible to reduce overdoses solely by intervening on the supply of drugs—without a concomitant reduction in demand. Pure supply-side interventions produce the “Drug Bust Paradox,” where arrests of major drug dealers are followed by an increase in overdoses, as addicts seek out more dangerous sources of opioids in the absence of adequate treatment options. My research explores how well-meaning, but draconian, efforts to correct the abusive opioid prescription promotion practices of drug companies were followed by a nationwide explosion of overdoses from illicit opioids, again in the absence of equivalent efforts to make opioid treatment available.

As Trump attempts to cast Maduro as a “narco-terrorist” abroad his administration has simultaneously undermined substance use disorder treatment programs at home. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has decimated the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Agency (SAMHSA). As a result, states were cut off from almost $2 billion in block grants, including $350 million in addiction and overdose funding. Roughly half the SAMHSA staff have been lost, along with 12 of its senior leaders, including its top administrator. At the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA), $588 million in drug research grants were cancelled and 1,200 related personnel laid off.  NIDA itself may be subject to abolition.  

What makes these cuts particularly remarkable is that on May 14, 2025, the Division of Overdose Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had announced, based on provisional data, that the number of overdose deaths in 2024 had dropped 27%. This was the first such decline in 33 years and one that was sustained month after month, most dramatically for deaths caused by illicit fentanyl. Identifying the causes required analysis of confirmed data, but the announcement suggested that something may have worked—perhaps one of the many programs eliminated by RFK Jr. 

Since Trump took office, the CDC has lost about a third of its staff and is without a permanent Director. RFK Jr. has proposed that CDC’s Division of Overdose Prevention (the nation’s eyes and ears on the opioid epidemic) be abolished and its remnants absorbed, along with the remnants of an abolished SAMHSA, into his “Administration for A Healthy America.” He had HHS issue a 72-page manifesto, “Making America Healthy Again.” The word “opioid” never appeared. This is in a context where CDC had also issued the stark warning of a seven-fold rise in overdoses from illicit carfentanil, an opioid 100 times more potent than fentanyl. An opioid trafficker’s dream.

Without any evidence to suggest that Trump’s actions abroad will noticeably reduce drug overdoses at home—and as the president undercuts efforts to save American lives—we must instead consider alternative motives. As has been the case so often in history, an administration desperate to reverse its declining popularity may have placed the military in the position of triumphing in an empty spectacle abroad while the war is at risk of being lost silently at home.