Since September 2, the U.S. military has attacked suspected drug boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific 59 times, killing 196 people. According to President Donald Trump's mysterious math, that means this campaign of carnage has prevented around 1.5 million drug-related deaths in the United States—more than 20 times the total number recorded in the year before Trump started treating suspected cocaine smugglers as "combatants" who can be killed at will, from a distance and in cold blood.
Back on planet Earth, there is no reason to think the boat strikes have prevented any deaths at all. That could only happen if blowing up smugglers—as opposed to the previous practice of intercepting them, arresting them, and seizing their cargo, which Trump says was "totally ineffective"—reduced the supply of cocaine available to American consumers. Given more than a century of failed attempts to "stop the flow" of illegal intoxicants, that never seemed likely. And nearly nine months after Trump launched his new, deadlier version of the war on drugs, there is no evidence that it is more effective than the traditional tactics he derides as insufficiently homicidal.
