Trump's drug boat strikes made zero dent in cocaine smuggling: NYT
Despite bombing small boats, Trump's aggressive military operations outside South America have made zero progress towards stopping the flow of cocaine, according to reporting by The New York Times.
Nine months ago, the Trump administration started attacking dozens of small boats, killing nearly 200 people in the process. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth touted the strikes as "highly effective" at stopping drug trafficking into the United States.
However, epidemiologists, addiction scientists, and public health experts are saying that cocaine is just as easy to get in the United States as it was before those strikes began, according to the Times.
"In addition to being morally abhorrent, this method is as likely to succeed as much as would bombing a handful of McDonald's in Dallas, Texas and claiming that you've made America healthy again," Dr. Carl Latkin, a public health professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the Times.
"Cocaine remains highly available, highly prevalent and relatively inexpensive," Latkin added.
Other experts told the Times that another sign of the campaign's ineffectiveness is that the purity and price of cocaine in the U.S. have stayed the same.
The Trump administration deployed gunships, F-35 fighter jets, guided-missile destroyers, drones, fixed-wing aircraft, and 15,000 U.S. military personnel to fight small boats, all to the tune of $4.7 billion, according to a Brown University study cited by the Times.
"Signs are also emerging that traffickers are simply adopting other methods for smuggling cocaine," the Times reported.
Drug smugglers are basically going around Trump's military operations by "shifting to land routes through Central America or placing cocaine in container ships, while absorbing the occasional loss of shipments on small boats," according to the Times.
The U.S. military also captured former Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to face drug trafficking charges and started ground strikes in Ecuador, the Times noted.
"They're not moving the needle at all," Adam Isacson, the defense director at the Washington Office on Latin America, told the Times. "Is that worth killing all these people?"