Q&A – How Many Lives Have Been Saved by Trump’s anti-Narco-Terror Campaign?

14,200 fewer drug overdose deaths through the first two months of President Trump’s campaign projects to greater than 85,000 fewer lives lost to illicit drugs over a full year. There’s been much debate about the legality of the president’s campaign, whether it’s warranted, etc. These remarkable early figures speak for themselves.  

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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saved by Trump's anti narco terror campaign. This is brought
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(00:44):
maybe for a future Q and A like this.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Good morning, Brian and Joel. With President Trump interdicting all
of these drug cartel boats in the Caribbean, has it
impacted the United States in any way? Are there less
drug deaths?

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Yeah? Great question. A great question that today hasn't received
as much attention as it probably deserves. And some of
this is due to the operation having only been conducted
since early September, which means that We're still early into
the systemic impacts of President Trump's combating of drug cartels
and narco terrorists. Now today, the bit of research that
previously brought you in a late October was this that

(01:23):
the Trump administration had taken out what is estimated to
be thirty percent of drug running into this country through
the Counter Narcotics Task Force. So that was kind of
a big deal. And when I came up with that
research and I shared it, I figured maybe that gained
some more attraction, but it really just kind of went by,

(01:46):
let's dive into this information with the latest available information,
because it is as big of a deal as that sounds.
So it all started on the first day. Actually, I
remember covering this executive OOID and President Trump January twentieth,
he set the stage for what was to come with

(02:06):
the Order entitled Designating Cartels in other Organizations as Foreign
Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Okay, so that
executive order eventually accomplished two outcomes that you're scene carried out.
The first was to specifically identify the drug cartels some

(02:28):
were actually by name in the order, but to task
his administration with identifying the drug cartels that he designated
as terrorists, and then that would allow for the president
to use executive authority to combat them. You'll hear a
lot of DEBATEO was this even legal? In this and that, Well,

(02:51):
the president has the ability to take down terrorists in
the middle of action. You don't. You don't have terrorists
that are in the in the throws up a plot
and then the president go all right, we got to
guess the legislation pass here real quick does not work
that way, right, So the president has the ability to
use executive authority to gibat terrorists. And so that's how

(03:16):
what he has done is entirely legal. The second outcome
was to task all of his related agencies in personnel
with identifying threats from the cartels, establishing the plan for
combating them. And so the plan that has been carried
out today. It came together in early August. That's when

(03:36):
President Trump announced that he had authorized military force against
NARCO terrorists. Now, for a few weeks there nothing happened.
But in September that's when the Trump administration began carrying
out the campaign that he since regularly launched with missile
strikes that have targeted vessels suspected of drug trafficking in
the Caribbean Sea Eastern Pacific Ocean, primarily off the coast

(04:00):
of Venezuela and Colundia, and most recently, the campaign was
formalized under Operation Southern Spear on November thirteenth. The military
action against narco terrorists includes the use of US Navy warships,
helicopters MQ nine Raaper, drones, and emerging robotic systems to

(04:20):
sink or destroy boats alleged to carry narcotics like cocaine infentanyl, which,
by the way, I just kind of think about this.
Imagine you're these drug runners out there and then all
of a sudden, you've got that kind of that kind
of stuff come in your direction. As of November tenth,

(04:44):
twenty strikes had targeted twenty one vessels, focusing on groups
like Venezuela's Trendy Aragua and Columbia's Illin Gorillas, resulting in
eighty designated terrorists having been killed. So the administration claims
these actions save American law by disrupting fentanyl flows. Feeling
the opioid crisis, and that dovetails directly into today's question,

(05:07):
So let's go there an answer to the question as
to whether there's been a tangible impact within the US today,
the answer would strongly appear to be yes. And comparing
drug overdose tests in September and October of last year
to the same two months this year, the first two

(05:28):
month full months of the military campaign, here's what's happened.
And the information is, by the way, still considered provisional
at this point. But in September of twenty four there
were seventy two hundred drug overdose tests recorded in the
United States. How about this past September fifty five hundred, okay,

(05:49):
seventeen hundred. Fewer October twenty four seven thousand drug overdose tests,
this past October fifty four hundred. So we have in
the first two full months of operation fourteen thousand, two
hundred fewer drug overdose tests, or decline of twenty three percent.

(06:10):
So notably, we've seen a sharp decline in drug overdose tests,
with nearly a quarter fewer within just the first two
full months of operation. So the plumbinary numbers also wash
rather cleanly with my initial assessment in late October that
approximately thirty percent of the drug running into the United
States had been disrupted. So it does seem like all

(06:32):
of this is directly related. Fourteen thousand, two hundred fewer
drug overdose tests through the first two months President Trump's campaign.
That would project to greater than eighty five eighty five
thousand fewer lives lost to illicit drugs over the course
of a full year. So, I mean, you take a
look at everything that's that's happened here in the ongoing

(06:54):
debates or whatever else. That is what you haven't heard yet,
and it's worth talking about how effective this evidently has
been already at combating drug overdose deaths.