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fentanyl
Trump Admin Considering a Strike on Venezuela, Military Sources Say
The US is considering "shooting down Venezuelan military aircraft" or "bombing Venezuelan military airfield," according to a report from independent journalist Ken Klippenstein.
Sep 10, 2025
US President Donald Trump's administration is considering launching military strikes on Venezuela, according to new reporting from independent journalist Ken Klippenstein.
Military sources on Tuesday told Klippenstein that the Trump administration is mulling an attack against Venezuela unless it cracks down on drug cartels that it claims are shipping fentanyl into the United States.
Contrary to the administration's claims, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies, Venezuela plays virtually no role in fentanyl manufacturing and trafficking.
Klippenstein's sources said the attack was likely to involve "shooting down Venezuelan military aircraft or by bombing Venezuelan military airfield," and that the US Air Force has been rehearsing for such a mission in recent weeks.
Such an attack would mark a dramatic escalation in the Trump administration's hostilities toward Venezuela, which escalated last week when the administration bombed a boat off the Venezuelan coast that it alleged was carrying drug traffickers.
Many legal experts were quick to condemn the strike as a violation of maritime law. Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was among those who condemned the military attack on suspected drug smugglers without due process.
A leaked Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by Klippenstein gives clues as to why the administration is taking an aggressive military posture toward Venezuela.
Specifically, writes Klippenstein, the memo gives insight into the administration's view that Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro is actually in charge of the Tren de Aragua cartel and is giving it orders to poison American citizens by getting them addicted to drugs.
However, Klippenstein cautions that this view of Maduro as the commander of an international drug cartel is not backed up by US intelligence agencies.
"A declassified assessment prepared by the National Intelligence Council concluded in April that the Maduro regime 'probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TdA and is not directing TdA operations in the United States,'" he noted.
Klippenstein closed his report by likening the situation to the buildup to the 2003 Iraq War, but with fentanyl taking the place of "weapons of mass destruction" as the purported casus belli.
"Similar to the 'debate' about Saddam's WMD, Democrats in Congress are busy discussing whether the strike on a small drug boat was legal and complaining that they weren't briefed on the operation," he wrote. "The fundamental question—is there any evidence that the Venezuela government is directing fentanyl into the U.S.?—is hardly ever asked. And most importantly, would bombing Venezuela do anything to reduce the flow of drugs into the U.S.?"
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Why Pointing the US Military at Cartels Won’t Stop the Flow of Drugs
The Trump administration may present this as some magic solution that will win the drug war once and for all, but the reality is bullets and bombs have been lobbed at the narco traffickers repeatedly to little positive effect.
Aug 12, 2025
In 2020, during the last year of the Trump administration’s first term, U.S. President Donald Trump asked then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper a shocking question: Why can’t the United States just attack the Mexican cartels and their infrastructure with a volley of missiles?
Esper recounted the moment in his memoir, using the anecdote to illustrate just how reckless Trump was becoming as his term drew to a close. Those missiles, of course, were never launched, so the entire interaction amounted to nothing in terms of policy.
Yet five years later, Trump still views the Mexican cartels as one of Washington’s principal national security threats. His urge to take offensive action inside Mexico has only grown with time. Unlike in Trump’s first term, using the U.S. military to combat these criminal organizations is now a mainstream policy option in Trump’s Republican Party. According to The New York Times, Trump has signed a presidential directive allowing the Pentagon to begin using military force against specific cartels in Latin America, and U.S. military officials are now in the process of studying various ways to go about implementing the order.
While this may come as a shock to some foreign policy commentators, it shouldn’t. Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (and short-lived national security adviser) Mike Waltz, and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ron Johnson have all left the door open to military force, whether it takes the form of striking fentanyl-production facilities by air or deploying U.S. special operations forces to take out top cartel leaders on Mexican soil.
Effectively declaring war on Mexico, America’s top trading partner and neighbor with which we share a nearly 2,000 mile-long border, presents the illusion of progress without actually making any.
The Trump administration wasted no time going down this road. The Central Intelligence Agency is engaging in more surveillance flights along the U.S.-Mexico border, and inside Mexican airspace, to gather information on key cartel locations. The U.S. national security bureaucracy was already in preliminary discussions about the possible use of drone strikes against the cartels as well. And on February 20, the U.S. State Department designated six Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which is designed to deter Americans from working with the cartels and lay the foundation for future strikes.
This is all good politics for Trump, who recognizes implicitly that getting tough on Mexico economically and politically is red meat for his base. But politics isn’t nearly as important as policy, and the policy implications of U.S. military operations in Mexico—even if the purpose is a noble one—is riddled with costs and make managing the problems the Trump administration ostensibly cares about even harder.
First, we should remember one thing right off the bat: Using the military to tackle cartels is not a new phenomenon. The Trump administration may present this as some magic solution that will win the drug war once and for all, but the reality is bullets and bombs have been lobbed at the narco traffickers repeatedly to little positive effect. Successive Mexican governments since the turn of the century, from the conservative Felipe Calderón to the leftist Andres Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), have relied on the military under the presumption this was the best way the Mexican state could pressure criminal organizations into extinction.
Calderón, for instance, declared a full-blown war on the cartels immediately after his election in 2006, deploying tens of thousands of Mexican troops into some of the country’s most violent states. Despite lambasting the military-first strategy during his own presidential campaign, Enrique Peña Nieto largely continued Calderón’s strategy with a special emphasis on targeting so-called “kingpins” of the narco-trafficking world. When AMLO entered office in 2018, he tried to get the Mexican army back into the barracks but wound up expanding their authority and rushing Mexican soldiers into hot spots, like Culiacan, whenever large-scale violence broke out.
The result was a bloodbath. Rather than submit to the state’s diktats, the cartels fought the Mexican state with ever greater levels of force. Politicians, police officers, and soldiers were all targeted and killed with greater frequency. Areas of Mexico previously insulated from cartel violence were suddenly drawn into the maelstrom. Although senior narco traffickers were killed and captured in the process, Mexico’s cartel landscape was shattered into a million different pieces; as my colleague Christopher McCallion and I wrote in July, the demise of the cartel’s senior leadership merely opened up these organizations to extreme bouts of infighting between replacements who sought to grab the crown.
The end product was a massive uptick in Mexico’s homicide rate, which is now three times greater than it was before Calderón declared war almost two decades ago.
Of course, the Trump administration is unlikely to mimic the Mexican government’s past strategy entirely. It’s hard to envision tens of thousands of U.S. troops deploying to Tamaulipas, Guanajuato, or Sinaloa, sealing off neighborhoods, establishing checkpoints, and conducting offensive operations against cartels that in some instances have more firepower than the Mexican army. If Washington is going to do anything militarily, it’s more likely to come in the form of air power. Bombing fentanyl manufacturing plants would be more economical and wouldn’t involve U.S. ground forces, so the risk to U.S. personnel would be much lower.
Still, if the objective is to bomb the cartels into submission or convince them to stop producing and shipping drugs across America’s southern border, then an air campaign will fall flat. We can say this with a reasonable degree of certainty because there’s first-hand experience to go by. The U.S. Air Force did something similar in Afghanistan in 2017-2018, taking out opium labs in Taliban-controlled areas to deprive the Taliban insurgency of the revenue it needed to wage the war.
But as the Special Inspector General of Afghanistan Reconstruction reported, the bombing campaign failed to do anything of significance. The U.S. air campaign didn’t dent the Taliban’s revenue streams to the point where it made a negotiated resolution on U.S. terms possible. As David Mansfield, the world’s leading expert on Afghanistan’s drug patterns, wrote in a 2019 report, “It is hard to see how the campaign offered anything in terms of value for money, with the cost of the strikes and ordnance used far outweighing the value of the losses to those involved in drugs production or potential revenues to the Taliban.”
Why would Mexico be any different than Afghanistan? If anything, denting cartel revenue via an air campaign would be even more difficult than it was with respect to the Taliban. Unlike heroin, fentanyl is a synthetic drug that can be easily produced, isn’t particularly labor intensive, and doesn’t require acres upon acres of poppy fields that can be easily located. Sure, the United States is bound to find some of these facilities, but the cartels responsible for production will still have a monetary incentive to set up shop somewhere else. Fentanyl nets the cartels billions of dollars every year; this is a very large financial resource that the Sinaloa and New Jalisco Generation cartels—or frankly anyone in the business—will be hard pressed to pass up.
And if even if they magically did find a new line of work, other players would step into the void to increase their own market share.
These are only several problems associated with treating the U.S. military as a panacea to the drug problem. But the important thing to take away is that effectively declaring war on Mexico, America’s top trading partner and neighbor with which we share a nearly 2,000 mile-long border, presents the illusion of progress without actually making any. And it will inject immense tension in a U.S.-Mexican relationship that Washington should be strengthening, not undermining.
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Trump-GOP Cuts Could Reverse Last Year's Historic Drop in Drug Overdose Deaths, Warn Experts
Cuts to Medicaid and prevention, harm reduction, and treatment programs "will equal more people dying," said one public health expert.
May 15, 2025
Federal public health officials on Thursday announced an unprecedented drop last year in drug overdose deaths, which have plagued the United States for decades and had been rising steadily over the past several years.
But experts warned that now is exactly the wrong time to "take our foot off the gas pedal," as the Republican Party and President Donald Trump are threatening to do with steep cuts to Medicaid and other federal programs.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that an estimated 80,391 people in the U.S. died of drug overdoses in 2024—a 27% drop, with about 30,000 fewer deaths than in 2023 and "more than 81 lives saved every day."
Synthetic opioids like fentanyl were still involved in most overdose deaths last year, but those deaths were down 37% between 2023-24.
"I would characterize this as a historically significant decrease in overdose deaths," Brandon Marshall, a Brown University School of Public Health epidemiologist, told The Washington Post. "We're really seeing decreases almost across the entire nation at this point."
Experts noted that numerous factors are likely behind the plunging fatal overdose numbers. The CDC said it has been able to strengthen overdose prevention capacities across the U.S. since Trump declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency in 2017 during his first term, making congressional support available.
As CNN reported, with new federal support, local policymakers in places like Mecklenburg County, North Carolina have been able to secure vending machines with naloxone, a medication that can rapidly reverse an opioid overdose; employ epidemiologists who focus on opioid trends to prevent deaths; and infrastructure that has helped public workers determine where to target their overdose prevention work.
But the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, which funded those programs, was targeted by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency earlier this year as its Trump-appointed leader, billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, sought to cut federal jobs. The center is also identified as a "duplicative, DEI, or simply unnecessary" program that should be cut in the White House's proposed budget.
"Any changes or impacts to those funding streams would mean that we either have to find other funding to support the team that works in that department, or we would have to lay them off. That would, of course, impact the work," Dr. Raynard Washington, director of the county health department, told CNN. "Experts work hand-in-hand with us on the strategies that we choose to implement on the ground, and then how we're evaluating what's working, and then how we share those best practices. That technical assistance is also just as invaluable as the actual grant dollars that we receive."
Medicaid cuts in the proposed budget, which would slash $880 billion in federal spending to secure tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and corporations, could also reverse the historic progress made in 2024, as the healthcare program covers 47% of people with opioid use disorder and 64% of people who receive outpatient treatment.
Chad Sabora, a drug policy expert who helped spearhead the letter, told The Washington Post that cuts to Medicaid will leave people without medications they use to diminish the effects of opioid use disorder, like buprenorphine.
"It will equal more people dying," he told the Post.
On Monday, more than 320 faculty members from universities and other institutions wrote to Republican and Democratic Senate leaders to warn them that "dismantling the lifesaving work" of the CDC and other health agencies in the budget would have "dire consequences."
"At a time when the federal government should be boosting investments in behavioral health systems, service delivery, and public health surveillance programs, we are seeing drastic cuts to key agencies, including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the CDC, and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA)," they said.
The 2026 fiscal year budget proposes over $1 billion in cuts to SAMHSA—a reduction of 16% of its funding—and $3.6 billion in cuts to the CDC, or nearly half if its funding.
The faculty members listed a number of programs that will be impacted those cuts, including:
- State and local health departments and behavioral health agencies;
- Evidence-based prevention programs like community-based naloxone distribution, peer outreach programs, drug-use related infectious disease prevention programs, and drug test strip programs, which help people determine whether a drug is laced with fentanyl;
- The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (SAMHSA), which is used extensively by policymakers, researchers, and health professionals and gives accurate population estimates of trends in alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use; and
- The Addiction Medicine Fellowship Program and Substance Use Disorder Treatment and Recovery Loan Repayment Program (HRSA), which will train the next generation of substance use care specialists across the country, with special programs dedicated to rural areas.
"Members of Congress, we urge you to protect these vital substance use and mental health services. Millions of Americans are depending on you," wrote the experts.
The White House signaled in the proposed budget that it doesn't support evidence-based harm reduction programs funded through SAMHSA grants, calling them "dangerous activities."
Adams Sibley, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, told CNN that "now is the time to double down on efforts to educate and recruit folks into harm reduction and treatment, whatever their version of safer use looks like."
With fellow researcher Nabarun Dasgupta, Sibley tracked gradual declines in overdose deaths in cities and states over the past three years, before the national shift was seen in 2024.
They identified shifts in the population of drug users, with a growing number of people in the at-risk population taking advantage of newly funded treatment options—or having already died of overdoses—as one contributing factor to the plunging overdose death numbers last year, as well as a change in the supply of drugs available.
"The general dissatisfaction with the illicit opioid supply right now is surprisingly high," Dasgupta told CNN, pointing to the animal sedative xylazine, also known as "tranq."
Many users have reached an "inflection point" with their substance use disorders, said Sibley and Dasgupta, and policymakers must ensure the treatment and prevention programs funded by the CDC, SAMHSA, and other agencies are still there for them.
"The one thing that substance use treatment providers and people who use drugs alike will tell you is that people are ready when they're ready, and there are a lot of people ready right now," Sibley said.
Daniel Ciccarone, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, cautioned that even with last year's significant decrease, "we're still at very high levels of overdose."
"We need steady pressure," he told CNN. "To the degree that we stop paying attention... we will see a reversal."
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