Supply and Demand

I don’t know about you, but when President Trump says Pete Hegseth, his misbegotten, maladroit defense secretary, told him he never ordered the armed forces to kill all aboard a boat allegedly trafficking drugs to the U.S. from Venezuela, I don’t believe him. Not for a second.

Indeed, I take it to mean the exact opposite of what our leader said. Who or what do you believe? The guy who lies about essentially everything, or the pretty alarming story published last week by the Washington Post?

Hegseth’s bullyboy pose, his drunken assaults on women he later had to pay to shut up, and his determination to rid the military of fat and bearded generals are consistent with the fumbling, bumbling boob who insists we call him Secretary of War.

And it’s consistent with the idea that Hegseth ordered the erasure of all 11 people aboard that boat in the Caribbean on Sept. 2, necessitating a double tap to liquidate the two survivors from the first salvo. The Washington Post said Hegseth demanded that everyone on the boat be killed, an effort to show his boss — and, I guess, us — just how macho he is.

“I don’t know anything about it,” said Trump, characteristically. “He (Hegseth) said he did not say that, and I believe him. And Pete said he didn’t even know what people were talking about, but I wouldn’t have wanted that, not a second strike.”

The White House now says it was Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the commander overseeing the operation, who directed that second strike, working “well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed.”

Translation: Trump thinks it went too far, but blame the admiral, not my Petey. The day after the attack, by the way, Hegseth was exulting on Fox News about how he had watched it all go down. “I can tell you that was definitely not artificial intelligence; I watched it live,” he panted.

Imagine his chills.

So far, it’s estimated that about 80 people have been killed in 21 of these attacks this fall against what the administration claims are narco-terrorists doing the bidding of the Venezuelan government.

And they may well be drug traffickers. But who knows for sure? The Pentagon has not provided any evidence, and the longer it doesn’t, the more this whole campaign looks like murder on the high seas. This is all so egregious that even Congress, yes, Congress, has roused itself from its slumber to talk of investigations, etc. That I’ll believe when I see it.

According to the New York Times, the Trump administration has claimed that each boat coming from Venezuela could be responsible for 25,000 American deaths. Hmmm. But most experts on this subject say the drug shipments from Venezuela are predominantly cocaine. And according to the CDC, in all of 2023, there were about 29,918 drug-overdose deaths involving cocaine. And by cocaine-involved deaths, I mean overdoses in which cocaine may have been used alone or in combination with other drugs like opioids.

So there’s really no way each one of these relatively small speedboats could be responsible for as many fatalities as the administration claims. Moreover, the boat involved in the Sept. 2 incident was carrying those 11 passengers, taking up a lot of space that serious smugglers might prefer to use for, well, drugs.

Others have written that the real murderous drug culprit these days is fentanyl, which makes its way from China to Mexico to the streets of the U.S.A. According to the CDC, there were more than 70,000 deaths in 2023 in the U.S. involving synthetic opioids, mostly fentanyl. Fentanyl overdoses far outnumber deaths from most other drugs.

And Venezuela is mostly not involved. Indeed, as The Atlantic points out, Venezuela appears to be primarily a transit port for cocaine bound for Europe, while cartels in Colombia and Mexico are responsible for almost all of the shipments of cocaine and fentanyl that arrive in the U.S.

Trump has undoubtedly been told this, but it doesn’t appear to matter. He needs a villain, perhaps even a war, to galvanize the nation — and boost his lousy approval ratings. He’s spending tons of taxpayer money to move that huge aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Ford, to the waters off Venezuela now. Any guesses what he might do with it?

One thing that strikes me about all this is that we concentrate mostly on the drug “supply” without addressing the “demand.” And the demand here — from Americans — is obviously enough to sustain a robust, illicit trafficking market.

According to a 2023 report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, about 5 million people in this country were found to use cocaine. That’s about a million people from 18-25, and roughly 3.9 million people for ages 26 and up. Safe to say that recreational cocaine use involves millions of people. Another survey found that roughly 1.3 million people had experienced cocaine use disorder. And that means that 25 to 30 percent of people who recently used cocaine have a disorder related to it. That’s awful. And we should be doing more to stop cocaine use if it truly is so detrimental to our health.

The question, though, is whether shrinking the supply by bombing speedboats in the Caribbean Sea will do anything to dry up the very real demand that is taking the lives Trump claims he’s so worried about.