Public Health Reduces Drug Deaths, Not Wars

Republicans have defended Trump’s illegal invasion of Venezuela as necessary to solve the drug overdose crisis.

For instance, Vice President J.D. Vance posted on Twitter/X, “cocaine, which is the main drug trafficked out of Venezuela, is a profit center for all of the Latin America cartels. If you cut out the money from cocaine (or even reduce it) you substantially weaken the cartels overall. Also, cocaine is bad too!”

Representative Brian Mast (R-FL), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, similarly argued, “Drug lords and terrorists will no longer operate freely in our hemisphere and drugs and illegals will not flow into our country.”

Yet there are three key problems with this anti-drug narrative: first, President Trump has explicitly and repeatedly said this invasion was about seizing control of Venezuela’s oil reserves.

Second, Trump has been quite lenient on drug traffickers. For instance, in December 2025, Trump pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández. Hernández had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for his role in a more than 18-year long drug-trafficking scheme that funneled over 400 tons of cocaine to the United States.

If kidnapping Maduro was really about punishing drug profiteers and stopping the illegal drug trade, then why pardon Hernández? This is not the action of a “tough-on-crime” president.

Third, and most importantly, foreign invasions fail to address the true underlying cause of the crisis: public suffering. While drug abuse is a complex problem, poverty, homelessness, over-criminalization, social stigmas, and a lack of adequate health care are among the leading factors.

People turn to drugs when their governments and communities turn their back on them. Drug cartels, like any other capitalist enterprise, exploit these people’s hopes and desires for their own gain. Even if all the existing cartels were eliminated, new drug traffickers would emerge to meet that demand.

This does not mean that we shouldn’t go after drug dealers. The point is that the drug crisis is not a problem that we can solve through force alone. It requires social reform. But instead of strengthening the social safety net, Trump has been actively undoing it.

Since January 2025, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has faced layoffs and severe funding cuts. This has forced the agency to terminate $1.7 billion in block grants for state health departments, as well as eliminate $350 million in addiction and overdose prevention funding.

The Trump administration has also deeply slashed Medicaid and SNAP benefits and frozen funds for child care programs – all programs that greatly help people living in poverty. And health premiums are doubling for millions of Americans since Congress refused to extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans.

If Trump really cared about the drug crisis, he wouldn’t be kidnapping foreign leaders in the dead of night. Invading Latin American countries is not a solution — it simply exploits the drug crisis as a masquerade to justify American colonialism.

Instead, his focus would be on improving access to mental health and drug abuse programs in the United States, especially low-income neighborhoods. He would be funding services to help people living in poverty, instead of spending billions on battleships. He would be taking meaningful measures to solve the affordability crisis, instead of denying its existence.

The drug crisis is a real problem that demands immediate action. Creating an international crisis, however, will only lead to more suffering.

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