War on Drugs

Jacob Sullum | 1.20.2026 11:15 AM

"No statistic has ever made me more proud," Eric Trump wrote in an X message posted on Saturday evening. "Well done @realDonaldTrump!! Keep blowing the shit out of those boats!"

The "statistic" to which the president's son referred was originally illustrated by a chart showing a sharp decline in fentanyl-related deaths. Trump apparently removed that illustration after X users, including Reason's Nick Gillespie, noted an obvious problem with his brag: The dramatic drop that he attributed to his father's murderous anti-drug strategy happened during the Biden administration, a year before Trump started bombing suspected smugglers in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. Nor was that the only flaw in Eric Trump's reasoning, which echoed the president in conflating cocaine, the drug allegedly carried by "those boats," with fentanyl.

Although we should not make too much out of one stupid X post, this one nicely illustrates the illogic of the war on drugs, which assumes that politicians have the power to stop Americans from consuming politically disfavored intoxicants if only they try hard enough. If that is true, and if we ignore all the other factors that might affect drug deaths, it follows that presidents can........

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