Trump Declares War on Drug Smuggling Into the US --While Gutting Funding for Addiction Treatment at Home
And these federally-funded treatment programs have been very successful
READ IN APP To hear the Trump administration tell it, you’d think the flow of illicit drugs into the United States is among the gravest national security threats. That was among the reasons the government cited for seizing Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro, who now awaits trial in New York.
The US Attorney for the Southern District of New York’s indictment against Maduro—filed after Maduro was brought to the United States—alleges that he smuggled “tens of thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States” and “provided Venezuelan diplomatic passports to drug traffickers and facilitated diplomatic cover for planes used by money launderers to repatriate drug proceeds from Mexico to Venezuela.” The Trump administration has stated repeatedly that the Cartel de Los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), which it claims is an organization run by Maduro and other top Venezuelan officials, lies at the center of all this.
The indictment also mentions criminal groups involved in the drug trade, including FARC (of Colombia), ELN (like FARC, also a Colombian guerrilla group), and the Sinaloa Cartel and Los Zetas (both operate from Mexico)—but without directly tying Maduro to them.
The Trump administration has also claimed repeatedly that Maduro’s government is neck deep in the flow to the United States of fentanyl, a deadly—a dose equivalent to a few grains of sand can be fatal—synthetic opioid.
Look at the chart below—created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—and you’ll see that fentanyl has indeed killed tens of thousands of Americans a year, more than methamphetamines, cocaine, antidepressants, heroin, and benzodiazepine overdoses combined.
The numbers on this chart point to a serious problem, and the US Attorney’s description of Venezuela’s role sounds alarming—except that the indictment’s particulars don’t track with the government’s own data. Take the Drug Enforcement Administration’s 72-page 2025 “National Drug Threat Assessment.” Here—see the bolded text—is what it has to say about cocaine trafficked into the United States:
“The trafficking and abuse of cocaine has been a serious drug threat in the United States for over four decades and its persistence is a sustained concern for law enforcement and public health officials. Colombia remains the primary source country for cocaine entering the United States, followed by Peru and Bolivia. Mexico-based cartels obtain multi-ton cocaine shipments from South America and smuggle it via sea, air, or overland to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean for subsequent movement into the United States. Once in the United States, U.S. based criminal groups and street gangs distribute the cocaine, some of which is converted to crack at the local level.”
I cite this long passage to highlight one point: the DEA’s explanation of cocaine flows into the US does not mention Venezuela as one of the culprits, not even indirectly.
As for fentanyl smuggling, here’s what this same report has to say:
“Mexican TCOs [Transnational Criminal Organizations] maintain a complex and robust network to smuggle all major illicit drugs into the United States, using a wide variety of methods to include air cargo, maritime cargo, and overland traffic. The cartels maintain a network of couriers, border tunnels, and stash houses throughout Mexico and the United States to support their trafficking and distribution activities. Mexican TCOs have increasingly employed social media platforms to promote drug products, recruit and Chemical shipments can arrive first in the United States or Canada in mislabeled packages, which are then smuggled into Mexico by freight forwarders or re-shippers without the shippers’ knowledge. TCOs employ this transshipment method to safeguard precursor chemical supplies against regulations, disruptions, or seizures as well as to mask the country from which the chemicals originate, train couriers and dealers, advertise the sale of drugs, communicate with customers, and plan transactions with Mexican TCOs and China-based suppliers relying on sophisticated shipping methods and multi-step processes to evade detection and national/international regulatory controls on chemicals.”
Venezuela, you’ll notice, is never mentioned.
The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that Cartel de Los Soles is a formal organization led by Maduro and his inner circle. Trump’s Justice Department first described it in these terms in its 2020 indictment naming Maduro, his Interior Minister and Defense Minister, and other top officials as its leaders and accusing it of working with the Colombian leftist guerrilla movement, FARC, which trafficked cocaine to help finance its operations, before disarming and demobilizing as part of a 2016 peace agreement.
In November 2025, the Trump administration upped the ante. It designated Cartel de Los Soles as a “foreign terrorist organization—a label applied to groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. That move laid the ground for justifying possible military action against the Venezuelan state.
Some experts, and not surprisingly the Venezuelan government, say that Cartel de Los Soles is a fabrication to justify overthrowing the Venezuelan government. Others say the moniker was used by the Venezuelan media, starting in the 1990s, as a catchall term to cover civilian, military, and police officials lining their pockets through payoffs from the illicit trafficking of drugs, minerals and fuel.
Given the Trump administration’s myriad false statements and distortions, unveiled by the press, on a host of matters, skepticism about its claims about Cartel de Los Soles seems reasonable.
More to the point, the most recent indictment by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York backtracks. It describes Cartel de Los Soles as “a patronage network run by those at the top,” a much looser and more informal description, and does not formally charge it with being a “foreign terrorist group.”
But let’s leave Maduro’s role in narcotic trafficking aside and go back to the toll in human lives that drug overdoses have taken in this country. The deaths exceed one million between 1999 and 2023—a number equivalent to the fatalities in all the wars fought by the United States combined, including the Civil War, World War I and World War II, and the Korean and Vietnam wars.
The good news, as CDC’s line graph below shows, is that overdose deaths have fallen in recent years—thanks in part to government-funded treatment programs. Furthermore, the decline has continued in 2024 and 2025. Last year, overdose deaths were lower than at any point since 2020. Plus, non-fatal overdoses fell by 7% year-on-year in August 2025.
Considering the extent to which the Trump administration has played up the drug trafficking problem, you’d think that it would do its best to ensure that the treatment programs that have led to these significant declines in overdose deaths would be well-funded and even bolstered with additional funding.
Yet despite its America First pledges and promises to end foreign military entanglements, the administration has done the opposite.
The key government agency funding addiction treatment, and preventing death from substance abuse, is the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), a part of the Department of Health and Human Services that was established in 1992. It has a dozen centers and agencies, two of which focus on substance abuse treatment.
SAMHSA does this by providing block grants to state agencies that deal with the same problem as well as to nonprofits that do the same. In 2024, these grants totaled $3.6 billion for treating substance abuse, excluding funding from the proceeds of successful federal lawsuits—$57 billion so far—against corporations manufacturing pharmaceutical opioids.
The Biden administration’s 2024 budget request for SAMHSA was $10.8 billion—a $3.3 billion increase over 2023. The Trump administration, by contrast, has cut $1.5 billion from SAMHSA’s budget—and reduced its staff by more than 50%. These cuts hardly align with Trump’s repeated claims that drug smuggling into this country constitutes an act of war requiring extraordinary measures.
Naturally, Trump’s cuts to SAMHSA’s budget will affect states differently when it comes to resources available for treating drug dependency and preventing overdose deaths. But in at least one, Texas, a red state, mind you, the loss amounts to 70% of the budget for addiction-related programs. Here’s what the Texas Tribune had to say about the cuts:
“In just a few years, Texas established one of the largest no-cost systems for distributing opioid reversal medications in the United States, thanks to an influx of federal and state funding supporting local community efforts.
The sudden loss of $68 million in federal substance abuse response funding this year due to the end of COVID-19 funding, plus the potential for more federal cuts in the future, is threatening this fragile ecosystem.”
Those hardest hit by Trump’s slashing of SAMHSA’s budget will be the residents of low-income rural communities—those who voted for Trump in large numbers. Mortality rates (per 100,000) from opioid overdoses are higher in large metropolitan areas, but the rate at which they have increased has been substantially higher in rural and small-town America. Between 1999 and 2016, mortality rates in large urban counties rose by 158% versus 740% in rural counties. And of course there were variations among rural communities: those in the Midwest experienced a 1,700% mortality rate increase.
The administration plans to merge SAMHSA and four other agencies to create a new entity within HHS, the Administration for American Health. But that reorganization won’t increase the flow of money to states via block grants for treating drug addiction, and it remains to be seen whether efficiency increases.
In short, Trump’s drug policy—if one can call it that—focuses entirely on external threats and resorts to blatantly illegal acts, including abducting the president of Venezuela in an armed attack that killed 80 people, and perhaps more. That’s not all: he has threatened military action against Colombia and Mexico.
But within the United States, the administration is cutting the funds available for treating addiction and for preventing drug-related fatalities—at a time when, in the case of the deadliest of these drugs, fentanyl, these resources are showing very positive results.
You’ve heard the president charge Venezuela’s government with drug trafficking countless times. But how often have you heard him say that increasing funding for treatment programs at home is one of his top priorities?