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One of President Trump’s rationales for ordering the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was his claim that Maduro was responsible for trafficking “colossal amounts of deadly and illicit drugs” into the United States, fueling the overdose deaths of “countless Americans.”
But experts who study drug trafficking told CBS News these claims are exaggerated.
Analysts from the U.S. government and independent think tanks say that Venezuela plays a relatively limited role in bringing cocaine to the U.S. and has virtually no link to the trafficking of fentanyl — the synthetic opioid that causes most overdose deaths.
Venezuela is not listed as a source or a transit country for fentanyl in any edition of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s annual “National Drug Threat Assessment,” according to a review by Jeffrey Singer, a practicing surgeon and senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. Instead, the DEA has repeatedly found that fentanyl entering the U.S. is largely produced in Mexico — where it is often trafficked over land, primarily by U.S. citizens.
“I don’t think what happened in Venezuela is going to in any way impact the overdose rates here, since the biggest driver of overdoses is fentanyl,” Singer said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, illegally manufactured fentanyl was involved in 65% of overdose deaths in 2024, compared to roughly 34% of overdose deaths that involved cocaine – figures that include overdoses involving multiple drugs. About 20% of overdose deaths in 2024 were caused by fentanyl alone, while 8.3% were caused by cocaine.
The State Department has designated Venezuela as a major transit country for cocaine, which is primarily produced in Columbia. But much of the cocaine that moves through Venezuela is destined for Europe, rather than the United States, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies drug policy.
“A lot of cocaine that goes to the United States bypasses Venezuela,” Felbab-Brown said. “It goes through the Pacific, smuggled by sea from Columbia around Mexico to the U.S.”
Felbab-Brown also questioned Mr. Trump’s portrayal of Maduro as an organizer and manager of the drug trade and cast doubt on the strength of the federal criminal case against him.
“It remains to be seen whether the prosecution in New York will be able to substantiate those charges,” Felbab-Brown said. “Certainly the more common perception is that Maduro was aware of members of the government taking a cut from drugs, but it’s not widely believed that Maduro was a principal orchestrator.”
