President Donald Trump’s $4.7 billion war on cocaine smugglers has claimed the lives of nearly 200 people yet hasn’t made the drug meaningfully harder to buy in the United States, according to experts.
Nearly nine months after the Trump administration began launching strikes on small boats off the coast of South America, experts say cocaine prices, purity levels, overdose patterns, and border seizure data all suggest the flow of drugs into the U.S. is largely unchanged.
That is despite the operation ballooning into one of the largest U.S. military deployments in Latin America in decades, with heavy equipment such as guided-missile destroyers and roughly 15,000 American troops now involved. The campaign has stretched from the Caribbean into the eastern Pacific, alongside ground strikes in Ecuador and the capture of Venezuela’s former leader on U.S. drug trafficking charges.
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