Escalating The Drug War

This is a guest article by Skye Hawthorne of Drug Cultures podcast. The views and perspectives contained herein are solely representative of the guest author. We’ll be back tomorrow with a roundup of global mushroom news and an invite to the weekly Mycopreneur Incubator.

On September 2nd, Donald Trump posted a video of a drone strike on Truth Social, claiming to have destroyed a Venezuelan drug boat the day before and killed all eleven smugglers onboard. Within days, officials in his administration had closed ranks, defending the strike as a legitimate act of warfare. Secretary of State Marco Rubio doubled down, saying: “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up. And it will happen again.”

On Sunday, September 15th, it did. The US military struck another Venezuelan boat, this time killing three passengers. On September 16th, a third boat was struck, killing another three people onboard. If the first strike could be dismissed as a rogue incident, the subsequent strikes have confirmed that this is an official policy. 

It is not new for our military to act with impunity; since the fall of the USSR, we’ve been living in a unipolar world, with no other superpower able to challenge our violations of other countries’ sovereignty. It is not new for America, or its client states like Israel or Saudi Arabia, to violate international law or brazenly commit war crimes. And it is also not new for the executive branch of the US government to use terrorism as an excuse to perform acts of violence without an official declaration of war, or congressional approval. This is an art form the United States government has perfected over the past 25 years. 

These attacks represent a continuation of the Bush-era war on terror and erosion of our constitution. But they also bolster a uniquely fascist agenda that Trump has been pushing since his re-election. This saber rattling with Venezuela – the strikes on the boat, the deployment of fighter jets to Puerto Rico, and the $50M bounty for information leading to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s arrest – is precisely calculated to bring our foreign policy and domestic policy into a horrifying lockstep. 

Clearing the way for more deportations

Trump’s 2024 campaign was one of the most vindictive and spiteful in history, and for much of his base, the core excitement for revenge, retribution, and mass deportations drove them to the polls. And for that faction of his base, his administration has delivered. Over the past few months, ICE thugs dressed in plain clothes have been snatching innocent people off the streets, dragging them to secret detention facilities and, in some cases, putting them on planes and sending them out of the country. 

The goal of the Trump White House and the remaining MAGA loyalists is clear: deport as many immigrants as possible. It does not matter whether they are documented or undocumented. It does not matter if they are lawful permanent residents, green card holders, or even citizens. The agenda is clear if you listen to the words of the people in power. 

Venezuelan migrants, many of whom fled their country in the last 10 years as the economy fell apart, are an easy target. There are almost a million Venezuelan immigrants in the United States. Only 25% are American citizens; many are undocumented, while many others have claimed asylum and are attempting to become lawful permanent residents. But to MAGA, they are simply fodder for the deportation machine, a way to keep their base placated as the rest of the country turns on Trump over his incompetent governance. 

In order to justify these sweeping deportations and total lack of due process, Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act, an obscure 18th century law giving the President the authority to detain, or deport, citizens of an enemy country. The problem? Venezuela is not an enemy country. We are not at war with Venezuela, and even if the White House’s baseless claims are true, and these migrants being deported are all drug traffickers in the Tren de Aragua gang, the Alien Enemies Act is not a legal justification for denying them of their rights. For Trump’s scheme to work, he must be able to claim that he is not only attacking smugglers, but enemy combatants. So Trump has decided to bring the war to Venezuela, and he’s using one of the oldest excuses: drugs. 

The narcoterrorism designation as a tool

In Trump’s initial statement on September 2nd, he declared that: “Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility.” In using the word “narcoterrorism”, the Trump White House is intentionally linking our War on Drugs with our War on Terror. We live in an era where there is widespread awareness of the ravages of the opioid epidemic. Overdose deaths, despite having declined from their 2022 peak, remain astronomical. Fentanyl, a highly potent drug once confined to hospitals, is now widely understood to have contaminated the supply of most street drugs. People have a real, understandable fear of drugs, often borne out of first-hand loss of loved ones. 

But it is also increasingly well-understood that to the extent there are villains at all in the opioid epidemic, many of them are domestic. The Sacklers and their company Purdue Pharma are now household names for pushing doctors to prescribe oxycontin and lying about its addiction potential. Trump declaring a Venezuelan gang that nobody had heard of a year ago a “narcoterrorist” organization is an attempt to shift blame away from domestic culprits, manufacture consent for a revitalization of the war on drugs, and to reframe drug dealing not merely as a moral wrong and a criminal act, but as an act of war. 

By linking the War on Drugs to the War on Terror, Trump is paving the way for the civil liberties of drug dealers, suspected drug dealers, and even suspected drug users to be stripped away. This is hardly speculative: earlier this year, ICE used terror as a justification to abduct a series of student protestors whose only “crime” was criticism of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Two of the highest-profile examples are Mahmoud Khalil, who had been involved in organizing the Columbia University pro-Palestine protests, and Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts PhD student who had written an op-ed calling for divestment from Israel. In both cases, the Department of Homeland Security’s justification for their arrests is that they indicated support for Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. 

Neither Khalil nor Ozturk actually expressed support for Hamas, but that did not matter to the DHS. If writing an op-ed critical of Israel is seen by the Trump administration as material support for terrorism, then what will come of designating a Venezuelan drug cartel as a terrorist organization? It will give the DHS carte blanche to deport any Venezuelan immigrant they want. It will give them political cover to target and deport their families, some of whom may even be American citizens. And it will give ICE the justification to deport anyone they want who is caught buying or using illicit drugs. If drug traffickers are terrorists and enemies of the state, then everyone else in the supply chain all the way down to small-time users are providing material and financial support to terrorism. 

Of course, these classifications will not be applied equally; they never are. Don Jr. could snort all the cocaine in Manhattan and will never, ever have the book thrown at him. Bombing a small Venezuelan speedboat that may or may not have contained a few drug smugglers will do absolutely nothing to keep Americans safe from the drugs they might have been carrying. But this grotesque escalation in the War on Drugs, and the intentional effort to link it to the War on Terror, is merely the logical end point to decades of drug policies that have never had the safety of drug users, or Americans at large, as their main concern. 

Trump may also be counting on a “rally around the flag” effect to revitalize our drug war. More so than ever, Americans understand that our decades-long war on drugs has neither reduced the supply nor the demand for mind-altering substances, and has only made the supply of those substances less safe. But Trump is not a true populist; he has never been beholden to his constituents but rather his donors, which include police unions, private prisons, and the military-industrial complex, all of whom benefit greatly from a continuation of the war on drugs both domestic and foreign. He has also given sweetheart deals to companies like Palantir that are financially invested in a mass deportation policy, as part of the rapidly growing deportation-industrial complex. Perhaps Trump knows that if we are at war with Venezuela, the State Department stenographers in the press will do all they can to create an environment in which tough-on-drug policies at a local level, and harsh immigration raids nationwide, are seen as a matter of patriotism and national interest. 

An Attack on the Left

Which brings us to the last point, and potentially the most obvious one. Even if you sign on to the belief that South American cocaine or opioids pose a major national security threat to the United States (which I do not), Venezuela is not a major exporter - certainly not in comparison to, say, Ecuador. But the Ecuadorian President is a Trump loyalist. Maduro’s government in Venezuela is one we have wanted to topple for years under both the Trump and Biden regimes. America has long wanted control over Venezuelan oil reserves. It’s a deeply unstable country with lots of popular resentment toward the government already. And, of course, it’s a leftist country. Maduro is the successor to the widely popular socialist leader Hugo Chavez. But since the economy’s collapse in 2015, Maduro has not been nearly as popular. As such, hawks in the US government see Venezuela as the perfect candidate for regime change.

And in just the same way that Trump is trying to fuse the War on Drugs with the War on Terror, he may also hope to paint the domestic and international left as one and the same. Republicans have long sought to dismiss the left as both weak, effeminate, and soy, while also implying they are a well organized and militant threat to public safety. By agitating for a hot war with Venezuelan drug gangs, Trump has an opportunity to reconcile these disparate visions of the left. 

Take my home city of Portland, Oregon, for example. Oregon achieved national notoriety for its decision to decriminalize all drug use, and while the state legislature has since repealed this decision, Portland is seen as the poster child for the failings of the left among much of Trump’s base, largely because of its hands-off approach to drugs and homelessness. The right-wing portrayal of Portland is used both as a laughing stock and a cautionary tale. Trump will have no trouble making the case that policies like Oregon’s drug decriminalization both threaten public safety and enable Venezuelan drug trafficking gangs. In fact, I would not be surprised if he goes a step further and attempts to make the case that nebulous left-wing organizations are involved both with international drug trafficking from leftist countries and local drug decriminalization initiatives, and use this accusation as a scapegoat to continue to attack the left. 

In both domestic and foreign policy arenas, our nominally left-wing party has consistently lent legitimacy to this Trumpist caricature of the left. Democrats have repeatedly signed on to the notion that actual countries fighting for an actual left-wing vision of reality are in fact a grave danger to national security. Maduro’s government has been authoritarian and does, of course, deserve a large share of the blame for the collapse of Venezuela’s economy. But so do our crippling sanctions on the country’s oil industry, which both major political parties in the US have supported; the current wave of Venezuelan migrants is a price our government decided it was willing to pay in order to punish Maduro. And at a domestic level, many Democrats continue to spend more time admonishing the left than fighting Trump’s fascism. As an example: Florida Rep. Brian Mast just introduced a bill, with the widespread support of his Republican colleagues, that would give Secretary of State Marco Rubio the authority to revoke the passports of US Citizens who have protested against Israel’s genocide. Despite this, there are still democrats who’ve spent more time criticizing these protestors than the Republican-led assault on their constitutional rights. 

Where to go from here

Whether on the streets of major American cities, where ICE and the National Guard have been deployed to terrorize and racially profile immigrant communities, or in Gaza, where our client state continues to drop American-made bombs on a largely defenseless population, the Trump Administration and its allies continue to test what they can get away with. The strikes on the alleged drug smuggling boat are just another example of this; those in power want to see whether they can wield our xenophobia and ignorance about drugs to push an agenda that will revitalize the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. The Trump Administration and their lackeys will try to build support for their war, and the erosion of domestic civil liberties, by continuing to stoke paranoia and fear of Venezuelan drug cartels. 

Do not let them. 

If the Trump administration really wanted to deal with the overdose crisis in America, they would end the billions of dollars spent on our War on Drugs and spend that money instead on education, rehabilitation, and the creation of a safe and regulated supply for the millions of Americans who use drugs. The best way to put a cartel out of business is to create a legal alternative; most people do not want to break the law if they don’t have to. But for all the attention given to JD Vance’s backstory, the administration’s priority is not, nor has it ever been, ending the overdose crisis. 

Unless we stand in opposition to this blatantly false pretense for Trump’s politically convenient war, Rubio will continue to invoke the specter of narcoterrorism, and the Trump regime will likely continue striking boats until he is able to provoke a response. The response may be ugly. 

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