The war on drugs is in the news again, and Republicans don’t like it.
Mainly because this war has been a $1 trillion failure.
Trump said one main reason for the new tariffs on Mexico and Canada was because of fentanyl smuggling by cartels into the U.S.
But the facts don’t support that.
From the north, about two-tenths of one percent of fentanyl comes into the U.S. from Canada, according to MSNBC. To the south, Trump said the Mexican government is working with fentanyl drug smugglers.
Today, about 70% of fentanyl comes from Mexico, mainly from the Sinaloa Cartel and
the Jalisco New Generation (Jalisco) Cartel. While there are undoubtedly corrupt officials on both sides of the border, Trump has not provided proof that the Mexican government is actively aiding the smuggling.
More importantly, if Trump knew his history of the war on drugs, he would know that the CIA operated one of the most extensive heroin smuggling rings in history. This operation from the Golden Triangle in the Burma-Thailand-China border was active during the 1970s, and it sent heroin worldwide, including to active-duty U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.
As reported in the book Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Survived the CIA, by Patrick Winn, by the late 1960s, “the hottest market for heroin was South Vietnam.” The reason: access to U.S. troops. Due to the war’s stress, many GIs turned to heroin, which was readily available and cheap thanks to the CIA smuggling operation. One estimate found that during the Vietnam War, one in six GIs in Vietnam was using heroin, according to Winn.
The CIA-inspired drug growing, processing, and distribution network was comprised of local Wa tribesmen who eventually grew big enough to produce $60 billion worth of methamphetamine and were known for mass-producing pink, vanilla-scented speed pills. As U.S. officials lambasted the gang as wrecking American society, they covered up the fact that the Wa syndicate’s origins could be traced to the CIA.
What the CIA Did With the Drug Smugglers
Due to the way this Golden Triangle drug operation worked, U.S. taxpayers were subsidizing the heroin addiction of their troops. This was an open secret.
“The CIA coldly observed this flux of dollars and heroin, in which it was complicit but did nothing to stop it. The agency could hardly claim ignorance. In secret memos, it [the CIA] noted that the Exiles [the Chinese smugglers] were building new drug labs for a specific purpose: meeting a sharp increase in demand for heroin by U.S. forces in South Vietnam.”
The CIA’s heroin smuggling operation involved American planes flying under the famous Air America banner. (Air America was covertly owned and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1950 to 1976. It supplied and supported covert operations in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, including providing support for drug smuggling in Laos.)
So, when Trump accuses the Mexican government of working with drug smugglers, he should present his evidence. Instead, the CIA’s creation of a heroin smuggling ring from the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia that fed addicts worldwide, including active-duty GIs, is well-known, documented, and a national tragedy that destroyed thousands of lives worldwide.
Why DOGE Avoids the $1 Trillion Wasted on the War on Drugs
The much-publicized coverage of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) vigilante attack on the federal government’s employees and targeted programs says it is focused on “waste, fraud, and abuse.” But that is only part of its mission.
The goal of Musk’s DOGE hatchet job is to undermine specific parts of the Federal government, make it more unsafe, and placate Trump’s naïve followers who think they are making the government more efficient.
But DOGE is a cover story.
If DOGE were serious, they would focus on the $1 trillion wasted on the U.S. “war on drugs,” which Trump invoked this week when he said drugs were coming in over the Mexican and Canadian borders.
The U.S. war on drugs is nothing new. This war first started over 100 years ago in response to racial prejudices and law and order demands from anti-immigrant elements. In the 1970s, the “war on drugs” slogan was first used by President Richard Nixon in 1971 to target anti-Vietnam War dissenters and critics of his administration and to distract Americans from the failing Vietnam War. The “War on Drugs” theme has been an element of every presidential administration ever since.
The reason Musk and his team avoid investigating the “War on Drugs” is that it is the portal to the authentic deep state, the innermost bureaucratic workings of the most secretive, lethal, and ideological federal ideologues who are mainly untouchable and unaccountable. The Deep State is the Holy Grail of right-wingers and their conspiracy theory followers, but they talk about it only when it supports their stories about why bad things happen to MAGA Republicans.
When the Deep State is involved in criminal and illegal activities for a cause the MAGA supporters feel is justified, investigating the Deep State is off-limits.
This is why Musk and DOGE will never venture near the “War on Drugs” portal to the Deep State. Doge prefers to target unprotected, average citizens and federal workers who perform the needed tasks to keep the government operating. These workers have little recourse to DOGE’s arbitrary rulings over their careers, workplace, and financial security; they are mostly powerless. That’s why DOGE and Musk continue to harass them.
Musk would never take on the $1 trillion that has been spent and wasted mainly in the “war on drugs” since 1971 because he is afraid of antagonizing the deep state. Like Trump, Musk knows that the secret federal government’s specific inner workings cannot be examined or exposed to sunlight. Just ask John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and others considered MIA.
The war on drugs is a complex, global system. Not only does it involve smuggling illegal drugs, but it also involves money laundering, which occurs mainly in the U.S.” Indeed, despite intensified efforts by the United States to counter the flow of bulk cash to Mexico across the U.S.-Mexico border across several administrations, extensive amounts of illicit money and weapons continue to flow from the United States to Mexico,” according to an article by the Brookings Institute. This is a problem on the American side of the border.
How the CIA Started a Heroin Smuggling Operation
But because Trump, Doge, and Musk are afraid to investigate the “war on drugs,” it doesn’t mean Americans should not be told what happened to the $1 trillion spent on drug eradication and enforcement over the past 50 years.
This includes how the CIA helped form and expand a Chinese heroin ring that exported heroin to active-duty US soldiers during the Vietnam War. Heroin then found its way into the inner cities during the 1960s from CIA-sponsored opium drug lords operating on the disputed border between Burma, Thailand, and China.
The most controversial case involving the CIA, drug smuggling, and inner-city black drug users was the 1996 series of controversial articles first published by the San Jose Mercury News.
In the articles, the newspaper said: “For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.”
This series of three articles ignited a firestorm of controversy since it involved the CIA, the convoluted and perverse Iran-Contra conspiracy, the drug infestation in the inner city of Los Angeles, and the failed drug policy. Almost 39 years later, the articles’ questions have not been settled. But the series is essential since it connects the dots in the drug cultivation, harvesting, processing, transportation, and distribution pipeline to actual users in the U.S.
The Real Cost of the War on Drugs
The actual cost of the “war on drugs” is hard to estimate. One study found that the U.S. federal drug control budget in 2015 was about $25.5 billion, while the money spent by state—and city-level drug control expenditures amounts to at least that much again, or a total of $50 billion as of 2015.
The “war on drugs” started with President Richard Nixon, who concocted the drug crisis as a means of sensationalizing the issue as a conversation piece before his election. At the time, the campus college students, who later became hippies, were engaged in the anti-Vietnam War protests and the counterculture (rock and roll, questioning authority, civil rights reforms, etc.), and they certainly were not going to vote for Nixon.
At the time, the war on drugs was focused on marijuana, a plant that was vilified in the 1920s, as it gained traction in the Jazz Age and was migrating from Black jazz musicians to middle-class users, including college students. This was the theme of the classic anti-drug film Reefer Madness, released in 1936.
The war on drugs has its origins in racism and repression. The first anti-drug laws against immigrants were in 1875 to target the Chinese immigrant communities on the West Coast.
These places were in Chinese immigrant neighborhoods. Similar racially inflammatory state laws emerged, according to the Drug Policy Alliance(DPA). Then, the first federal drug law, the 1909 Smoking Opium Exclusion Act, prohibited importing and using opium.
“By the turn of the century, the push for prohibition had begun—in part as a means to control minority communities. Politicians, pastors, and the press drew specious links between drug abuse and the exploitation of white women. These early drug warriors pushed for aggressive state responses, playing on racial stereotypes. African Americans were singled out for especially harsh treatment.”
According to the DPA, “a 1914 New York Times article, “NEGRO COCAINE “FIENDS” ARE A NEW SOUTHERN MENACE,” blamed “cocaine-crazed negroes” for “[inciting] homicidal attacks.” In 1914, Congress passed the Harrison Act, effectively outlawing opiates and cocaine. Experts testified that “most of the attacks upon white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain.”
Unsubstantiated claims linked black drug abuse to “many of the horrible crimes committed in the Southern States,” thus providing another convenient excuse for all varieties of Jim Crow persecution and oppression,” according to a June 29, 2020, Policy Analysis article by Josh Bowers and Daniel Abrahamson, “Kicking the Habit the Opioid Crisis and America’s Addiction to Prohibition,” by the conservative Cato Institute.
In their article, authors Bowers and Abrahmson write that: “In other words, attitudes about recreational drugs were shaped by caste and class—by the desire to prevent the “wrong” type from associating with the “right” type. Unsurprisingly, then, the first shots of the drug war were, like most shots since, targeted strikes against poorer and darker communities.”
At the start of the anti-drug campaign in the late 1800s, the use of hard drugs like heroin, opium, and cocaine was restricted to hard-core addicts. But the “war on drugs” gained widespread political support as anti-immigrant and racist policies expanded.
The Drug War and Nixon
Since 1972, the drug war has received an ever-expanding budget and operated mainly without oversight. Operating inside and outside the U.S., the DEA soon became a paramilitary group with the authority to act inside the U.S. and in areas it deemed drug sources around the world. Many countries that produced the drugs were targeted by DEA paramilitaries or by US foreign policies that helped foster civil wars to topple entire governments that did not make the drug war, and the U.S. demands a priority. As part of misguided U.S. foreign policy, millions of people became refugees, and thousands were killed.
In Colombia alone, the profits from drug sales paid for a war that killed an estimated 400,000 people and turned seven million Colombians into refugees. Similar tactics have been used worldwide, such as in Mexico, Panama, Brazil, Thailand, and Nicaragua. Today, the DEA is in 68 foreign countries, has 334 offices worldwide, and has a budget of $3.28 billion. It employs some 10,000 people worldwide.
But this is just one element of the global war on drugs. The DEA, the Customs Service, Coast Guard, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Border Patrol, CIA, Coast Guard, Marshals Service, CIA, and U.S. military have roles in these programs.
However, an entire layer of inter-department agencies is also in the feeding frenzy. This includes the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces under the US Justice Department. This task force involves people from the Justice Department Criminal Division, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations, U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigations, U.S. Postal Service, Postal Inspection Service, U.S. Department of Labor, Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Diplomatic Security, state and local law enforcement agencies, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations, Internal Revenue Service, Criminal Investigations, and U.S. Department of Labor (Office of the Inspector General).
But there is more.
This list does not include the U.S. military and NSA intelligence agencies, such as the National Drug Intelligence Center, which supplies details of operations. The DEA’s intelligence group is also part of the U.S. intelligence community, which is comprised of 18 separate agencies that share intelligence gathered inside and outside the U.S.
Since 9-11, the war on drugs has expanded to include drug groups as terrorists, even if they were apolitical. To ratchet up the effort and the amount of money, starting in 2025, President Trump said the war on drugs will add several drug cartels and other criminal organizations to the list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists. This could involve the CIA and other intelligence services, many of which have secret budgets.
For this reason, academics have called the DEA and the federal agencies involved with drug enforcement the “Americanization of the U.S.’ global war on drugs. Studies have also shown that when the DEA takes its military enforcement actions in other countries, violent crime rates invariably increase.
Today, marijuana is legal in 37 states, which must be a profound disappointment to the U.S. drug enforcement industry. As a result, the DEA’s focus has shifted to fentanyl. “Americans today are experiencing the most devastating drug crisis in our nation’s history. This is because one drug—fentanyl—has transformed the criminal landscape,” according to the DEA head, Anne Milgram.
Milgram also said in testimony in April 2023 before a House Appropriations Committee that “Every day, nearly 300 people die from drug poisonings. Countless more people are poisoned and survive. These drug poisonings are a national crisis.”
To do its work, Milgram asked Congress for a fiscal year 2024 budget totaling $3.7 billion. This budget would provide the DEA “with the resources needed to build upon the work we have accomplished to defeat the cartels and emerging drug threats.”
So, based on her testimony, about 109,500 Americans die every year from” drug poisonings” or overdoses, which equates to $337,899 per death of the DEA’s budget.
Since most federal programs tend to expand, the DEA’s mandate has also morphed into its own federal bureaucracy.
In 1989, George Bush announced his drug strategy on TV. “Bush proposed that the federal government increase spending to combat drugs by $1.5 billion for enforcement and $1.5 billion for interdiction, but only by $321 million for treatment and $250 million for education. The Strategy advocated that states spend billions more, particularly to expand the criminal justice system,” University of California law professor Jerome Skolnick wrote in the journal Daedalus in 1992.
But by 1992, the penalties, arrest numbers, vast expenses, and resources devoted to stemming from the drug trade were not working. This so-called “deterrence or “get tough” approach has not deterred drug use.
Since drug selling is profitable, it conforms to supply and demand principles. Significant demand drives up the process, and the opposite happens when demand is low. Distributors can keep prices high when monopolizing certain cities and markets.
So, while big drug busts make the headlines, they only show part of the story. Law enforcement says that only 10% to 20% of drug shipments are intercepted.
Drug treatment is also a contentious issue. Current thought is that since law enforcement has not stemmed the use of drugs, it is time to reconsider legalization. No less than such political opposites as William Buckley, Milton Friedman, and the American Civil Liberties Union agreed that decriminalization can reshape the problem and make it more controllable.
Others, such as law professors Josh Bowers and Daniel Abrahamson, wrote that “The drug-free society is a pipe dream. If, instead, we were to acknowledge that drugs are an often (but not always) unfortunate fact of life, we might come to regard drug misuse, abuse, dependence, and addiction for what they are—questions of health, not morality, and social policy, not penology. “However, under the DEA umbrella, the mandate to eradicate drugs in the United States became, in practice, a mandate to eliminate certain drug users. These users were often minorities and the poor.
So, as Trump conjures up an excuse that fentanyl is a cause for invoking tariffs, and as Musk and DOGE fail to investigate the abuses of the $1 trillion spent on the war on drugs, we can rest assured that nothing will change. The Deep State has a vested interest in sustaining the macho aspects of the drug wars–SWAT teams kicking in doors and shootouts—but this is a failed approach. Every year, DEA and other politicians decry a drug as a “national emergency” that is threatening young people, but the organizational approach never changes.
As law professors Bowers and Abrahamson write: “Criminal law is the wrong tool for addressing the opioid epidemic.” Government policy is “addicted to punishment” instead of treatment. Until Federal and state policies change, the Deep State will continue to waste taxpayer money in its war on drugs, but at least they will have job security.
