Fear and Loathing in the War on Drugs: How Trump’s Drug War Will Ultimately Fail

I remember, as do many of us, the 1990s and our first D.A.R.E. class—the day a local cop came to the school cafeteria to warn us about the demons hiding in dime bags. He stood under fluorescent lights, sweating through his uniform, preaching that pushers and addicts were the same animal, that one hit would turn us into drooling zombies or corpses. If I’d raised my hand and asked, “Do you ever think it would be appropriate to turn drug dealers into pink mist with an unmanned airstrike?” he’d have laughed and told me to stay in school.

But here we are, decades later, and that childhood fantasy has become federal policy. The War on Drugs, revived under the current president, now comes with kill lists and Reaper drones. What began as Nixon’s sweaty 1971 paranoia has hardened into doctrine. He called drugs “public enemy number one,” not to save lives but to crush the people who made him nervous—the hippies, the Panthers, the kids who refused the script. His own aides later admitted it: the plan was tactical, not moral. Disrupt the vote. Fill the prisons. Keep the machine humming.

What followed wasn’t a war but a circus. Billions burned on helicopters strafing coca fields in Colombia while the product sailed north untouched. Mandatory minimums turned hustlers into lifers and judges into clerks with gavels. By Reagan’s time, the whole thing was gospel: Just Say No as national scripture. Nancy in her red coat preaching purity while Ollie North funneled arms to Contras bankrolled by the same cocaine that built America’s paranoia.

Then came the farce. The crack epidemic that gutted Miami and South Central wasn’t an act of God—it was a byproduct of covert wars and hungry markets. Powder for the stockbrokers, crack for the poor, with laws written to keep that distance sacred. The same system that preached zero tolerance built an empire on addiction, then jailed the evidence.

Prisons filled, two million strong, mostly poor, mostly brown. Purdue Pharma flooded the suburbs with OxyContin, made a fortune, paid their fines, and called it philanthropy. Cops drove armored trucks through Ferguson, not chasing dealers but keeping order. Hollywood sold the glamour in every Scarface rip-off; politicians snorted their focus pills and talked about reform. We torched Afghan poppy fields to starve the Taliban, then watched the price of heroin drop anyway. Supply never flinched. Demand only grew teeth.

We glamorize it now. Netflix builds antiheroes out of cartel bosses. Rappers turn overdoses into album art. Rockstars stagger through addiction and call it authenticity. Rich kids crash at college, go to rehab, get clean, and move on with a FAFSA loan and a fresh start. Meanwhile, a Black teenager caught with a gram at eighteen is marked for life—no loans, no job, no redemption. Justice in America has always been a caste system with better lawyers at the top. And I’m not pretending to benefit from this, I have been to rehab and overcame addiction. Thank god for the socialized medicine of the VA, or I’d be dead.

And now Trump wants to militarize it further. Venezuela is his new frontier. Nicolás Maduro is a corrupt tyrant, yes—he stole elections, wrecked his nation, and turned half of it into refugees—but this crusade isn’t about justice. It’s about optics and oil. The U.S. will send drones and destroyers after smugglers while pretending it’s cleaning up the streets. It’s theater, not strategy.

Because the problem isn’t Venezuela. It isn’t Sinaloa. It isn’t the jungle labs in Putumayo or the mules crossing the Rio Grande. The problem is us—the consumer. Someone will always rise to meet demand. Kill one trafficker, and another steps in before the blood dries. I’ve seen it firsthand. I did my field research in the barrios of Medellín, where the coke is stacked like drywall and sold for two or three thousand U.S. dollars a kilo. Pure product, clean and ready. In the States, it goes for a hundred a gram. You think the finance bro in Miami or the influencer in L.A. won’t pay one-fifty after the next airstrike drives up the price? They’ll wire it before the drone smoke clears.

That’s the truth we can’t face. The sickness isn’t in the supply—it’s in the soul. We’re a country that can’t stand still without a chemical buffer. We pump kids full of Adderall to make them focus, then SSRIs to make them forget. We guzzle booze to numb the stress, then Xanax to clean up the hangover. We’ve medicalized the escape and criminalized the evidence.

Trump’s talking about “war,” but this isn’t war. It’s ritual suicide with a PR budget. The dealers are just reflections—distorted, impoverished versions of our own appetite. Every missile we fire into the blue Caribbean is aimed at the mirror. Every reform is just a new strain of denial. We say we want peace, but peace is boring. We want the chase, the chaos, the rush of moral superiority between hits.

End it. Legalize the chaos. Regulate it, tax it, treat addiction like disease instead of heresy. Or keep the fantasy alive—keep dropping bombs over jungles and cities while Americans OD in parking lots and presidents promise redemption. The machine will keep feeding, and the crowd will keep clapping.