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The Trump administration’s undeclared war on what it calls “narco-terrorists” in Latin America opens an aggressive new chapter in US history and reignites the war on drugs.
Declared by President Richard Nixon in the 1970s, the war on drugs is a decades-long campaign, woven into American foreign, justice and public health policy, to forcefully stop the flow of drugs into the US and harshly punish traffickers, dealers and even users.
It has also recently been regarded — by academics, activists and policymakers — as a failure. Drugs remain a major problem. Their flow into the US has not stopped. The recent trend was away from harsh penalties that predominantly impacted Black and Brown people and toward treatment and education.
Now, the Trump administration is amplifying a war on drugs playbook, declaring cartels as “narco-terrorists,” citing drugs as the main reason to target a leftist government in Venezuela, and tasking the US military with blowing alleged drug boats out of the water.
I talked to David Farber, a history professor at the University of Kansas and editor of “The War on Drugs: a History,” to understand how all of this fits into the generations-long saga.
WOLF: You wrote a history of the war on drugs. Do you view this current war that the Trump administration has launched as part of the war on drugs?
FARBER: Yeah, I do think this is part of the war on drugs. The war on drugs used to be more of a metaphor than an actual descriptor of events. It was like the war on poverty much more than it was like World War Two. Certainly the Trump administration has willfully decided to escalate military activities up to and including the extra judicial murder of people who are perceived to be drug traffickers. So this is different.
WOLF: It’s a metaphorical war, coined by Richard Nixon, but it’s lasted more than 50 years. How has the US prosecuted the war on drugs until now?
FARBER: Nixon called for an “all-out offensive” against drugs in the United States. That was literally his phrase. I’m afraid it was the media and the rest of us who sort of put the words “war on drugs” into his mouth.
The war on drugs was done by two means. One was to do everything legal within the United States’ power to stop the supply of drugs into the United States. Before the 1970s almost all the drugs we considered the big ones — cocaine, opioids, even cannabis — were produced somewhere else, not within the United States. The impetus had long been, and Nixon in particular, pursued the attempt to stop the importation of these illegal drugs. But there’s always been the problem of demand. In the United States, people seem to have an insatiable desire for a lot of the drugs that we’ve now made illegal: cocaine, opioids, cannabis, etc.
It’s every politician’s decision since Nixon to try to decide how to balance those two different kinds of battles — the supply battle and demand battle. It wasn’t really until the mid 70s, escalating with Richard Nixon and a whole bunch of state governors, an attempt was made to really squeeze also the demand within the United States by going after drug abusers and very small-time local dealers. It’s really in the 1970s and then ever more in the 1980s and ‘90s, that the use of incarceration became the preferred method for trying to stop drug use within the United States, as well as attempts to stop the supply coming in from international distributors. Both of those are parts of the war on drugs.
Lagging behind, until recent years, was the attempt to use education and rehabilitation and public health measures to try to both reduce demand and reduce the abusive aspects of drug use, and to try to save the lives of people who fall prey to addictions of one kind or another.
WOLF: So is this is kind of a new front in the war on drugs? How do you view these new operations in the context of the larger war?
FARBER: I don’t think anybody else who has been in a position of power in the United States government has ever thought that we’d be, I don’t know what the right word is, slaughtering cargo traffickers in the Caribbean or in the Pacific. So this is definitely a new policy. You could make a case it’s an extension of policies that have existed in the past. So again, not anywhere near the kind of lethality, as the word goes today, that the Trump administration has chosen to pursue.
FARBER: Some of the stuff that Trump is doing now was considered by (former President) George H.W. Bush back in the late ‘80s and into the early 90s. He’d already begun using the military in ways that never been used before to try to interdict drugs. And there were a lot of conversations about how you do that. Could you use aircraft to shoot drug trafficking ships? Blow boats out of the water? They talked about this stuff. Bush himself wanted to create the death penalty for drug traffickers and even high-level drug dealers in the United States. Those things did not fly at that period in time, though they were discussed. And along those lines, Bush and his people, (Secretary of State James) Baker and others, never considered going it alone, doing these acts without the cooperation of Colombia, Mexico and other countries. The hints were there, but it never quite happened before, the way it’s happening right now. Maybe that’s America First, one of its uglier faces.
WOLF: What’s the brief history of international anti-drugs operations the government has done? How did we get here?
FARBER: The United States definitely has a long history of trying to interdict drugs coming in from everywhere, from Turkey down to Colombia and places near and far. You could go all the way back to the early 20th Century. It certainly accelerated starting after World War II. So there’s nothing new about that, and the United States has used the military as part of that interdiction process, as well as intelligence agencies and almost every other form of the United government, from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department. But not with this kind of lethality, not this deliberate attempt to use extra judicial methods of killing narco-traffickers.
I think chapter and verse about trying to interdict heroin. Some of us can remember the famous movie “The French Connection,” in which United States worked with the various agencies within it to stop heroin from coming over the United States in the 70s. But this is different in kind and different in scope than anything else that has happened.
A wink and a nod here; regime change there
WOLF: The US has also used drugs as the impetus for regime change in Latin America. How should that influence policymakers looking now at Venezuela?
FARBER: Depending on which agency you’re talking about, the US has had myriad policies toward drug traffickers in Central America, Mexico and South America. Sometimes, with those we deem friends, like the anti-Sandinista Contra movement in Nicaragua in the 1980s there was a kind of wink and a nod by intelligence agencies to allow certain members of that Nicaraguan group, the Contras, to traffic cocaine into the United States.
We had a kind of cozy relationship within the United States government, with Panama’s dictator Manuel Noriega for a number of years allowing him to participate in large scale drug trafficking networks — that is, until we decided that was no longer acceptable.
Probably in the closest thing to what’s happening right now, the George H.W. Bush administration decided to invade Panama in order to overthrow the Noriega government and stop narco-trafficking out of Panama as much as it could.
WOLF: Until this year, when we started bombing boats in the Caribbean, most people had probably viewed the war on drugs to have been a failure. Why was that? How did it return?
FARBER: The war on drugs come up from the dead, like a Dracula that can never be put to rest. I’m a historian by trade. We deal with periodization, when things sort of begin, when they end, and, yeah, until ten months ago, I would have probably made the case that the war on drugs had come to a close, probably during the Obama administration, and that we had turned the page. We’re trying public health measures. State after state has legalized or decriminalized cannabis. We seemed like we were fast moving into a different world. The reason it came to a close was the punishments, the penalties, that cost had been deemed to be too high by a lot of Americans.
We became the nation that had incarcerated more people per capita than any other. I don’t think that’s what most Americans really wanted the American dream to look like.
The second problem was it seemed like every time one kind of drug — crack cocaine, for example — had been squashed, some other illegal drug reared its head. Or, a drug that was legal became abused illegally, such as opioids, and reared its head so that demand problem, that desire so many Americans seem to have to get high, one way or the other, just didn’t seem to be defeated by the so-called war on drugs that’s been waged for some 50 years.
So different measures seemed to be undertaken – decriminalization; far more resources to rehabilitation and methods for addicts to get themselves clean; trying to keep people from killing themselves during the period of time that they were using drugs poorly.
Now suddenly we seem to be taking up the war on drugs. Again, I think it’s interesting that it’s the supply side that’s getting most of the attention under the Trump administration. There’s not been an attempt to revive the incarceration machine and start putting away tens, hundreds of thousands of Americans into prisons, penitentiaries and jails. The supply side has always been the more popular aspect of the war on drugs, stopping those foreigners, those non-Americans, from bringing drugs in. It seems like that’s the piece that’s come back with a vengeance.
WOLF: On the demand side, actually, the great bipartisan achievement of Trump’s first term was sentencing reform, The First Step Act. Would you agree with that?
FARBER: It’s really not until the Obama administration that something called the Sentencing Commission, a group that had long argued that certain drug punishments at the federal level made no sense, that they were wrong, that they were inordinately punitive, was finally listened to by the president and his administration. That crack cocaine monster sentencing that had started in the 1980s and others were, as you suggest, reduced. They’re still quite onerous. And Trump, in that surprising way, signed on to this new post-war on drugs consensus in 2018.
Attacks on Venezuela, I think, are really not so much a reiteration of the war on drugs as they are a reiteration of gunboat diplomacy from 100 years ago, the 1920s.
WOLF: The first thing Trump frequently says about immigrants is “They’re bringing drugs.” Nixon used drugs as a potent political wedge. The policy of the war on drugs may be a failure, but the politics of it continues to be extremely effective. How do you distinguish between the policy and propaganda?
FARBER: There’s a public health approach where you say people addicted to opioids need help, and there is a very political, powerful sense that people who traffic in whatever — cocaine from South America— need to be killed, like apples and oranges. And I think the politics of anti-drug policies have long been very successful for politicians. Poor Richard Nixon gets a very bad name as the instigator of the war on drugs when he started that policy, not that I mean to apologize for Richard Nixon, but it was really a public health measure when he first started. He was very worried about heroin addicts coming home from Vietnam, veterans who were returning soldiers. That was probably his primary concern when he launched the “all-out offensive” against drug abuse, as he called it. But quickly he saw the politics of it, that American families, moms and dads, all sorts of local leaders were really actually quite scared about the uptick in drug use, especially by young White people in the 1960s and then even much more so in the 1970s. So the politics were good.
Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York in 1973, with his eye probably on running for president in 1976 … was really the most punitive member of that war on drugs warrior culture. While there were real reasons to worry about drug addiction in New York City — there was a kind of heroin epidemic at that time in New York — he also saw the politics of it.
President after president, senator after senator, governor after governor, they often see being hard on drugs as good politics, and I think Donald Trump is certainly pushing in that direction, though there’s more to the story than just vote counting.
