By Rodrigo Uprimny, EL ESPECTADOR, November 2, 2025
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
The war on drugs has been a disaster ever since Nixon declared it in 1971: it has never been able to achieve the expected result, which was to control the sale and traffic in certain psychoactive substances, such as cocaine or marijuana. But on the contrary, it has been very efficient in producing terrible effects: arbitrary arrests, mass murders (such as those by Duterte in the Philippines), invasions like that of Bush father in Panama in 1989 to capture Manuel Noriega, a dictator nurtured by the United States. He was a collaborator of the CIA for many years.
The failures and the terrible effects of the war on drugs are widely documented and don’t come from operational errors or lack of funds; it’s a mistaken strategy that attaches radically different phenomena to the drug packet itself: including the military ingredient (the notion of a war and the massive use of military forces) in actions that, by their nature should be police or judicial (repression of drug trafficking and combat against criminal organizations), for the purpose of solving a problem that in its essence is not criminal, but social; namely, spreading the consumption and possible abuse of certain psychoactive substances that are considered to be risky. And that’s why Thomaz Szasz was right when he wrote, at the end of the ‘80’s that the “war on drugs is nothing but one more chapter in the history of human stupidity.”
But now the case is worse: if Bush’s war on drugs was already a stupidity, I don’t know what to call the one by Trump. In the ‘80’s the main drug problem was cocaine and “crack”, substances that come from the Andean countries. The decision by Bush father to declare war on drugs in September of 1989, although it was a mistake because it didn’t solve the problem but aggravated it instead, it had a certain logic, because it was directed against cocaine. Trump’s war, on the contrary, is really absurd: now the problem in the United States is fentanyl, which causes thousands of deaths, but Trump is sending his military deployment against boats that are supposedly carrying . . . cocaine. And so he pressures Colombia and Venezuela, who are not involved in fentanyl trafficking. A strange logic: thousands of people in the United States are dying from fentanyl, and Trump bombards boats that are carrying cocaine, which is a very different drug, and pressures Venezuela and Colombia, which have nothing to do with the trafficking of fentanyl.
To this hallucinatory reality, it’s necessary to add the destruction with missiles of boats that are supposed to be carrying cocaine, and which has already caused more than sixty violent deaths in violation of international law, as it lacks any legal basis. Not only the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, but also numerous experts, including United States professors that have been part of prior administrations like Richard Painter of the University of Minnesota and who was a Counsellor to the second Bush, state that these are extrajudicial executions.
Trump is a very cunning person. So what explains his having a strategy that’s so senseless? The answer could be that his war isn’t against drugs, but rather that he has other purposes. This should not surprise us, because it has occurred many times in the past: we know now that, as was pointed out by John Ehrlichman, an aide to Nixon, his “war on drugs” was declared in 1971 to combat the pacifist movement against the Vietnam war and the movement of black people for equality. As he could not criminalize them directly, he was trying to associate the pacificists with marijuana and the black people with heroine, and that was the way he could “arrest their leaders, search their houses, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news”. So, what is Trump looking for?