OPINION: U.S. should rethink war on drugs

The Trump administration has opted to use our military to stop the flow of drugs coming into the United States from Latin America. As with previous administrations, this is a myopic view of the problem.

Americans have a voracious appetite for illicit drugs, and the solution rests not from without but from within the United States. It is estimated that American taxpayers have footed the bill for $1 trillion since the Nixon administration initiated its war on drugs, and since that time neither Republican nor Democratic administrations have been able to make a dent in the flow, as more drugs come into the U.S. than ever.

As a matter of fact, in comparison to the trafficking of the most well-known drug lord in history, Pablo Escobar, the current flow of drugs into the U.S. makes the Medellin Cartel look like a small mom and pop corner grocery store. One trillion dollars has been flushed down the toilet via Clinton’s Plan Colombia and other programs.

What we lack as a society is the recognition that we have an absolutely horrendous drug addiction problem. We do not recognize that this is an American problem, not a problem that the drug cartels have created. We can blast them out of the water until the kingdom comes, but we will still have traffickers providing the goods as long as Americans shell out the bucks to buy them. Therein lies the problem. All social classes use illicit drugs, including the wealthy, the poor, all ethnic groups and people of all religious affiliations. People of all political beliefs, including conservatives and liberals, and Democrats and Republicans. But that is only part of the tragedy.

U.S. funding for drug wars in Latin America has resulted in the deaths of many innocent people. They are primarily among the poor and remote Indigenous people whose communities lie along the drug trafficking corridors where men, women and children are victims of state and non-state violence directed at them.

If Congress was doing the job it was elected to do — and if that body was so concerned about wasting government expenditures — its members would recognize that the war on drug trafficking has been a complete failure for 60 years, and perhaps they should retool the shop. While rising fentanyl seizures are often seen as a sign of success, they may instead reflect a growing supply, according to a 2024 New York University study. In 2021, a Department of Homeland Security report estimated that only about 3% of the cocaine trafficked through official ports of entry had been confiscated. And subsidizing alternate crop production in targeted regions of Latin America can only minimally reduce the quantity of drugs like cocaine being produced.

So, does anything work to stop the flow of illicit drugs? One strategy for dealing with the flourishing internal drug market might lie in a strategy that Portugal instituted in 2001, and which has shown positive results, according to the CATO Institute. Portugal enacted an extensive drug reform program. It decriminalized possession of all illicit drugs but retained criminal sanctions for trafficking. The Portuguese government concentrated its efforts on treatment and harm reduction.

The same model may or may not work in the U.S. The operative question is whether a massive infusion of funding into rehab programs might be successful here. Can even one-half of the $1 trillion be better spent on funding programs that do demonstrate potential to resolve the problem from within? We simply don’t know because it has never been tried.