CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Origin of Trump’s Drug War Killing Spree

George W. Bush in the Oval Office with is Attorney General John Ashcroft, who said of the war on drugs: “I want to renew it. I want to refresh it, relaunch it if you will.” White House photo by Eric Draper.

President Trump effectively claims that he is entitled to preemptively kill suspected drug traffickers anywhere on earth, or at least in the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. military has killed hundreds of people in its attacks on suspected smugglers’ boats off the coast of South America.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth proclaimed that illicit drugs are “tantamount to chemical weapons” and the dead suspects “are the al-Qaeda of our hemisphere, and we are hunting them with the sophistication and precision that we hunted al-Qaeda.”  Anyone who the U.S. military killed is automatically posthumously designated a narco-terrorist.

If the U.S. government is entitled to summarily kill suspected drug traffickers abroad, there is no reason why the same prerogative would not eventually be invoked on the home front.  If politicians truly want to protect Americans, why not authorize the U.S. military, state police, and county government dog catchers to summarily attack any boat suspected of transporting drugs on the nation’s lakes, rivers, or overgrown puddles?

Actually, such warped logic has already been taken to absurd ends.  The core follies of the Trump-Hegseth war of extermination on drug suspects were established almost a quarter-century ago.   American illicit drug users miraculously became collectively guilty for every terrorist attack in the world.

In December 2001, three months after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush announced to antidrug groups in Washington: “It’s so important for Americans to know that the traffic in drugs finances the work of terror, sustaining terrorists, that terrorists use drug profits to fund their cells to commit acts of murder. If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America.”

A few weeks later, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy spent $3 million for two television ads to appear during the Super Bowl. One ad asked viewers: “Where do terrorists get their money?” The answer: “If you buy drugs, some of it might come from you.” Drug users were portrayed as terrorist financiers—practically the........

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