Trump’s military strikes on suspected drug boats (killing hundreds, mostly in the Caribbean/Pacific near Venezuela) represent an escalation of the drug war, with officials like Pete Hegseth equating drug traffickers to “al-Qaeda” and drugs to “chemical weapons.”

The flawed logic traces back to post-9/11 Bush era — where the White House and DEA falsely linked American drug users to financing terrorism, using emotional ads and rhetoric to merge the war on drugs with the war on terror, despite little to no evidence.

Critique of impunity and slippery slope — The U.S. automatically labels killed suspects as “narco-terrorists” with minimal scrutiny, risking domestic abuse of similar preemptive killing powers and highlighting the futility and dangers of militarized drug policy.

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,........

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