The Ongoing Drug War Failure
Many, many years ago, I was doing some research, perhaps preparing a lecture for a class, about US anti-drug activity in Latin America, and it became exceedingly clear to me, just based on the numbers, that the US drug war was a bad idea based simply on a basic cost/benefit analysis. Sure, there are a number of debates to be had beyond the dollars and cents of it all, but given the amount of money being spent to get the results we were getting was an insane waste of money. That is to say that for all the money, time, and sophistication deployed by the United States and its allies in pursuing an interdiction/supply-side set of policies, it was in no way stopping drugs from reaching US markets.
The cost/benefit of it is made worse by the deleterious effects of the drug war on local populations.
I have long been convinced that the war paradigm is the wrong one for this issue. I will readily admit there is no perfect solution to the problems caused by drugs and their use. I do know that I would prefer spending just some fraction of the money we have spent on trying to use military might in an unwinnable war on harm reduction and treatment.
At a bare minimum, this is one of those areas that the more you know about it, and are honest with yourself about what the numbers show, the more the Groundhog Day-esque nature of stories about US drug policy makes you want to pound your head against the wall.
All of this is a preface to the latest example that proves the point.
The NYT provides the least surprising headline I have read in some time: Blowing Up Boats Hasn’t Slowed Cocaine Traffic to U.S., Experts Say.
almost nine months into the operation, epidemiologists, addiction scientists and public health experts say cocaine, by far the top drug smuggled out of South America, is as easy to get in much of the United States as it was before the strikes began.
The findings — based on evaluations of street prices, lethal overdoses, purity of samples and drug seizures at U.S. borders — raise questions about the effectiveness of the largest U.S. military deployment in Latin America in decades.
But, fear not, it is also costing a lot of money to produce no significant results!
The costs of these military operations have already climbed to $4.7 billion, according to Brown University’s Costs of War project, including the deployment of AC-130J Ghostrider gunships, F-35 fighter jets and guided-missile destroyers, as well as about 15,000 U.S. military personnel.
I don’t know how many times I have read some version of this story: the US ramps up some anti-drug operation, claims success, only to have the key variables show little to no signs of shifting.
A personal favorite is the claim of massive seizures of product, which often sounds impressive (and is often described as a “record”).
U.S. officials have said the strikes have disrupted some maritime smuggling routes and produced a surge in the U.S. Coast Guard’s seizures of cocaine, which reached 511,000 pounds in 2025, over three times the service’s annual average.
Sure, that’s cool until you put it in perspective.
But while that is an enormous amount, it pales in comparison to the massive cocaine production boom in South America, particularly in Colombia, the world’s largest source of the drug. In Colombia alone, the United Nations estimates that annual cocaine production is around 5.7 million pounds, about 11 times the amount seized by the Coast Guard.
The bottom line is that plenty of product is getting to market.
If boat strikes were slowing the flow of cocaine to the United States, public health researchers say one consequence would be an increase in prices.
But street prices for cocaine remain between $60 to $100 per gram in many U.S. cities, about where they were before the boat strikes began, according to Nabarun Dasgupta, an addiction scientist at the University of North Carolina and a leading expert on the epidemiology of street drugs in the United States.
Similarly, epidemiologists say the purity of cocaine sold in the United States would be expected to drop if the maritime strikes were truly hurting drug cartels. Dealers seeking to stretch restricted supplies would likely dilute their product with more adulterants, such as levamisole, a medication used to treat parasitic worm infections that can physically resemble cocaine, or lidocaine, a local anesthetic.
And yet, the average number of such substances in cocaine samples ranges from 1.3 to 1.5 in 2026, after the boat strikes began, compared with a range of 1.4 to 1.6 for much of 2025, Mr. Dasgupta said.
And, as is always the case, smugglers find new methods:
Signs are also emerging that traffickers are simply adopting other methods for smuggling cocaine, such as shifting to land routes through Central America or placing cocaine in container ships, while absorbing the occasional loss of shipments on small boats.
All of this could have been written (and was written) in stories from the 80s, the 90s, 00, and 10s. And these stories will be written in the 30s, 40s, 50s, etc.
This approach to fighting drug use Does. Not. Work.
And yet, we persist. And the attacks on fast boats are perhaps the dumbest approach to this issue I have seen (not to mention illegal and unethical).
Dr. Latkin is among the substance use experts in the United States who agree that the Trump administration’s campaign is both illegal and ineffective.
“In addition to being morally abhorrent, this method is as likely to succeed as much as would bombing a handful of McDonald’s in Dallas, Texas, and claiming that you’ve made America healthy again,” Dr. Latkin said.
Indeed.
“They’re not moving the needle at all,” said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, a research group. “Is that worth killing all these people?”
This is an excellent question, but Trump, Hegseth, and a lot of other people seem to think it is.
On this point, the other part of this story is that there is a great deal of collateral damage from all of this, wherein, as has been the case for dcades very poor local populations have to suffer the consequences of decisions made in Washington by people who think they can just blow things up to solve complex problems.
Again, the NYT reports: The U.S. Boat Strike Campaign Has Now Killed Over 200 People.
The death toll, however, only accounts for one dimension of the consequences of the lethal campaign.
Coastal communities in Colombia and Ecuador, where most of the boats are thought to have begun their journeys, are counting the losses not just in relatives who never returned, but in how the attacks have upended the lives of those who make their living from the ocean and now fear it.
Residents described entire communities abandoning fishing because the small “lanchas,” or speedboats, used by traffickers and fishers are often indistinguishable.
“Fishermen endure the forces of nature: wind, rain and sun. But they also face pirates, and on top of that, now there is this bombing thing,” said one Ecuadorean woman from a fishing family in San Mateo, a seaside town of 5,000. Like many in these coastal Ecuadorean villages, she asked not to have her name published for fear of retribution from the government, which has actively supported the bombing campaign. The Ecuadorean government did not respond to requests for comment.
“We live in fear of these strikes,” she said, “and because of that, many people have stopped going out to fish.”
I commend the entire piece.
But let me sum up: this current policy is repugnant, illegal, expensive, and utterly ineffectual. But beyond that, what’s not to like?
By the way, the insistence on a drug war in a bipartisan affair that is not just a Trump administration notion. As noted above, the basic contours of this story are not new. I could have written a similar post about Plan Colombia during the Clinton administration, and the way in which attempts at coca eradication created substantial harms to subsistence farmers in Colombia’s interior.
Still, the attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific deserve to be underscored as perhaps the worst examples of this overall approach that I can think of. The US government is currently targeting civilians and summarily executing them on suspicion of drug smuggling without any due process. In so doing, the lives of many people in coastal areas of Ecuador and Colombia, in particular, are having their way of life utterly disrupted. This is costing the American taxpayer a lot of money.
And all of this is being done without having any real effect on the drug trade.
So, hooray?
I feel like there is some cliche about the definition of insanity that needs to be deployed here.
Like so much that goes on in politics, the drug war is performative. Once it may have seemed to be a good idea, but even a cursory look at the history of prohibition would inform you that introdiction and suppression doesn’t work. But it will continue as no politician would be willing to sustain the attacks that would occur if they abandoned the war on drugs.
I’m pretty much of the opinion that the only way to disrupt the flow of drugs would be for the profit to be removed. This would require government to become the “addict’s pharmacy” and provide the drugs at low cost. It would also provide an opportunity to divert the addict into treatment and offer alternative assistance for the wouldbe user who sees drugs as a method to sooth pain in their life.
As believers in the free market Americans should understand that when willing buyer meets willing seller, there’s no stopping it. This is not a Columbia or Mexico problem, it’s an American consumer problem.
@Sleeping Dog: I don’t think providing cheap hard drugs will happen in this country. I’m convinced the majority of Americans have no empathy or sympathy for the addict or their family unless there is a personal connection. I don’t know for sure but I don’t think a majority even agree with needle exchanges, safe places to shoot up or Narcan dispensing. Whacking smugglers is sexy as long as the war is elsewhere. If there were cartel wars here it would be different.