So let’s say the United States labels Mexican drug cartels terrorist organizations, like so many Republicans are demanding. Let’s say it deploys “cyberwarfare” and missile strikes against its kingpins, declares war against the cartels and sends troops across the border, whether the Mexican government agrees or not. Then what?
Photos of fentanyl victims on display at the Faces of Fentanyl Memorial at U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters in Arlington, Va. Alex Wong/Getty Images/TNS
Here’s what: Fentanyl keeps killing Americans; in 2023 more than in 2022; in 2024 more than in 2023. You can follow the trend.
The war on drugs has always been, at best, a pointless approach to the nation’s epidemic of substance abuse. More likely, it has exacerbated the crisis, pushing traffickers into more powerful, and lucrative, narcotics with which to lure vulnerable Americans into addiction.
The arrival on scene of fentanyl, easily cooked in a makeshift kitchen, so compact that a couple of pickup loads can serve the entire U.S. market, has blown up the farce. The Republican Party’s bloodlust does not change the reality that fentanyl, in the words of John Walsh of the Washington Office on Latin America, is “un-interdictable.”
“The danger is that, confronted by this new kind of drug, we will get more and more frustrated,” he said. “We will lash out. We will literally militarize the response and it will have no effect on the real problem.” Even if Washington manages to enlist China and Mexico to disable the current fentanyl pipeline, it will reconstitute elsewhere. It’s just too easy. And the U.S. market is just too lucrative.
The U.S. strategy to combat illegal drugs failed long ago. Cocaine and heroin on the street were cheaper in 2020 than 10, 20 or even 30 years earlier, according to the U.N. office that tracks the stuff. That’s not what happens in a market where the supply of the commodity is curtailed. What fentanyl has done in the last couple of years is put the stupidity of the policy in plain view.
Before, Washington could at least argue that there was an identifiable source of drugs to apply its stamp-the-problem-out-at-the-source strategy. It could point to poppy fields to torch and coca plantations to spray. It could identify plausible paths on which to target enforcement and nab the kingpins to stop drugs from making it into the U.S.
But fentanyl doesn’t rely on the harvest of some crop farmed on a faraway field. There is no Bolivian field to spray. Today the precursor chemicals come from China. But they could come from other places. And when one batch of chemicals is banned, fentanyl can be made from others. It can plausibly be made in the USA.
One could hope that fentanyl would focus minds on the drawbacks of Washington’s favored supply-side strategy. What it misses, of course, is that the drugs arriving in the U.S. serve a consumer market; a pretty big, lucrative and dynamic one, at that. As long as that market exists, it will be served.
As Walsh notes, the strategy has been worse than pointless. It deepens the nation’s addiction. Interdiction encourages suppliers to move up the ladder of potency in order to get around enforcement and build a more solidly addicted market to serve. Pound for pound, cocaine is way more lucrative and easier to move across borders than cannabis. Fentanyl is as easy as it gets.
The alternative policies are no secret. For years, countries in Western Europe have deployed so-called harm reduction interventions and other strategies focused on the buy side first, to alleviate the harm caused by drugs on their citizens and, second, to address addiction directly, by treating it as the disease it is.
In Portugal, once known as Europe’s heroin capital, harm reduction strategies have reportedly cut opioid use and HIV infections, as well as incarceration rates for drug offenders. Today, the U.K. suffers 15 times as many drug-related deaths; the U.S., 55 times as many.
Unfortunately the U.S. is already knee-deep into the 2024 political season. These sorts of strategies are insufficiently muscular to gain any sort of traction in a Republican Party eager to be seen on TV beating down the bad guys with lethal hardware.
Harm reduction strategies have been around for a long while. But the U.S. political system has found it way more attractive to focus on wicked foreigners poisoning American youth. “The political payoff for the aggressive, drug warrior position is even more potent than fentanyl,” Walsh remarked. “That is not going to go away.”
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