The so-called War on Drugs has always been a war of convenience—a tool for the empire to consolidate power, discipline its own population, and dominate the global south. From the beginning, it was less about the harm caused by substances and more about controlling who profits from them, who gets punished, and who gets to play the moral arbiter on the world stage.
But don’t let the self-righteous rhetoric fool you. The empire’s drug policies are as hypocritical as they are destructive. While claiming to wage a noble war on narcotics, the U.S. props up regimes and corporations complicit in the trade, exploits the chaos it creates for geopolitical gain, and ignores its own pharmaceutical and chemical industries’ roles in fueling global addiction and trafficking.
Domestic Drug Wars: Same Playbook, New Excuses
Domestically, the War on Drugs is a thinly veiled system of racial and class control. During the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 90s, predominantly Black communities were criminalised and subjected to mass incarceration under draconian laws. But when the opioid crisis hit white, suburban communities in the 2000s, the narrative suddenly shifted from crime to compassion. The message couldn’t be clearer: your zip code and skin colour determine whether you’re a victim or a criminal.
Despite cannabis legalisation in many states, millions remain behind bars for drug offenses, disproportionately people of colour. Meanwhile, Big Pharma executives—who knowingly created the opioid epidemic by flooding the market with addictive painkillers—face little more than token fines. Purdue Pharma’s Sackler family gets to keep their billions while the families of overdose victims bury their dead.
Global Drug Wars: The Empire’s Convenient Excuse
Abroad, the War on Drugs has served as a pretext for interventions, sanctions, and military operations. But here’s the kicker: the empire is often complicit in the very drug trades it claims to fight.
Colombia and Mexico: Violence by Design
Colombia’s Plan Colombia, launched in 1999 with U.S. funding, was framed as a counter-narcotics operation. In reality, it was a military campaign to crush leftist insurgencies while protecting U.S. corporate interests. Billions of dollars later, cocaine production hasn’t dropped, but violence has surged. Paramilitaries and cartels thrive, farmers are displaced, and rural communities live in terror.
Mexico, the U.S.’s southern neighbor, offers a similar story. Since 2006, the U.S.-backed war on cartels has turned the country into a battlefield, with over 350,000 killed and countless more disappeared. The militarisation of the drug war has empowered cartels, whose profits are fueled by insatiable U.S. demand. And let’s not forget: the same weapons flooding Mexican streets come from U.S. manufacturers, courtesy of lax American gun laws.
Afghanistan: Poppy Fields Forever
Then there’s Afghanistan. After the U.S. invasion in 2001, opium production soared to unprecedented levels, turning Afghanistan into the world’s leading supplier of heroin. The Taliban, once suppressors of opium cultivation, re-entered the trade to fund their insurgency, while U.S.-backed warlords and government officials took their cut. By 2020, Afghanistan supplied 80% of the world’s opium—a grim legacy for a country the U.S. claimed to “liberate.”
The Precursor Problem: Following the Supply Chain
No drug trade functions without precursor chemicals—the raw materials needed to manufacture synthetic drugs like methamphetamine and fentanyl. And guess what? Many of these precursors flow from legitimate industries in countries like the U.S, China and India, often with little regulation or oversight.
Take fentanyl, the synthetic opioid driving the U.S. overdose crisis. While Mexico manufactures much of the fentanyl flooding American streets, the precursor chemicals often originate in China. The U.S. loves to point fingers at Beijing, but here’s the reality: America’s insatiable demand for cheap, powerful drugs is the real driver of this crisis. And let’s not ignore the pharmaceutical companies and chemical industries complicit in this supply chain—they’re hardly innocent bystanders.
The Empire’s Allies: Partners in Prohibition and Profit
The War on Drugs isn’t just a U.S. operation—it’s a global enterprise involving allies who play their roles in the empire’s game.
Saudi Arabia, for example, has used the drug war narrative to justify its brutal crackdowns on dissent. While publicly executing people for drug offenses, the kingdom imports massive quantities of Captagon, an amphetamine fueling conflicts across the Middle East. The hypocrisy is staggering.
In West Africa, U.S.-backed counter-narcotics programs have targeted countries like Guinea-Bissau, a key transit hub for Latin American cocaine heading to Europe. But these programs do little to address the root causes of trafficking—poverty, corruption, and demand—and often end up empowering local elites complicit in the trade.
The Synthetic Shift: A New Era of Control
Synthetic drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine have shifted the landscape of the drug war. These substances can be produced in labs, eliminating the need for sprawling plantations. This makes them harder to track but easier to profit from, and their devastating impact on communities has become a global crisis.
The U.S. response? More of the same. Blame foreign actors, militarise borders, and expand surveillance. But what’s left unexamined is the role of U.S. pharmaceutical companies in creating the opioid crisis and the complicity of its chemical industry in supplying precursors.
Profits Over People: The Real Agenda
The War on Drugs isn’t a failure—it’s a resounding success for those it’s meant to serve. It enriches the military-industrial complex, fuels private prisons, and gives the U.S. a pretext for interventions across the globe. The victims—addicts, farmers, and civilians caught in the crossfire—are collateral damage in a system designed to maximise profit and control.
From the coca fields of Colombia to the poppy farms of Afghanistan, from the fentanyl labs of Mexico to the pharmaceutical boardrooms of the U.S., the War on Drugs is a racket. It punishes the powerless while protecting the powerful, perpetuating a cycle of violence and dependency.
The Legacy: High Stakes and Hypocrisy
The War on Drugs was never about eradicating narcotics. It’s about maintaining a global order where the empire dictates the rules and reaps the rewards. Drugs are both the pretext for intervention and the byproduct of exploitation.
Until the empire’s policies prioritise people over profit, the cycle will continue. The drug trade will flourish, the violence will escalate, and the real culprits—the corporations, governments, and systems that enable this crisis—will remain untouchable.
The War on Drugs isn’t a war on drugs. It’s a war on the vulnerable. And as long as the empire profits, it’s a war that will never end.
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