Trump’s War on Drugs

From Afghanistan to Iraq, the United States has long used drone strikes to take out people it alleges are terrorists or insurgents. It’s a legacy that started under President George W. Bush and greatly expanded under President Barack Obama. President Donald Trump has taken this tactic to new extremes, boasting about lethal strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and declaring the U.S. is in a “non-international armed conflict” with narcotics traffickers.

Trump appears to be merging the war on terror with the war on drugs. This comes as he’s simultaneously ramping up the use of troops to police inside American cities. It’s a chilling escalation. But it’s not the first time we’ve seen a president stoke public fear and deploy overwhelming force in the name of law and order. 

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to President Richard Nixon’s administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is the prelude.

Transcript

Radley Balko: The United States has long used drone strikes to take out people it alleges to be terrorists or insurgents. Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, Syria. It’s a legacy that started under President George W. Bush’s war on terror and then was greatly expanded under President Barack Obama. But now President Donald Trump has taken the tactic to new extremes.

NBC: Moments ago, President Trump posted on social media that the U.S. military carried out a second strike targeting drug cartels. 

CBS: This attack just two weeks after the military struck another boat from Venezuela in the Caribbean.

WPLG Local 10: The president says three narco-terrorists were killed, posting this video of the strike on Truth Social. The president saying, “Be warned — if you are transporting drugs that can kill Americans, we are hunting you.”

RB: Following Trump’s announcement of those strikes, the U.S. Navy took out another boat — a speedboat in which authorities in the Dominican Republic allege they confiscated 1,000 kilograms of cocaine. 

The U.S. president is directing the full force of the U.S. military to kill alleged drug traffickers.

DT: We’re telling the cartels right now we’re going to stop them too. When they come by land, we’re going to stop them the same way we stopped the boats.

RB: And as Trump justifies this expanded role for the president as judge, jury, and executioner, he defines and casts villains, real or imagined, to fit his narrative. 

DT: They killed 300,000 people in our country last year. And we’re not letting it happen anymore. 

RB: Trump appears to be merging the war on terror with the war on drugs. And this comes simultaneously as he’s ramping up the use of troops to police inside American cities. 

As Trump justifies this expanded role of judge, jury, and executioner, he defines and casts villains, real or imagined, to fit his narrative.

DT: What they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles — they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within. … 

We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard, but military. 

RB: It’s a chilling escalation. But it’s not the first time we’ve seen a president stoke public fear and deploy overwhelming force in the name of law and order.

From The Intercept, this is Collateral Damage: a podcast about the half-century-long war on drugs, its enduring ripple effects, and the devastating consequences of building a massive war machine aimed at the public itself. 

I’m Radley Balko, an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice system for more than 20 years.

The so-called “war on drugs” began as a metaphor to demonstrate the country’s fervent commitment to defeating drug addiction, but the “war” part of that metaphor is now all too literal.

When the drug war ramped up in the 1980s and ’90s, it brought helicopters, tanks, and SWAT teams to U.S. neighborhoods. It brought dehumanizing rhetoric and the suspension of basic civil liberties protections.

All wars have collateral damage: the people whose deaths are tragic but deemed necessary for the greater cause. 

But once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage. 

In the modern war on drugs — which dates back more than 50 years to the Nixon administration — the United States has produced laws and policies ensuring that collateral damage isn’t just tolerated, it’s inevitable.

This is the prelude.

Once the country dehumanized people suspected of using and selling drugs, we were more willing to accept some collateral damage.

Donald Trump has begun his second presidential term by unleashing aggressive, abusive immigration enforcement officers all over the country. Federal agencies from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE; Customs and Border Protection; Homeland Security Investigations; even the DEA and ATF are teaming up with local sheriffs and police. 

KTLA: New video shows dozens of carwash workers being detained by federal agents including at least one customer.

WFLA: A Tampa family says they were roughed up and their home thrown into disarray by federal ICE agents and Homeland Security investigator.

WFLA: They just pointed guns at us in our face. They told us to open the door, if not they were going to break it down. They didn’t have no warrant. 

RB: In some parts of the country, the administration has deployed federal troops, about 35,000 personnel from the National Guard, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines, according to reporting from The Intercept. In service of Trump’s mass deportation agenda, these forces operate now in at least five states.

One of the first places Trump sent troops was Los Angeles, California, to quell anti-ICE protests that had erupted in response to violent immigration raids.

FOX 11: About 700 U.S. Marines from the Second Battalion, 7^th Marine Regiment out of Twentynine Palms received weekend orders and are on the way expected to arrive this morning. And although they’re trained for close combat, officials say these Marines won’t be on the front lines. Instead, they’ll be focused on crowd control.

RB: Trump’s mass deportation policy has many analogs to the drug war. 

Richard Nixon: To the extent money can help in meeting the problem of dangerous drugs, it will be available. This is one area where we cannot have budget cuts because we must wage what I have called “total war” against public enemy No. 1 in the United States: the problem of dangerous drugs.

Trump’s mass deportation policy has many analogs to the drug war. 

RB: The modern drug war began during President Richard Nixon’s administration and, like Trump’s fight against undocumented immigration, it was predicated on false claims designed to stir up fear and anger, particularly among white, middle- and low-income voters.

RN: It is time for an honest look at the problem of order in the United States. 

RN: In recent years crime in this country has grown nine times as fast as population. At the current rate, the crimes of violence in America will double by 1972. We cannot accept that kind of future for America. We owe it to the decent and law-abiding citizens of America to take the offensive. 

RB: Nixon was also obsessed with enemies and held paranoid fears. 

RN: You see, homosexuality, dope, immorality in general — these are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the communists and the left-wingers, they’re trying to destroy us. 

RB: His aides dehumanized drug offenders with terms like “vermin” and lied about crime statistics to both terrify voters and play to their prejudices.

In 1994, the journalist Dan Baum tracked down Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and interviewed him. 

On a talk show, Baum recounted Ehrlichman’s frankness about their goals.

Dan Baum: He said, “Look. The Nixon campaign in ’68 and the Nixon White House had two enemies: Black people and the antiwar left.”

RB: He went on to say: 

DB: “[V]ilify them night after night on the evening news, and we thought if we can associate heroin with Black people in the public mind and marijuana with the hippies this would be perfect.” And he looked me in the eye and said, “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

RB: That ought to sound familiar.

DT: She’s eradicated our sovereign border and unleashed an army of gangs and criminal migrants from prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions, from all around the world, from Venezuela and the Congo in Africa.

DT: Democrats have vowed mass invasion and mass migration. We are delivering mass deportation. And it’s happening very fast. And the worst of the worst are being sent to a no-nonsense prison in El Salvador.

DT: It’s a great honor to be deep in Florida, the Florida Everglades, to open America’s newest migrant detention center. It’s known as Alligator Alcatraz, which is very appropriate, because I looked outside and that’s not a place I want to go hiking anytime soon. But very soon this facility will house some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet.

RB: The rhetoric of the Nixon administration resulted in more aggressive, less accountable, and ultimately more reckless and abusive police tactics. 

It was this era, for example, that gave us the no-knock raid, or the policy that allows police to get prior permission from a judge to forcibly enter a home without knocking. 

The policy upended a centuries-old tradition in common law that the home should be a place of peace and sanctuary.

But the no-knock raid wasn’t a policy police groups were demanding or clamoring for. 

It was a policy dreamed up by a 31-year-old Senate staffer who had been recruited to Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. Donald Santarelli came up with the policy as a way for Nixon to show he was tough on crime.

“There was an increasing fear of crime,” Santarelli told me in an interview for my book “Rise of the Warrior Cop.” Santarelli said, “At the same time you had the rise of the civil rights movement, the riots, the Black Panthers, and this increase in drug use. I think the public started to pick up on the idea that these things were linked, because they were all happening simultaneously.” 

This line of thinking drove policies designed to “unleash” law enforcement. The Nixon administration tried to relax wiretapping laws, roll back Miranda rights, and erode Fourth Amendment protections against unconstitutional searches and seizures.

And now we’re seeing the Trump administration push even harder to roll back constitutional protections under the guise of immigration enforcement, fighting crime, and what they call “domestic terrorism.” 

“Law enforcement is just like any other interest group,” Santarelli told me at the time, “They’re always after greater power. There was a sense that they needed to capitalize on these historic events. And I think there was a real willingness on the part of the public to give them whatever powers they sought.”

That too should sound familiar.

DT: On day one of the Trump administration, we declared an all-out war on the dealers, smugglers, traffickers, and cartels. Within moments of taking office, I deployed the U.S. military to our border and unleashed the patriots of ICE and Border Patrol to defend our country from an invasion. This was an invasion. This wasn’t people coming in. This was an invasion of our country. 

RB: Like Nixon, Trump also demagogues fear of crime. The main difference is that while Nixon merely exaggerated crime statistics, Trump just simply fabricated them. 

The Justice Department announced in January that violent crime in D.C. hit a 30-year low in 2024. 

So far this year, it’s down 26 percent from that. This, in other words, is a curious time for the president to declare that the nation’s capital is a violent cesspool that it demands the sort of crime-fighting expertise that only a 79-year-old man who fetishizes strongmen and dictators can provide.

DT: We have to give power back to the police, because crime is rampant. 

DT: There is a literal crimewave going on. You know, and if you look, we have spent last year $113 billion on illegal immigrants. We have to do something about it. And we have to start by building a wall, a big beautiful powerful wall.

RB: In truth, when Trump first took office in 2017, he inherited the lowest homicide rate of any president in modern history. He was also the first president since George H.W. Bush to leave office with a higher homicide rate than when he entered.

But Trump’s biggest lies have always come when he blames crime on immigrants.

DT: When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.

DT: A lot of towns don’t want to talk because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets.

RB: The truth is that immigrants — documented and otherwise — commit far fewer crimes than native-born people. Historically, when undocumented immigration has gone up, crime has gone down. And so-called sanctuary cities actually have lower crime rates than cities that cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

[Break]

There are also some interesting parallels and contrasts between what’s happening now and the Reagan administration, in which fear of illicit drugs and crime would again be exploited to grow the power of police, prosecutors, and government.

Ronald Reagan: Drugs are menacing our society, they’re threatening our values and undercutting our institutions. They’re killing our children. 

RR: We will no longer tolerate those who sell drugs and those who buy drugs. All Americans of good will are determined to stamp out those parasites. 

RR: Well now we’re in another war for our freedom.

RR: [T]reating drug trafficking as a threat to our national security. 

RB: Illicit drugs were not a threat to national security. And to the extent that they were, it was the way in which aggressive U.S. drug policy overseas had turned vast swaths of the world against America.

As with Nixon, Reagan turned drugs into a culture war battle, pitting middle class American values against hippies, activists, urban advocates, and the counterculture. 

Recreational drug use was immoral. 

So drug addicts weren’t suffering from a health condition; they were simply bad people.

RR: Drug use is not a victimless crime, it is not a private matter. While we must be concerned with the personal consequences for the individual, we must demonstrate our great concern for the millions of innocent citizens who pay the high price for the illegal drug use of some. These costs are measured by crime and terrorism.

RB: This sort of dehumanization made it easier for federal and state government to kick down doors, raid entire towns, city blocks, and housing projects, and bring in National Guard troops and helicopters to invade entire counties where they suspected people were growing marijuana. It also helped Reagan create federal–local task forces with broad new powers, and to begin to blur the lines between domestic policing and the military.

Anchor: We have a report from Spencer Michaels of Public Station KQED, San Francisco.

VOX: Good afternoon skipper, this is the United States Coast Guard. We’re going to be placing a boarding party aboard your vessel this afternoon to ensure your compliance with all federal regulations… 

Spencer Michaels: What they’re really looking for is drugs: marijuana and cocaine, smuggled into the U.S. from South America and Asia. San Francisco Bay may not look like a war zone, but this is the Western front of the Reagan administration’s war on drugs. And it is a real war complete with an Air Force and a Navy.

RB: This too echoes in the Trump administration’s version of the war on drugs — one that also folds in war on terror-level racism and propaganda. 

DT: In the 21st century, we’ve seen one terror attack after another, carried out by foreign visa overstayers from dangerous places all over the world. And thanks to Biden’s open-door policies, today there are millions and millions of these illegals who should not be in our country. 

Trump’s false claim that immigration poses a threat to national security has provided his administration the legal basis to claim sweeping new powers for police agencies.

RB: Trump’s false claim that immigration poses a threat to national security — that we’re being “invaded” and that this poses a “national emergency” — has provided his administration the legal basis to claim sweeping new powers for police agencies. These include the power to arrest and deport immigrants for speech protected by the First Amendment, to deploy the Marines and National Guards to American cities, and to ship people off without due process to slave labor prisons like CECOT in El Salvador. 

Stephen Miller: Tren de Aragua has the same legal status as Al Qaeda and ISIS. MS-13 has the same legal status as Al Qaeda and ISIS. These are foreign terrorists operating on our soil. And our gratitude to El Salvador for agreeing to take custody of these terrorists is immense.

Kristi Noem: If you are considering entering America illegally, don’t even think about it. Let me be clear. If you come to our country and you break our laws, we will hunt you down. 

RB: The argument that immigrants pose a threat to national security is just as ridiculous as the argument that illicit drugs do. But as we saw during the Reagan administration, the federal courts have thus far been reluctant to question the president when he makes such proclamations. 

As many political commentators have pointed out, Donald Trump is in many ways stuck in the 1980s. He seems to think American cities are wastelands of crime and decay. 

DT: The capital of America was a bloodthirsty, horrible, dangerous place. One of the worst.

DT: These are high-crime areas. As high as there is in the world. You can go to Afghanistan, you can go to places that you think of are, like, unsafe. You’re safer there than you are in Chicago at night.

RB: In truth, despite the increase in some crimes during the Covid pandemic, crime is falling again. And it’s now at near historic lows. 

He seems to think that New York especially is a violent, dystopian hellscape, when in truth it’s safer than most cities a fraction of its size.

DT: I’ve seen New York through good times and bad, through boom times and crimewaves, through market crashes and terrorist attacks, but I’ve never seen it quite like this. We have filthy encampments of drugged out homeless people living in our places that we’ve spent so much time with children where they used to play.

RB: During the 1980s, the Reagan administration and congressional leaders wanted to bring in active-duty military to patrol U.S. streets and raid U.S. homes. That didn’t happen in large part due to opposition from the military itself. And that’s a sign of a healthy democracy.

Rep. Benjamin Gilman: And I would appreciate your comment with regards to the military — the need for the military’s involvement in being a backup force in our war against the narcotics traffickers that are affecting our national security as much as any other common enemy. 

RB: That’s Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-N.Y., during a 1988 hearing on the defense budget, asking then Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci about his opposition to relaxing restrictions on the use of military in the drug war.

Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci: My statement was that I would be opposed to making the Defense Department the front-line agency. You and I agree, when you said you don’t think we ought to have the capability to arrest people — that is what I am talking about. But I also have a responsibility to make certain that the military isn’t diverted from its mission, that is, the national security, the security of the country.

RB: That separation is eroding under Trump. 

DT: Under the authorities vested in me as the president of the United States, I’m officially invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act — you know what that is — and placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control.

ABC: This next wave of troops expected to join the more than 800 National Guard troops that President Trump activated just last week. Up to this point, we’re told the Guardsmen have been unarmed, but Defense officials say that could change. 

RB: The crackdown in D.C. came 10 days after the New Republic reported on a Pentagon memo authored by Phil Hegseth, the defense secretary’s brother. The memo laid out the administration’s plans to deploy active-duty troops around the country to aid in immigration enforcement “for years to come.”

If enacted, that memo would once and for all end this country’s centuries-old tradition of keeping the military out of routine domestic law enforcement. It would eradicate one of the cornerstone principles that drove the American Revolution. And it could well end with U.S. soldiers firing their guns at U.S. citizens.

Despite the best efforts of the politicians who represent them, the American public finally began to see that declaring war on drugs was never really going to make them go away.

States around the country finally began to see the folly of spending billions and incarcerating thousands to prohibit a mostly harmless drug like marijuana.

After the George Floyd protests, we saw dozens of cities and even a couple states roll back some of the broad powers granted to police during the drug war era, particularly when it comes to no-knock raids.

And yet in other parts of the country, the drug war never really ended. 

The raids continued, the violence continued, the unnecessary deaths continued.

Even as we were producing this podcast, I continued to find stories about innocent people killed in botched raids, including for marijuana.

The election and reelection of Donald Trump also represents a regression on these issues. Trump has repeatedly fawned over governments that execute drug dealers. 

DT: China has the death penalty. I said to him, “Do you have a drug problem?” when I first met him. He looked at me like what a stupid question. He said “No, no, no drug problem.” I said, “Well, what do you do?” “Death penalty. Immediate death penalty.”

DT: They execute the drug dealers. They have zero drug problem, zero. 

DT: If you notice that every country that has the death penalty has no drug problem, they execute drug dealers.

RB: And during the 2024 campaign, Trump vowed on Fox’s Jesse Watters show to invade Mexico. 

Jesse Watters: Mexico, are strikes against the cartels still on the table?

DT: Absolutely.

JW: Even against our biggest trading partner? 

DT: Absolutely. 

RB: And since taking office again, Trump has claimed sweeping new powers that have alarmed presidential scholars and historians. In a major escalation Trump has boasted about attacking boats in the Caribbean, killing at least 17 people.

These attacks were illegal both under domestic and international law. 

Trump justified these extrajudicial execution by claiming without evidence that the vessels were “trafficking illicit narcotics.” 

NBC: The Trump administration says it’s blown up boats near Venezuela that were used by drug traffickers. But the Venezuela government has denied it. And the country’s leader Nicholas Maduro says the U.S. wants to force him from power. 

ABC: President Trump has declared drug cartels operating in the Caribbean unlawful combatants. The president says the United States is now in a non-international armed conflict.

RB: His administration has also expanded the definition of terrorist to go after suspected drug dealers, designating gangs and cartels as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.”

And it doesn’t stop there. The administration has also designated “anti-fascists” as domestic terrorists, directing the full weight of the federal government against everyone from people protesting violent immigration raids to police brutality, to even media outlets covering those protests.

Trump has rolled back many of the Obama-era reforms such as restrictions on transferring military weapons, armor, and vehicles to local police departments.

He has instructed his Justice Department to relax oversight and end civil rights investigations of abusive police departments. 

And of course, Trump has exploited public fear of the potent, dangerous drug fentanyl to impose ridiculous, destructive tariffs on virtually every country on earth, including countries with zero connections to fentanyl.

DT: This open border nightmare flooded our country with fentanyl and with people that shouldn’t be here. Some of the worst people on Earth. 

DT: We are tariffing countries that are sending us fentanyl and working with fentanyl.

RB: But the most alarming way the stories you’re about to hear on this podcast echo what’s happening today is the way Trump has framed immigration as an existential crisis that demands urgent, extra-constitutional action. 

DT: Joe Biden allowed 21 million people — that’s a minimum, I think it was much higher than that — illegal aliens to invade our country. 

DT: They allowed millions and millions of criminals into our country, 11,888 murderers, 50 percent of whom murdered more than one person.

DT: That’s what came into our country from prisons, from mental institutions, from street gangs, drug dealers. Disgusting. This enormous country-destroying invasion has swamped communities nationwide with massive crime, crippling costs and burdens far beyond what any nation could withstand. No nation could withstand what we did.  

RB: While Pentagon opposition thwarted Reagan-era attempts to enlist the military in the drug war, Trump is keeping his promise to deploy active-duty troops to combat everything from immigration, to drugs, to protest, to homelessness. And he has repeatedly promised to send troops to more cities and states.

DT: Because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city.

Chris Hayes: Hundreds of armed federal agents and police — backed up by riot trucks, smoke grenades, and helicopters — breached fences and busted doors in an immigration raid on an entire apartment building on the city’s South Side. They pulled dozens of residents from their homes in zip ties, including children, some of them without any clothes.

RB: Trump has also attempted to purge the Pentagon of anyone who he believes might stand in his way.

We’ve also seen aggressiveness, violence, bigotry, and disregard for the basic dignity and rights of immigrants we’ve seen from Trump’s deportation forces. This is strikingly similar to the aggressiveness and abuse we saw from drug cops at the height of the crack epidemic.

Now, Congress has appropriated enough money to make Trump’s deportation army — ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and Homeland Security Investigations — into the largest police force in government, and a force larger than most country’s military.

Meanwhile, the protections the courts created during the drug war to grant police officers new powers and shield them from any real accountability are still in place. So the stories you’re about to hear don’t merely remain relevant today, they are why we are here.

The protections the courts created during the drug war to grant police officers new powers and shield them from any real accountability are still in place.

Coming up this season on Collateral Damage. 

Bill Aylesworth: So they cooked up a scheme, a story that he was growing marijuana on the property.

Rev. Markel Hutchins: The judge would just sign the no-knock warrant. And they were kicking in people’s doors and violating people’s rights. 

C. Virginia Fields: Police officers knocked on her door, threw in a grenade. 

BA: And raided his house and killed him. 

Ryan Frederick: What do you do when the police are telling you a lie? And how much are you going to argue with the people that make the law? 

Cristina Beamud: The goal was to eliminate the enemy. And the people were the enemy.

RB: Collateral Damage is a production of The Intercept. 

It was reported and written by me, Radley Balko.

Additional writing by Andrew Stelzer, who also served as producer and editor.

Laura Flynn is our showrunner.

Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief.

The executive producers are me and Sumi Aggarwal.

We had editing support from Maryam Saleh. 

Truc Nguyen mixed our show. 

Legal review by Shawn Musgrave and David Bralow. 

Fact-checking by Kadal Jesuthasan.

Art direction by Fei Liu.

Illustrations by Tara Anand.

Copy editing by Nara Shin.

Social and video media by Chelsey B. Coombs.

Special thanks to Peter Beck for research assistance. 

This series was made possible by a grant from the Vital Projects Fund. 

Thank you for listening.

The post Trump’s War on Drugs appeared first on The Intercept.