VIDEO: War on Drugs Is a Price Support for Traffickers
In a sharp debate on Al Jazeera’s This Is America, Sanho Tree, director of the Drug Policy Project, makes the case that the Trump administration’s militarized approach to drug enforcement isn’t just ineffective — it’s actively making the problem worse.
On the fundamental economics of the drug war, Sanho is direct: “The drug war is essentially producing a price support for drug traffickers. These are minimally processed agricultural and chemical commodities that cost pennies per dose to manufacture. There’s nothing exotic about these substances. They’re not difficult to produce — but they are illegal. And so by making it illegal and increasing risks to traffickers, it allows them to charge an ever higher risk premium to the next person down that smuggling chain.”
Sanho explains that the Trump administration’s unlawful boat strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific amount to posturing rather than strategy.
“This is mostly drug war theater,” he notes. “There are so many different ways drugs enter the country — whether they’re using submarines, semi-submersibles, ultralights, drones, drug tunnels — there’s a myriad of ways they can move drugs into the United States besides these boats.”
That drug war theater also costs lives.
“We’re talking about more than 200 extrajudicial killings, murders. There’s no trial, no evidence. This is completely problematic. It’s quite illegal,” Sanho warns.
Sanho also exposes how the administration has used fentanyl as a political tool far beyond drug policy itself: “The lies around fentanyl have been kind of a skeleton key that unlocks all these other powers — the trade war with Mexico and Canada, moving the aircraft carrier into the Caribbean, invading and kidnapping the head of state of Venezuela,” Sanho explains. “All of this could not have been done without the lies about fentanyl originally.”
On funding cuts to harm reduction programs, Sanho warns the human cost will be direct and immediate. “We know what works in this country. Harm reduction works. It saves lives. When they cut off funding for fentanyl test strips and for naloxone, people will die as a direct result of that,” Sanho warns. “It’s as if they’re saying the wages of sin ought to be death — and that should never be the case.”
Sanho closes with a warning about the consequence of escalating enforcement: “There’s something in this field called the iron law of prohibition. When there’s high demand for a substance and you try to clamp down on it, you will end up with more potent, easier to smuggle, easier to manufacture drugs. That’s how we ended up with fentanyl.”
Watch the whole segment here:
