From the standpoint of many US officials, one can easily see why they find the drug war advantageous. Like the drug lords and drug cartels, there is a huge drug-war federal bureaucracy that has grown dependent on the drug war. There are, for example, generous salaries for federal judges (plus lifetime appointments), federal prosecutors, DEA agents, court clerks and secretaries, law clerks, and others, all of which would dry up if the drug war were ended and drugs were legalized. Just like the drug lords and drug dealers, the last thing these federal bureaucrats want to do is let go of the source of their largess.
But there is another benefit to the drug war, one that President Trump is now using to expand his militarized police state across America. That’s the violence that necessarily comes with the drug war. Trump is using that violence as a way to complete the destruction of freedom in America.
Here is how the drug-war racket works.
The US government enacts drug laws that make it illegal to possess, ingest, or distribute drugs that have not been approved by the US government. It would be difficult to find a better example of the destruction of a free society than drug laws. With the enactment of such laws, the federal government is declaring to the citizenry: “You are the serfs and we are your masters. We, not you, will decide what you possess, ingest, and distribute. If you disobey our edicts, we will punish you with incarceration and fines.”
But that’s not the end of it. The drug war not only destroys individual liberty and sovereignty, it also produces a black market — that is, an illegal market. Notwithstanding the government’s drug laws, there are still a large number of Americans, for whatever reason, who wish to continue consuming drugs and who are willing to pay large amounts of money for them.
Thus, black-market sellers of drugs enter the illegal market to meet this demand. Angry and chagrined over this phenomenon, federal officials crack down by targeting both distributors and consumers with things like mandatory-minimum jail sentences, asset-forfeiture laws, no-knock raids, racist enforcement, killing of drug lords, burning of drug crops, and more.
But all that this crackdown accomplishes is higher black-market prices and profits arising from the sale of illegal drugs. The ever-soaring profits attract more people into the drug-supply business. Competition for consumers inevitably turns violent — extremely violent, especially given the unsavory nature of black-market distributors. There are, for example, turf wars where drug suppliers do their best to kill their competitors.
As we libertarians have long pointed out, there is only one solution to all this violence and mayhem — end drug prohibition by legalizing drugs. That would immediately put all the drug gangs, drug dealers, and drug cartels out of business and thereby put an immediate end to all the drug-war violence. That is, it is the drug war that is responsible for much, if not most, of the violence in America.
President Trump has to recognize this. He is a very intelligent man. He knows full well that the end of alcohol Prohibition put an end to all the violence, cartels, corruption, and mayhem that came with the war on alcohol.
But instead of calling on Congress to end the drug war by legalizing drugs, Trump instead is using the violence of the drug war as a way to expand a military police state to the entire nation — in the name of imposing “law and order” and keeping people “safe” and “secure.” The “law and order” justification is what he is using to justify the military occupation of Washington, D.C., and he is now using the same rationale to threaten other American cities with the same.
In other words, Trump doesn’t want to end the drug war, which would bring an end to the drug-war violence. He instead wants to use the violence that comes with the drug war to solidify and reinforce a militarized police state across the nation. Given Trump’s recent use of the military to kill suspected drug traffickers in the Caribbean, no one should be surprised if he ultimately orders US troops to do the same here within the United States — in the name of establishing “law and order” of course.
Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.