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Unpacking the Dangerous Myth of 'Narco-Terrorism'
Framing “Operation Southern Spear” as a battle against “narco-terrorists” is a desperate attempt to commit new violence using old excuses, one which ignores the security state’s history of creating its own enemies.
Dec 04, 2025
Between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror, the US government has a long history of waging bloody and unsuccessful wars against broad concepts that can not be meaningfully defeated. What makes the government’s latest “armed conflict” unique is not just its combination of these two failures, but also that its target—“narco-terrorism”—is largely a myth.
Under the title “Operation Southern Spear,” the Trump administration has launched a campaign intended to target the drug cartels that it designated as terrorist organizations earlier this year. So far, this has involved at least 21 airstrikes, killing upwards of 83 people on small boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific; a military buildup involving 15,000 troops; and covert operations by the CIA in Venezuela. Though President Donald Trump lacks the legal authority for these activities, the Senate’s latest attempt to restrain military action failed in a narrow vote of 49-51.
Key to the White House’s case is the idea of “narco-terrorism,” a label they have applied to both the airstrike victims and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The US claims that Maduro is closely connected to the Tren de Aragua cartel (despite a National Intelligence Council analysis suggesting otherwise) and that he is the leader of the supposed “Cartel of the Suns” (which, despite its terrorist designation, does not exist as an organization). The specter of “narco-terrorism” has also been invoked to bash the progressive governments of Colombia and Honduras.
To say that “narco-terrorism” is a myth is not to deny the obvious violence associated with the black market drug trade, but to acknowledge that the term does more to confuse than to clarify. The idea does not accurately explain the complex dynamics of the global drug trade; instead, it radically oversimplifies the problem. By portraying military intervention as a response to drug trafficking, the “narco-terrorism” myth allows politicians to ignore all of the ways in which military intervention is a cause of drug trafficking.
Strange Origins
“Narco-terrorism” has its origins in the early 1980s, when US Ambassador to Colombia Lewis Tambs began referring to leftist rebel groups like FARC and ELN as “narco-guerillas.” Some of his specific claims were fabricated: After Colombian police completed what was then the largest drug bust in history, Tambs falsely claimed that communist rebels were involved in the operation, prompting another State Department official to admit that “Tambs got ahead of the evidence.” Regardless, the idea quickly gained acceptance as a justification for military intervention in Latin America, suggesting that the only way to reduce drug abuse at home was to wage war against foreign suppliers. By 1985, the Reagan administration was alleging an “emerging alliance between drug smugglers and arms dealers in support of terrorists and guerrillas.”
Ironically, Tambs himself later played a role in the Iran-Contra scandal, helping to traffic drugs and guns for the violent anti-communist Contras in Nicaragua. The full scope of the CIA’s involvement in bringing the Contra’s drugs into the US remains unclear, but at the very least it is obvious that officials like Tambs helped support the group. Thus, the idea of “narco-terrorism” was created by someone who participated in it.
The “narco-terrorism” label has always been controversial. Drug traffickers are motivated solely by profit, while “terrorists” and “guerillas” are motivated by goals like ideology and territory. Though some armed groups in Latin America engaged directly in the drug trade, many others either had no involvement or were involved only by “taxing” traffickers for revenue. “Narco-terrorism” misrepresents this extortion racket between two opposed groups as an alliance of like-minded organizations. By “combining two threats that have traditionally been treated separately,” critics argue that the term can “complicate rather than facilitate discussions on the two concepts…”
Many of the largest foreign interventions in US history created new pathways for drugs to reach the country while also generating new demand among traumatized veterans.
Far from being allies, rebels and drug traffickers often fought one another. Most rebels were communist outsiders, while many traffickers hoped to build ties with Colombia’s elite. The rebels sometimes imposed wage and price controls in coca-growing communities in hopes of building popular support, rules which ate into the traffickers’ profits. These tensions eventually escalated into violent conflict, and it was later revealed that dozens of officers from the US-backed Colombian military had collaborated with the traffickers in a campaign to crush the rebels. The rebels and traffickers were “staunchly opposed social forces” in the words of journalist Collet Merrill, meaning that “narco-guerilla” was “less an analytical model than a political slogan.”
The Trump administration’s definition of “narco-terrorism” seems even less useful than its original meaning. Speaking to the United Nations, a US delegate commented on the recent terrorist designations of cartels to say: “When you flood American streets with drugs, you are terrorizing America...” Similarly, the White House claims that drug imports “constitute an armed attack” all by themselves. In other words, traffickers no longer need to have any “terrorist” connections to be considered “narco-terrorists,” because all drug trafficking is now considered “terrorism.”
The language used in our debates about drug trafficking is poisoned by this type of imprecision. Even the concept of a “cartel” is suspect, as it often portrays loose networks of organized criminals cooperating with state authorities as well-coordinated paramilitaries that lack government connections. This sort of terminology survives because of its usefulness to government officials in search of ready-made explanations, officials who did not want to draw attention to their own role in the global drug trade.
Stop Hitting Yourself
Many of the largest foreign interventions in US history created new pathways for drugs to reach the country while also generating new demand among traumatized veterans, leading some scholars to conclude that “every major foreign war of the past century produced a domestic drug crisis.” At times, the US government has even purposefully supported drug traffickers to advance its short-term objectives.
During the Vietnam War, the CIA allegedly facilitated drug trafficking in Southeast Asia to help fund anti-communist organizations, helping to turn the region into the source of the majority of the world’s heroin by the early 1970s. Much of this heroin made its way to US soldiers stationed overseas and, through the trafficking efforts of troops like Army Master Sergeant Ike Atkinson, to the United States itself. The subsequent rise in drug addiction helped inspire the original “War on Drugs,” a war which the US fought on both sides of.
The pressures of the Drug War helped bring Mexican “cartels” into existence. One of the first such organizations—the “Guadalajara Cartel”—emerged as an organized effort to survive the joint US-Mexican attempts at destroying the then-disorganized drug trade. Later efforts to support foreign security forces backfired when some of the Mexican soldiers who received special forces training in the US defected to form their own cartel: “Los Zetas,” which carried out a wave of extreme violence in Mexico in the 2000s-2010s.
With our focus exclusively on military efforts to disrupt the supply of drugs, little time is spent on the real solution: reducing demand.
Similarly to Vietnam, the War in Afghanistan created new channels for heroin trafficking. After the Taliban lost control of the country, a US government report noted that Afghanistan saw “increased poppy cultivation and drug production as farmers and traffickers took advantage of the power vacuum…” The growing opium trade corrupted the highest levels of US-backed leadership in Afghanistan. As a result, US-occupied Afghanistan was “producing nine times more heroin than the rest of the world combined,” according to journalist Seth Harp.
Sensing a profitable opportunity to connect this supply of heroin with the demand at home, a group of current and former US troops began smuggling the opium into the world’s largest military base, Fort Bragg. These smugglers then moved the drugs around the country by plugging into the distribution network of the Los Zetas cartel (whose founders had coincidentally received training at Fort Bragg decades earlier). US military interventions thus produced all of the necessary ingredients to inflame the opioid crisis: a flood of new heroin production abroad, flights to smuggle it into the US, and a cartel with the skills to distribute it.
These are just a few of the moments throughout history when the US government facilitated drug trafficking all over the world. More recently, the US provided extensive support to Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández despite widespread allegations that he was connected to cocaine trafficking. Only after he left office did the US government bother to indict him for “protect[ing] some of the largest drug traffickers in the world,” helping to bring more than 400 tons of cocaine into the country. In an absurd act of hypocrisy, President Trump recently pardoned Hernández on the grounds that the convicted drug trafficker was “treated very harshly and unfairly.”
Believe it or not, this was not even the first time that something like this had happened. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration tolerated the obvious drug trafficking of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega because of his cooperation with their geopolitical priorities. As with Hernández, the government even provided cover for Noriega by claiming that he helped fight against drug trafficking. But when US officials finally lost patience with him near the end of the decade, a Panamanian official predicted that “suppressing drug trafficking might be the Reagan administration’s excuse for an invasion.”
Though George H.W. Bush claimed that the 1989 invasion of Panama was intended in part “to combat drug trafficking,” others were skeptical. The Academy Award-winning documentary The Panama Deception argued that the true purpose of the invasion was to reinforce US dominance over the Panama Canal (a topic which is now an obsession of President Trump’s). Though this regime change operation against a former ally serves as a classic example of how military interventionism creates its own villains, it is now often remembered as a success, even earning praise from Republicans arguing in favor of Trump’s airstrikes. Panamanian diplomat Carlos Ruiz-Hernández recently criticized this comparison as a “fundamentally flawed” analogy which “persists because it’s emotionally satisfying for US hawks.”
Get Real
By misunderstanding and overemphasizing a select few of the groups involved in the drug trade, the “narco-terrorism” myth redirects our attention away from more significant causes of drug trafficking. First, the focus on supply distracts us from the far more important question of demand—so long as drug addiction remains a major problem in this country, the drugs will always find a way in. Additionally, the exclusive focus on non-state actors distracts us from the role that our own government plays in facilitating the global drug trade.
Framing “Operation Southern Spear” as a battle against “narco-terrorists” is a desperate attempt to commit new violence using old excuses, one which ignores the security state’s history of creating its own enemies. In truth, this is a domestic problem as much as a foreign one. Of those convicted of drug trafficking in the US, 80% are citizens. MS-13, now designated as a foreign terrorist organization, was founded in Los Angeles and spread abroad by the US government’s deportation practices. More than two-thirds of the Mexican cartels’ guns come from the US, and US military weaponry regularly shows up in the hands of cartel members.
With our focus exclusively on military efforts to disrupt the supply of drugs, little time is spent on the real solution: reducing demand. In fact, the Trump administration has undermined real public health solutions by repeatedly firing employees at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, discouraging lifesaving harm reduction efforts, and proposing massive cuts to drug abuse services. No amount of immoral and illegal airstrikes will ever save even a fraction of the lives lost by these decisions.
Perhaps the greatest flaw of “narco-terrorism” is that it encourages us to believe that complex human problems have simple military solutions. Sociologist C. Wright Mills once astutely criticized US elites for accepting a “military definition of reality,” a distorted perspective which prevents them from imagining policy solutions that do not involve military intervention. So long as the government insists upon seeing non-military problems through a military lens, they will never be solved.
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Trump's Threat to Invade Venezuela Is Indeed About Drugs–Oil, That Is
This is not about stopping the flow of dangerous drugs, it is about actually increasing the flow of the dangerous drug some pushers want to keep us all hooked on.
Nov 28, 2025
President Donald Trump’s saber-rattling about potential military action in Venezuela is indeed about drugs, but not cocaine. It is about a far more dangerous drug that former President George W. Bush admitted (in his 2006 State of the Union address) the US is addicted to—oil.
Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world—300 billion barrels—even larger than reserves in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Trump and his oil industry friends may imagine that by deposing President Nicolas Maduro and installing a friendly government there, the US would have unlimited access to this huge oil reserve, which is five times larger than the proven reserves in the US. Never mind the fact that for any hope of future climate stability, most of this oil needs to stay right where it is, in the ground.
We've seen this tragic play before. The Bush administration justified its disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq with the pretext that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction which, as it turned out, it didn't. And as US Central Command commander General John Abizaid admitted about the Iraq war at the time: “Of course it’s about oil, it’s very much about oil, and we can’t really deny that.” The invasion killed tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians, and destabilized the broader Middle East region for years.
And now here we go again. A similar pretext—this time “drug interdiction”—is being used to justify a potential US invasion and regime change in Venezuela. But this is not about stopping the flow of dangerous drugs, it is about actually increasing the flow of the dangerous drug some pushers want to keep us all hooked on—oil. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro recently stated on the US-Venezuela threat: “Oil is at the heart of the matter.”
Instead of admitting their addiction, the damage it causes, and committing to recovery, hard core junkies are always desperate for more supply. It seems Mr. Trump and his oil industry friends are the most dangerous narco-traffickers we need to worry about.
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Legal Cannabis Is Powering the US Economy; Washington Needs to Catch Up
The question is no longer whether the United States should move toward legalization, but why federal law still treats a mainstream industry as a crime.
Nov 26, 2025
This fall, the Drug Enforcement Administration is anticipated to decide whether to reclassify cannabis at the federal level. Nearly 90% of Americans support cannabis legalization, 47 states have legalized it for medical use, and over 20 allow for recreational use. The question is no longer whether the United States should move toward legalization, but why federal law still treats a mainstream industry as a crime.
In 2024, Americans spent just as much on cannabis as they did on beer. The US legal cannabis market is worth more than $35 billion and expanding quickly. Yet, under federal law, cannabis is still a Schedule I drug, grouped alongside heroin and considered to have “no medical use.” It’s a Nixon-era relic that has remained unchanged since 1971—by those outdated standards, cocaine and crystal meth are classified as less harmful Schedule II substances. That classification is not only outdated, but it also creates an untenable mismatch between federal policy and economic reality.
Today, cannabis is one of the fastest-growing industries in America, employing nearly 500,000 people—more than the beverage and tobacco manufacturing industries combined—and generating billions in annual tax revenue. Federal legalization would strengthen an already significant engine of economic growth. The cannabis industry added roughly $115 billion to the US economy in 2024 alone and is expected to reach $45 billion in legal sales by 2025. It is one of the few sectors that is both labor-intensive and domestically produced—every gram sold is grown, tested, packaged, and distributed in the US.
All of this growth has happened without access to the basic tools every other sector relies on: banking, capital markets, credit cards, and institutional investment. Because cannabis remains federally illegal, businesses can’t take out conventional bank loans, list on US stock exchanges, or process credit card payments. Dispensaries operate as cash-only businesses, creating daily security risks for employees and customers. Entrepreneurs cannot access Small Business Administration loans or standard insurance. Even employees, founders and executives in the cannabis industry often struggle to qualify for personal mortgage loans due to the industry they work in.
Rescheduling would not be radical. It would be a recognition of the obvious: Cannabis is already part of American life and the American economy.
The result is a thriving yet hobbled industry, competing on an uneven playing field. Legal operators are forced to navigate a different set of regulations, packaging requirements, and facilities for every state where they conduct business, while the illicit market still accounts for an estimated $50 billion in unregulated sales each year and has no problem selling cannabis to the American youth. The DEA’s forthcoming decision offers an opportunity to modernize this system before it calcifies further.
The cultural and economic shifts are here to stay. Cannabis is mainstream. It’s integral to how Americans relax, socialize, and take care of themselves. It’s in our music, our fashion, our film, and our homes. What’s missing is a legal, regulatory, and financial framework at the federal level that reflects reality.
The public health case is equally clear. Consistent national standards would strengthen consumer safety and transparency, closing the gap between legal and illicit markets. Rescheduling would also remove barriers to research and innovation. The current classification makes it nearly impossible for US scientists to study cannabis at scale, leaving critical medical discoveries to foreign and underfunded research programs.
In a country where millions of adults use cannabis for anxiety, pain, and sleep, and where opioid dependency remains a public health crisis, the restriction is not just outdated, but negligent.
A recent study published by the American Journal of Health Economics found that states with legal cannabis programs reduced opioid prescriptions by up to 22%. The American Medical Association also found that cannabis helps cancer patients reduce opioid use throughout their treatments.
Legalization would also improve public safety. With access to banking, dispensaries could move away from cash-heavy operations that make them frequent targets for robbery. National standards for labeling, potency, and contaminants would protect consumers and build trust. And as we’ve already seen in legal states, underage use declines when cannabis is regulated.
Rescheduling would not be radical. It would be a recognition of the obvious: Cannabis is already part of American life and the American economy. In 2023, the Department of Health and Human Services formally recommended to the DEA that cannabis be rescheduled—a historic acknowledgment that federal law is out of step with science, public opinion, and economic reality. Even the Supreme Court has noted the “contradictory and unstable” relationship between federal and state cannabis laws.
This is one of the few policy issues with broad bipartisan support. Former President Joe Biden campaigned on rescheduling cannabis in 2020. So did President Donald Trump in 2024. With the DEA’s decision imminent, the window for meaningful modernization has never been clearer.
The cultural reality is undeniable. The economic opportunity is massive. The public mandate is clear. The question is no longer whether cannabis belongs in American life—it already does. The question is when federal law will finally catch up.
It’s time for Washington to finish what the majority of states have already started: Bring cannabis policy into alignment with science, economics, and public consensus.
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