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fentanyl
The Venezuela Escalation Ignores a Long History of US Hypocrisy on Drugs
For decades, the most powerful state actors facilitating and protecting narcotics trafficking have not been Washington’s adversaries but Washington itself.
Dec 30, 2025
Every accusation is a confession. This is clearly true of the Trump administration’s insistence that Venezuela operates as a “narco-state,” exporting terrorism to the US via fentanyl, now labeled as a “weapon of mass destruction.” The charge is not only false, given that virtually no fentanyl enters the country from Venezuela, but transparently political and pretextual.
This hypocrisy was made unmistakable with President Donald Trump’s recent pardon of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in 2024 in a US federal court on drug trafficking charges. Hernández presided over a regime long treated as a strategic ally within Washington’s regional security architecture, a reminder that the label of “narco-state” is applied not according to fact but according to the shifting imperatives of US imperial power.
This accusation collapses further when placed in broader historical context. For decades, the most powerful state actors facilitating and protecting narcotics trafficking have not been Washington’s adversaries but Washington itself. Throughout the Cold War and the so-called War on Drugs, the United States, above all through the CIA, repeatedly subordinated drug enforcement to geopolitical priorities, enabling narco-networks so long as they advanced perceived US interests.
These dynamics became especially pronounced in the 1980s, with disastrous consequences both at home and abroad. The decade marked an intensification of the Cold War under Ronald Reagan. His administration insisted that communist “advances” could not only be contained but rolled back. Upon taking office, Reagan launched his promised global offensive, intervening wherever alleged Soviet influence appeared. Turning a blind eye to drug trafficking became a central feature of this crusade, as anti-communism consistently took precedence over anti-narcotics efforts.
Carter and the Crisis of Confidence
Reagan’s rise followed a brief but meaningful thaw. In the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War, Americans’ faith in political institutions had been profoundly shaken. Years of economic stagnation, inflation, and the reverberations of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo convinced many that the postwar promise of endless upward mobility, the ideological core of the American dream, was collapsing.
It also became impossible to ignore that the US was not only failing to deliver on its economic promise but had also long abandoned the democratic values it claimed to champion. In 1975, the Church Committee laid bare what much of the Global South had known for decades: The United States had been operating as a global anti-democratic force, orchestrating coups and assassinations, sabotaging leftist movements (at home and abroad), and imposing political outcomes that served the interests of American capital rather than the aspirations of people around the world.
Imperial powers had long leveraged drugs to consolidate geopolitical control, from alcohol’s role in Indigenous dispossession to Britain’s forced export of opium into China.
Then, in 1977, came Jimmy Carter. Carter promised a new foreign policy rooted not in reflexive anti-communism but a commitment to human rights. In doing so, he broke, at least in his rhetoric, with decades of bipartisan Cold War orthodoxy. For the first time, a president openly challenged the axiomatic belief that every leftist movement was a Kremlin proxy that demanded immediate US intervention.
As Carter put it, “We are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear,” acknowledging that “for too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs.” Washington, he admitted, had “fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water,” a strategy that had ultimately backfired.
Carter would also come to critique not only the misguided zealotry of US foreign policy but, to an extent, capitalism itself. As he turned toward the root causes of the nation’s intersecting crises, he warned that “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” and that “human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.” Conservatives responded with derision, quickly dubbing it the “malaise speech,” a framing that captured many Americans’ refusal to confront the deeper structural problems Carter had identified.
The Reagan Rollback
Reagan ran on this response. He rejected everything Carter had come to represent. Carter, for his part, presided over a series of perceived foreign policy blunders, not all of them self-inflicted, including the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, the Iran Hostage Crisis, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and his actual record was far less radical than his rhetoric suggested. But Reagan seized the moment, casting Carter as weak, naïve, and insufficiently committed to American power and the American way of life, and he won in a landslide.
When Reagan assumed office in 1981, he claimed a mandate to pursue his promised program of unfettered capitalism at home and militant anti-communism abroad, raising the military budget to what were then unprecedented levels. Yet even with this political momentum, he faced constraints. Among them was a public skepticism toward foreign intervention, labeled “Vietnam syndrome,” which posed a direct challenge to his effort to reassert American military primacy on the global stage.
Reagan, however, was not inclined to let public sentiment, democratic constraints, or questions of legality impede his objectives. This saw its most notorious expression in the Iran-Contra Affair, in which administration officials sold weapons to Iran, then in a war of attrition with Saddam’s Iraq, whom the US was backing, in exchange for assistance pressuring Hezbollah to release American hostages in Lebanon, while simultaneously generating funds to support the Contras in Nicaragua. Both were illegal: Congress barred aid to the Contras with the 1982 Boland Amendment, and arms sales to Iran violated US law once it was designated a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984.
Drug Traffickers and “Freedom Fighters”
Another method in which Reagan sought to bypass political constraints on his policies was through the funding of “freedom fighters” in covert proxy wars, an expensive endeavor financed not only by taxpayer dollars but also by enabling allies to engage in drug trafficking. The tactic was hardly new. Imperial powers had long leveraged drugs to consolidate geopolitical control, from alcohol’s role in Indigenous dispossession to Britain’s forced export of opium into China.
Nor was this unprecedented for the United States. During the American war in Vietnam, US intelligence enabled local traffickers to fold an existing regional drug trade in support of their counterinsurgency effort. As historian Alfred McCoy has demonstrated, this helped transform the Golden Triangle into the world’s largest opium-producing region. Estimates during the conflict suggested that up to 25% of U.S. troops stationed in Southeast Asia used heroin in some units, and thousands returned home with addictions seeded with the complicity of Washington.
The “war on drugs” has never been a genuine campaign to curb the sale or use of narcotics or to protect Americans. Rather, it has functioned as a mechanism for advancing American power.
Under Reagan, such complicity only grew. As the administration aggressively expanded punitive anti-drug policing at home under the banner of the “War on Drugs,” it tolerated and indirectly facilitated the cultivation and transport of narcotics when doing so served Cold War priorities. This dynamic was most visible in two of the bloodiest proxy wars of the Reagan era: the Soviet-Afghan War and the Contra War in Nicaragua.
After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States funneled billions of dollars to the mujahideen in an attempt to mire the Soviets in a Vietnam-like quagmire, ultimately producing the most expensive covert operation in US history. It was clear at the time that this policy risked significant “blowback,” although the result was much worse than imagined, but the chance to bleed the Soviets was not one Reagan was willing to forgo.
The extent of US support, indispensable to sustaining the anti-Soviet insurgency, led political scientist Mahmood Mamdani to refer to the insurgency as an “American Jihad.” But the flow of money and arms was not enough on its own, and drug trafficking helped to supplement the effort. Before the war, heroin production in Afghanistan was negligible. By 1989, Afghan-Pakistan supply routes dominated global markets, destabilizing the country and region and creating the conditions for a catastrophic CIA and drug-money enabled, warlord-led civil war that ultimately led to the Taliban’s consolidation of power in 1996.
This heroin not only fueled death and destruction in Afghanistan, where the American-Afghan victory was paid for with the lives of millions of Afghan civilians, but it also boomeranged back. As Mamdani documents, during the Soviet-Afghan jihad, this heroin came to account for some 60% of the heroin circulating on US streets. The consequences were immediate and severe. As a White House drug-policy adviser acknowledged at the time, New York City witnessed a 77% increase in drug-related deaths.
In Central America, a parallel “logic” emerged. The Contras needed cash, and cocaine networks supplied it. The Kerry Committee, convened in the wake of Iran-Contra, and tasked with investigating these links, concluded in 1989 that there was substantial evidence the Contras engaged in drug smuggling and that US officials allowed them to operate without interference.
This support for traffickers unfolded at the very moment the US was intensifying its domestic crackdown on cocaine. During this period, lawmakers and prosecutors entrenched and weaponized legal asymmetries between crack and powder cocaine, driving the militarization of policing and expanding infrastructure of mass incarceration, a campaign that disproportionately targeted and destabilized Black communities across the country.
When Gary Webb, an investigative journalist for the San Jose Mercury News, revealed in 1996 an even more direct connection between CIA awareness of Contra-linked cocaine profits entering the United States and the simultaneous domestic “War on Drugs,” the backlash was swift. Government officials and major media outlets launched a concerted campaign to discredit him, all but ending his career. Nonetheless, many of his findings would soon be corroborated, at least in part, by internal investigations conducted by the CIA and Department of Justice.
The Failures of the “War on Drugs”
Trump’s latest invocation of drugs as a pretext for war with Venezuela is unconvincing on its face. But situated within the long historical record of US complicity in, or calculated indifference to, drug trafficking when it served strategic ends, even when those decisions inflicted direct harm on Americans, it becomes little more than farce. For decades, Washington has treated narcotics not as a public health challenge but as a political instrument, inflating them into an existential national security threat when expedient and minimizing them when inconvenient.
The “war on drugs” has never been a genuine campaign to curb the sale or use of narcotics or to protect Americans. Rather, it has functioned as a mechanism for advancing American power. This history makes clear that the US cannot credibly condemn other nations for their entanglements in the drug trade until it reckons with its own record as a facilitator of state-sponsored terrorism and narco-trafficking.
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Fentanyl Is Dangerous, But It Is No Weapon of Mass Destruction
The ramifications of misinformation concerning fentanyl are clear in the recent US military bombings of boats in the Caribbean and the US government’s threats against the sovereign nation of Venezuela.
Dec 18, 2025
On December 15, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Designating Fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction.” The order declares that “Illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic. Two milligrams, an almost undetectable trace amount equivalent to 10 to 15 grains of table salt, constitutes a lethal dose.” If it was not already clear and despite many think pieces and obituaries to it, the US government continues its failed War on Drugs.
This designation of fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction has been nearly a decade in the making across multiple presidential administrations and with bipartisan support and media complicity. The people of the US have been groomed for this moment since 2015. On March 18, 2015, the Obama administration’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) issued a nationwide alert that “fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin and accidental inhalation of airborne powder can also occur.” The DEA doubled down on this threat over a year later, when, on June 10, 2016, they released a roll call video and press release reiterating that “Fentanyl Exposure Kills.” The press release notes that “A very small amount ingested, or absorbed through your skin, can kill you.”
The last statement is only partially true. It is important to understand that, if used without a doctor’s supervision, fentanyl is a dangerous drug that has led to hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths over the last decade. However, doctors, pharmacologists and their associations, with Dr. Ryan Marino at the forefront, have long noted that fentanyl cannot kill you through passive exposure or absorption through the skin except under rare circumstances. For example, Dr. Marino noted that “you would probably have to be in a wind tunnel with dunes of fentanyl around you” in order to overdose from exposure to fentanyl in the air. Chad Sabora, a harm reduction expert, put fentanyl in his hand to show that skin exposure is not killer. A case study where a researcher spilled a “large dose” of fentanyl “at a site with some skin barrier compromise, a factor that can increase fentanyl absorption,” experienced “no clinical effects of opioid exposure.” There have been zero reported cases of someone touching fentanyl and dying.
Despite the scientific debunkings of police claims that fentanyl exposure kills, as Alec Karakatsanis so aptly shows in his work, the media report what the cops tell them without hesitation and context. Police would send out a press release reporting that one of their officers overdosed from fentanyl exposure and the media shared it unchecked. In 2020, research showed that the fentanyl exposure panic had “appeared in 551 news articles spanning 48 states” and that these reports were shared over 450,000 times on Facebook “potentially reaching nearly 70,000,000 users" from 2015 to 2019.
The most egregious example for this narrative comes from Bloomberg in 2018. The headline reads “This Killer Opioid Could Become a Weapon of Mass Destruction,” accompanied by a picture showing a grim reaper figure spreading powder, implied to be fentanyl, over a large city.
The media and the police had zero excuses here. In 2017, the American College and Medical Toxicology and the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology released a joint statement that said, “the risk of clinically significant exposure to emergency responders is extremely low.” Yet, in tandem, the police and media circulated the false narrative of fentanyl exposure. This continues into the present. In 2022, Zachary Siegel wrote in the New York Times of the continued trend of viral fentanyl exposure police videos. Just this past summer in my home state of South Carolina, the media reported on a sheriff’s deputy who was administered Narcan after collapsing from “fentanyl exposure.” Though the media now will sometimes report, after the initial story, that experts dispute the claims of overdose through fentanyl exposure, the damage is done. In fact, the story linked above quotes an experienced fentanyl user who debunks the claim. However, in a country where research has shown that most consumers of news only read the headline, who is reading this debunking on the third paragraph?
Today, we are seeing the impact of the distribution of the “fentanyl exposure” myth by police and media. In addition to this recent executive order, states have been proposing and passing laws that criminalize people who “expose” first responders to fentanyl. Other states, like North Carolina, have a “Death by Distribution” law where a person can be charged with second-degree murder if they sell drugs that lead to an overdose. South Carolina created a new “fentanyl-induced homicide” crime that penalizes someone for “lacing” drugs with fentanyl with 30 years in prison. After its passage, the current South Carolina Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate praised this as a response to the “chemical warfare on our streets.” In West Virginia, the state passed Lauren’s Law, which requires a 10- to 40-year sentence for the delivery of drugs that results in death.
Potentially even more consequential, however, is the impact this narrative is having on the US government’s imperialist objectives. The US government constantly associates fentanyl as a problem facilitated by China and/or a problem at the US/Mexico border. Former Republican Mike Garcia of California, when in office, authored a resolution titled “Condemning the Chinese Community Party for its role in the fentanyl crisis.” This past September, the House passed the “Stop Chinese Fentanyl Act,” which, according to its author, Rep. Andy Barr (R-Ky.), will “hold the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its affiliates accountable for fueling America’s fentanyl crisis.” The bill “would impose sanctions,” a popular tool of aggression by the US government, “on Chinese officials who intentionally avoid taking action to prevent the trafficking of fentanyl.” Finally, the US House released a report accusing the CCP of intentionally fueling the crisis. While absolving the US pharmaceutical companies responsible for actually fueling the US opioid crisis, the US government is using fentanyl to prime its people for war with China.
Moreover, the ramifications of this propaganda are clear in the recent US military bombings of boats in the Caribbean and the US government’s threats against the sovereign nation of Venezuela. In his UN General Assembly speech on September 23, 2025, President Trump said, “we've recently begun using the supreme power of the United States military to destroy Venezuelan terrorists and trafficking networks led by Nicolas Maduro.” Despite the DEA never including Venezuela in its annual National Drug Threat Assessment reports, the Trump Administration continues its attempts to overthrow the Maduro government, efforts that date back to 2019, this time with fentanyl and drugs more broadly as its justification. To date, the US government has killed more than 95 people in more than 24 boat strikes.
The US government’s use of illicit drugs to legitimize its actions is far from new. The Trump administration’s Executive Order declaring fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction is a continuation of the destructive and misguided War on Drugs as continued justification for US imperialist objectives and the expansion of domestic surveillance and criminalization. The government, police, and media are complicit in US war crimes abroad, the potentially impending invasion of Venezuela, and the overdose crisis that is killing many people in the US through its peddling of fentanyl disinformation.
Recently, drug overdose deaths sharply declined 25% over one year. Early evidence suggests this is, in part, due to the harm reduction approaches to drug use. However, reduction in drug overdose deaths is not the US government’s goal. The goal appears far more sinister.
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Trump Declares Fentanyl a Weapon of Mass Destruction as His 'Lawless Killing Spree' Escalates
One expert said the Trump White House is "replaying the Bush administration's greatest hits as farce."
Dec 16, 2025
US President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order designating fentanyl a "weapon of mass destruction," a move that came hours before his administration carried out another flurry of deadly strikes on vessels in the eastern Pacific accused—without evidence—of drug trafficking.
Trump's order instructs the Pentagon and other US agencies to "take appropriate action" to "eliminate the threat of illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals to the United States." The order also warns of "the potential for fentanyl to be weaponized for concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries."
Brian Finucane, a senior adviser with the US Program at the International Crisis Group, said in response to the executive action that Trump is "replaying the Bush administration's greatest hits as farce," referencing the lead-up to the Iraq War. Trump has repeatedly threatened military attacks on Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico, citing fentanyl trafficking as the pretext.
Ahead of the official signing of the fentanyl order, an anonymous State Department official suggested to the independent outlet The Handbasket that the directive's "purpose is a combination of designating fentanyl cartels as terrorist organizations and creating justification for conducting military operations in Mexico and Canada."
The official also suspected "that it will be used domestically as justification for rounding up homeless encampments and deporting drug users who are not citizens," reported The Handbasket's Marisa Kabas.
Hours after Trump formally announced the order, the US Southern Command said it carried out strikes on three boats in the eastern Pacific, killing at least eight people.
"The lawless killing spree continues," Finucane wrote late Monday. "The administration justifies this slaughter by claiming there’s an armed conflict. But it won’t even tell the US public who the supposed enemies are. Of course, there’s no armed conflict. And outside armed conflict, we call premeditated killing murder."
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, argued that "Trump's classification of fentanyl as a 'weapon of mass destruction' will do nothing to salvage the blatant illegality of his summary executions off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia because fentanyl largely enters the United States from Mexico."
On Dec. 15, at the direction of @SecWar Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted lethal kinetic strikes on three vessels operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations in international waters. Intelligence confirmed that the vessels were transiting along known… pic.twitter.com/IQfCVvUpau
— U.S. Southern Command (@Southcom) December 16, 2025
Monday's boat bombings brought the death toll from the Trump administration's illegal strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, which began in early September, to at least 95.
Writing for Salon last week, Drug Policy Alliance executive director Kassandra Frederique and former counternarcotics official James Saenz observed that "the US is bombing boats that have nothing to do with fentanyl or the overdose crisis devastating American communities."
"These recent military actions have negligible impact on the transshipment of illicit drugs and absolutely no impact on the production or movement of synthetic opioids. And fentanyl, the synthetic opioid responsible for most US overdoses, is not produced in Venezuela," they wrote. "These developments raise serious questions about the direction of US drug policy. We must ask ourselves: If these extrajudicial strikes are not stopping fentanyl, then what are the motives?"
"History should be a warning to us. In the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte, the drug war became a tool of fear," Frederique and Saenz added. "Thousands were killed without trial, democratic institutions were hollowed out, and civil liberties stripped away—all while drugs continued to flow into the country."
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