The Bitter Truth Behind Trump's "War on Drugs"

In an unremarkable neighborhood just beyond the U.S.-Mexican border, a deadly business is thriving. Here, in one of the countless cartel safe houses, the next shipment of fentanyl for American streets is being prepared. The synthetic drug, fifty times stronger than heroin, is carefully sealed in plastic before disappearing with a quiet splash into a car’s gas tank. It is a devious but effective smuggling method – one of many.

“Jay,” a drug dealer from Los Angeles, watches the scene with a calm gaze. He knows the business, he knows the demand. He sells 100,000 pills a week in the American Northwest, cleverly distributing them across multiple cars to minimize risk. His verdict on Donald Trump’s “war on the cartels” is sobering: “He tried it last time and it didn’t do anything. There’s always demand. And where is it the biggest? In the U.S.”

These are words spoken with an unsettling sense of normalcy – as if it were just business, not a deadly game with human lives. But that’s exactly what it is: a lucrative business that neither Trump’s bombastic threats nor high tariffs can stop. While the U.S. government claims to be tackling the roots of the drug problem, it ignores a crucial factor: its own responsibility.

An artificial enemy for political purposes

Donald Trump presents himself as an tireless fighter against the fentanyl crisis. His response? Military operations against alleged drug boats from Venezuela, currently 87 people killed, punitive tariffs on Mexican goods, Canada is not spared in his rhetoric either, for reasons that likely only Trump himself knows, intensified border controls and aggressive rhetoric aimed at the cartels. Yet a look at reality shows that his policy is not only ineffective, it diverts attention from the real causes. The fentanyl crisis did not begin with the cartels, it began with the systematic downplaying of opioid painkillers within the United States itself. As early as the late 1990s, drugs such as OxyContin were aggressively marketed by pharmaceutical companies and approved with little scrutiny by the government. Doctors prescribed them on a massive scale, millions became addicted, creating the perfect breeding ground for the illegal opioid market that the cartels later exploited.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum put it plainly in June: “The US government must take responsibility for the opioid crisis.” Instead of confronting its own failures, Trump is now projecting the problem onto Venezuela – a politically convenient scapegoat that also happens to have oil. Is Venezuela really flooding the United States with drugs, or is security policy being staged as theater? Anyone who looks at sober data rather than headlines sees a very different picture. Venezuela is not a significant producer of cocaine. It is primarily a transit country – a corridor fed by its porous, thousand kilometer border with Colombia, the world’s largest cocaine producer. Estimates by the US government placed the volume of cocaine transiting Venezuela in 2020 at roughly 200 to 250 tons per year – about one tenth of global supply. That is substantial, but it is not the epicenter. Other routes move far larger volumes. In 2023, according to our reporting, around 1,700 tons passed through Guatemala. Geography is also decisive in the logistics. The main flow toward North America runs through the Pacific. From 2019 to 2023, roughly three quarters of all shipments were recorded along the Pacific corridor, primarily originating from Colombia and Ecuador. The Caribbean was the smaller, though more visible, stage. The same applies to fentanyl – the true killer in the US opioid crisis. Venezuela is little more than a rhetorical lightning rod. The synthetic drug is produced almost entirely in Mexico, using precursor chemicals that often come from China. It is well documented that cocaine in the United States is sometimes mixed with fentanyl. But that cutting happens in Mexico or on US soil in thousands of small laboratories, not in Caracas.

The cruel reality on American streets

The real consequences of this failure are visible in places like Kensington, Philadelphia – one of the largest open-air drug scenes on the East Coast. Here, Rosalind Pichardo saves lives. In a worn notebook, she documents every overdose she has reversed with naloxone, also known as Narcan. The number? 2,931 in the past six years. Each number represents a person, a desperate fight for survival.

She remembers a seven-year-old overdose patient. A little girl, blue in the face, poisoned by her own father’s drugs. Two doses of naloxone brought her back. A pregnant woman, six months along, also saved. But for many, help comes too late. Bodies lie in the streets – on sidewalks, in front of metro stations, in doorways. A man sits motionless in a wheelchair, a dollar bill in his hand, his leg amputated – one of the gruesome consequences of the new drug cocktail of fentanyl and the animal tranquilizer xylazine.

Pichardo sees the patterns. Where heroin once dominated, fentanyl now reigns. And when that disappears, it will be replaced by something else. “The war on drugs has never worked and never will,” she says. Because as long as there is despair, there will be people seeking escape in chemical numbness – and others profiting from it.

While Trump delivers tough talk about fighting drugs, the fentanyl business is thriving more than ever. In Los Angeles, the price of a single pill has fallen to as little as 1.50 dollars – a clear sign of an undiminished supply. The cartels have long since developed strategies to bypass tighter border controls. They use US citizens as couriers, mix their product with other substances, and stay one step ahead of law enforcement. Even expanded surveillance measures, such as CIA drones over Mexican drug laboratories, have done little to change that reality. The Mexican government has nonetheless taken action, including stricter controls on chemical imports from China – the primary source of fentanyl’s precursor materials. But as long as demand in the United States remains unabated, the supply will remain secure as well.

The truth is bitter: Trump’s “solution” of redirecting the fentanyl crisis toward Venezuela is nothing more than a media driven diversion. He needs enemies to distract from failure, from decades of mistakes in domestic policy, from the real crisis itself. The major surge in the United States began in 2018, during Trump’s first term – a crisis that is now deeply embedded in American society. In a country where the health care and social systems are chronically underfunded, where Robert Kennedy Jr. has been installed as health secretary and operates like a butcher, where mental illness often goes untreated, where economic insecurity and lack of prospects push millions toward addiction, drug use remains high – regardless of which substance happens to dominate at any given time.

The survivors of Kensington know this. Rosalind Pichardo knows this. The cartels know this. Only Donald Trump pretends not to know.