Nearly $13 billion in U.S. taxpayer money has gone to fund worldwide counternarcotics activities since 2015, often coming at the expense of efforts to end global poverty while at the same time contributing to international human rights violations and environmental harms. That’s according to a new report issued on Wednesday by two organizations critical of the war on drugs.
The 47-page document, jointly published by the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) and Harm Reduction International (HRI), consists of what it describes as a “follow-the-money data analysis” that looks at anti-drug spending allocations across various government departments as well as case studies from Colombia, Mexico and the Philippines.
Authors wrote that the analysis “demonstrates how U.S. assistance has supported and expanded destructive and deadly anti-drug responses in low- and middle-income countries around the world.”
The $13 billion figure, the report says, “is more taxpayer money than the U.S. government spent over that decade on primary education or water supply and sanitation in low- and middle-income countries” and also greater than U.S. foreign aid over the same period “for all of Southern Africa or Central America.”
It’s also “about 300 times the total amount of U.S. foreign aid over that decade for women’s rights organizations in low-and middle-income countries around the whole world,” it adds.
DPA said in an email about the report that the topic is “especially timely as President-elect Trump and members of his administration threaten to ramp up the global war on drugs and increase punitive responses to international drug markets.”
For fiscal year 2025 alone, the report says, President Joe Biden “requested $1 billion for international ‘counternarcotics’ activities,” about half of which ($480 million) would be allocated to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), while about $350 million would have gone to the State Department.
“The role of the United States in exporting the destructive war on drugs to other countries is unparalleled,” DPA and HRI said in an executive summary of the findings. ”
Hellbound and Down 