Tag: the war on (some) drugs

President Trump Rebukes Colombia Over Drug Trafficking Cooperation

The United States has placed Colombia on its list of countries that “fail to co-operate” in fighting drug trafficking — the first time since 1997 — blaming President Gustavo Petro’s government for record cocaine output, according to the Financial Times.

In a statement to Congress, Donald Trump said Colombia’s “coca cultivation and cocaine production have reached record highs” and that the government “failed to meet even its own vastly reduced coca eradication goals.” He argued Bogotá had undermined “years of mutually beneficial co-operation between our two countries against narco-terrorists.”

Colombia, the world’s top cocaine producer, had 253,000 hectares of coca under cultivation in 2023, yielding more than 2,600 tonnes, according to UN figures.

Petro, a former guerrilla who has floated legalising cocaine, denounced the US move: “Decades of our police, soldiers and civilians [dying] . . . in order to stop drugs reaching North American society,” he said, insisting “Everything we do really isn’t about the Colombian people — even if they get affected. It’s about stopping North American society from smearing its noses.”

The Financial Times writes that while criticising Petro’s approach, Trump praised Colombia’s security forces, who he said “continue to show skill and courage in confronting terrorist and criminal groups.” Washington also issued a waiver allowing continued programs that “advance US interests,” potentially preserving military co-operation.

The move reflects rising tensions. For years, Colombia was Washington’s closest anti-narcotics ally, receiving more than $10bn in US military aid under Plan Colombia (2000–2016). But Petro has shifted focus from eradication campaigns to intercepting drug shipments at sea, while violence and production have grown under his “Total Peace” policy.

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FDA Warns Companies Against False and Misleading Drug Ads

Federal regulators sent dozens of letters to companies in September warning them that their advertisements for drugs are misleading and could lead to repercussions unless fixed.

The Food and Drug Administration on Sept. 16 released 65 letters it sent on Sept. 9 to companies, including Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk. President Donald Trump signed a memorandum that day directing officials to enforce existing rules surrounding direct-to-consumer advertising for drugs.

In letters to Eli Lilly, FDA officials said that advertisements for weight loss products, including one that originally appeared in a special held by Oprah Winfrey, did not present people with accurate information about possible side effects.

The ad that aired during the Oprah special “creates a misleading impression regarding the safety of Zepbound and Mounjaro, which are drugs with multiple serious, potentially life threatening risks,” officials with the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research said in one of the letters. They said that people who seek medical treatment for obesity or Type 2 diabetes “should receive truthful and non-misleading information.”

An Eli Lilly spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email: “FDA’s correspondence to Lilly addresses three interviews conducted by independent media outlets. These interviews were not advertisements, and Lilly had no editorial control over them.

“We remain committed to providing patients with accurate, reliable information that empowers them to make informed healthcare decisions in partnership with their physicians.”

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Legalizing Medical Marijuana Is Linked To Reduced Use Of Tobacco And Amphetamines, New International Study Shows

There’s a “strong negative association” between tobacco use and legal medical marijuana sales, according to a new international study—indicating a “strong potential substitution effect” where people choose to use cannabis where it is allowed instead of smoking cigarettes.

The study, based on data from 20 countries, also found that amphetamine use is “negatively associated” with medical cannabis sales, “suggesting substitution dynamics.”

The researchers additionally concluded that a “well-regulated [medical cannabis, or MC] market can generate sustained economic benefits, emphasizing the need for comprehensive legal frameworks that address licensing, production standards, and access pathways,” adding that “removing barriers to access and enhancing consumer education will support the development of a responsible and sustainable market.”

The analysis also showed “a sustained growth trajectory” in medical cannabis sales after legalization, finding that the policy change is “associated with an average annual increase of 26.06 tons of MC sales in legalizing countries.” After excluding the U.S., which the researchers called “a major outlier in market size,” there was “a slightly lower average effect of 20.05,” which “still supports the persistent market expansion.”

The authors, based in Germany and Lebanon, cautioned that “given the ecological nature of the design, these results should be interpreted as population-level associations rather than individual-level causal effect.”

“Nonetheless, they highlight the potential economic relevance of cannabis legalization in expanding regulated markets and reshaping consumer behavior,” the paper says. “The study contributes to debates on legalization, public health, and economic policy by providing empirical evidence on the associations between legal reforms and market dynamics.”

The study comes amid new research indicating that marijuana use is linked to lower alcohol intake and diminished cravings in heavy drinkers, according to a new federally funded scientific paper.

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Trump Admin Expands Targets Across Global Narco Networks 

President Trump’s “America First” strategy – also described as “Hemispheric Defense” and alignes with the century-long Monroe Doctrine of the early 1800s – has expanded through increased border security, elevated pressure on allies such as Canada and Mexico, punitive measures against adversaries including China, Venezuela, Colombia, and Afghanistan, and declaring fentanyl crisis as well as both a public health crisis and national security threat, while also expanding list of nations designated as major drug transit or illicit drug-producing countries. 

A White House statement to begin the week announced that the Trump administration invoked Section 706(1) of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2003 (Public Law 107-228) to designate Afghanistan, The Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Burma, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Colombia, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Jamaica, Laos, Mexico, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela as major drug transit or illicit drug-producing countries.

Trump’s new designation for the countries listed above provides the administration with additional leverage, including the ability to impose severe consequences on foreign assistance programs if those governments fail to meet counterdrug obligations.

In effect, the designation gives Trump another bold tool to bring into line countries it views as complicit in the global drug trade network with drugs that eventually end up on the streets of U.S. cities, which have fueled an overdose crisis killing more than 100,000 Americans annually.

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Trump Has a Habit of Asserting Broad, Unreviewable Authority

In separate attacks this month, the U.S. military blew up two speedboats in the Caribbean Sea, killing 14 alleged drug smugglers. Although those men could have been intercepted and arrested, President Donald Trump said he decided summary execution was appropriate as a deterrent to drug trafficking.

To justify this unprecedented use of the U.S. military to kill criminal suspects, Trump invoked his “constitutional authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive” to protect “national security and foreign policy interests.” That assertion of sweeping presidential power fits an alarming pattern that is also apparent in Trump’s tariffs, his attempt to summarily deport suspected gang members as “alien enemies,” and his planned use of National Guard troops to fight crime in cities across the country.

Although Trump described the boat attacks as acts of “self-defense,” he did not claim the people whose deaths he ordered were engaged in literal attacks on the United States. His framing instead relied on the dubious proposition that drug smuggling is tantamount to violent aggression.

While that assumption is consistent with Trump’s often expressed desire to kill drug dealers, it is not consistent with the way drug laws are ordinarily enforced. In the absence of violent resistance, a police officer who decided to shoot a drug suspect dead rather than take him into custody would be guilty of murder.

That seems like an accurate description of the attacks that Trump ordered. Yet he maintains that his constitutional license to kill, which apparently extends to civilians he views as threats to U.S. “national security and foreign policy interests,” transforms murder into self-defense.

Trump has asserted similarly broad authority to impose stiff, ever-changing tariffs on goods imported from scores of countries. Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected that audacious power grab, saying it was inconsistent with the 1977 statute on which Trump relied.

The Federal Circuit said the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which does not mention import taxes at all and had never before been used to impose them, does not give the president “unlimited authority” to “revise the tariff schedule” approved by Congress. The appeals court added that “the Government’s understanding of the scope of authority granted by IEEPA would render it an unconstitutional delegation.”

Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) against alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has also run into legal trouble. This month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit concluded that Trump had erroneously relied on a nonexistent “invasion or predatory incursion” to justify his use of that 1798 statute.

Trump argued that the courts had no business deciding whether he had complied with the law. “The president’s determination that the factual prerequisites of the AEA have been met is not subject to judicial review,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign told the 5th Circuit.

Trump took a similar position in the tariff case. As an opposing lawyer noted, it amounted to the claim that “the president can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, for as long as he wants, so long as he declares an emergency.”

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FDA targets Hims & Hers, posts more than 100 letters to drugmakers

The Trump administration is cracking down on pharmaceutical advertising and they are specifically targeting telehealth companies that promote unofficial versions of weight loss medications.

More than 100 letters were posted by the Food and Drug Administration to drugmakers and online prescribing companies. Hims & Hers built a multibillion-dollar business around weight loss interventions. The letters warned the companies, including Hims & Hers, to remove “false and misleading ” promotional statements and advertising from their website.

Your claims imply that your products are the same as an FDA-approved product when they are not,” states the warning letter, dated Sept. 9.

Hims said Tuesday that it “looks forward to engaging with the FDA.”

“Our website and our customer-facing materials note that compounded treatments are not approved or evaluated by the FDA,” the company said in a statement.

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The Strange Case of Summary Execution of Eleven Suspects in Caribbean Waters

The U.S. government has been executing suspected terrorists without indictment, much less trial, since the dawning of the Drone Age, on November 3, 2002. On that day, the George W. Bush administration used a Predator drone to dispatch six alleged terrorist suspects in a car driving down a road in Yemen, far from any battlefield. This unprecedented act of extrajudicial execution was precipitated by the attacks on U.S. soil of September 11, 2001, which set the stage for a new, sanguinary, period of military history.

Officials such as John Brennan, Barack Obama’s CIA director, and former CEO (from 2005 to 2009) of a private military contracting firm, the Analysis Corporation, assumed the lethal authority to incinerate potentially dangerous human beings, including U.S. citizens such as Anwar al-Awlaki. Officials at the helm of what became a literal killing machine adamantly insisted on the necessity of deploying deadly force wherever they ordered missile strikes. The psychological climate in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, powerfully suppressed criticism, and the new techno-killers enjoyed the benefit of the doubt on the part of both the mainstream press and most of the populace. After years of launching missiles covertly, under a pretext of State Secrets privilege, the summary execution of suspects came eventually to be openly acknowledged by President Obama and widely accepted as completely normal, a standard operating procedure, whether carried out by the Pentagon or the CIA.

Even while thus terrorizing millions of innocent people, the perpetrators of the relentless targeted killing campaigns always characterized them as antiterrorism initiatives. As the nugatory, counterproductive “Global War on Terror” dragged on, fomenting anger among locals and creating more radical jihadists than it eliminated, the so-called battlefield expanded to include countries where war was never officially waged, as it had been by President George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq. The inhabitants of Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Mali, and other parts of the Middle East and Africa were also regularly terrorized by the lethal drones flying above their heads, never knowing when or where the next missile would make contact with human beings on the ground.

Each successive president insisted that the AUMFs (Authorizations for Use of Military Force) granted by Congress to George W. Bush in 2001 and 2002 sufficed to make any suspected terrorist or associate identified by U.S. government authorities fair game for summary execution. Among the “authorities” enlisted to create kill lists were privately contracted analysts with financial incentives to locate persons suspected of terrorist acts, whether past or, preposterously, potentially in the future. Despite a long list of documented incidents involving the U.S. government’s annihilation of entirely innocent persons, and often their families as well, such as the case of Zemari Ahmadi in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 29, 2021, so-called suspects continue to be “lit up” by missile strikes, provided only that whoever happens to be the commander in chief either agrees with the lethal determination or has delegated his war-making authority to those in his employ.

Many of the missiles have been launched by remote control, from unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs), a.k.a. remotely piloted aircraft (RPAs), to eliminate persons in places where no ground troops would ever have been sent in to kill the suspects, because, among other reasons, they were not acting as armed combatants at the time of their death. The targets were not provided with the opportunity to surrender (most were not armed anyway) and in fact met their demise at the hands of the drone warriors only because of the development of the technological capacity to kill by remote control. No officials in the executive branch of the federal government ever publicly debated whether rejecting the advances made in the Magna Carta, the presumption of innocence, the very concept of due process, and the post-World War II Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a good idea. Instead, We Kill Because We Can became the U.S. government’s guiding principle throughout the Global War on Terror, as it evidently continues to be today.

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Trump reveals secret third blast against Venezuelan boats as intensifying drug war prompts talk of invasion

American forces have blasted three Venezuelan vessels out of Caribbean waters in recent weeks, President Donald Trump told reporters Tuesday, revealing the expanding scope of his military campaign against  ‘narco-terrorists.’

The commander-in-chief posted a video to his Truth Social account on Monday evening showing U.S. military action against a Venezuelan boat in the Caribbean.

It was the second apparent operation against what the administration claims are narcotic traffickers bound for America.

But not even a day later, the president divulged that an additional third strike was carried out on a ship after receiving a question about rising tensions with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

‘We knocked off, actually three boats, not two, but you saw two,’ the president said on the White House‘s front lawn just before departing for the U.K. with his wife, Melania Trump.

‘And the problem is, there are very few boats out in the water. There are not a lot of boats out in the water. I can’t imagine why. Not even fishing boats. Nobody wants to go take a fish,’ the president continued.

The video Trump posted on Monday evening shows a boat out at sea before being engulfed in flames following a military strike. Three confirmed narcotics traffickers were killed in the operation, the president claims.

The Trump administration is restricting congressional oversight of recent military strikes on Venezuelan vessels by barring senior House staffers from classified briefings, according to The Intercept.

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How The Drug War Benefits Donald Trump And The State

From the standpoint of many U.S. 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 U.S. government enacts drug laws that make it illegal to possess, ingest, or distribute drugs that have not been approved by the U.S. 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.

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So Much for the Nobel Peace Prize

The first seven months of Donald Trump’s second term as president has seen a remarkable transformation. In his inaugural address, Trump said that “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.” He promised to “measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end – and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.” “That’s what I want to be,” Trump said, “a peacemaker.”

Seven months later, Trump changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. It is not just a change of name. It is a change of “attitude,” that rebrands the image the Trump administration wants to project to the world. Trump’s executive order says the name change “conveys a stronger message of readiness and resolve compared to ‘Department of Defense,’ which emphasizes only defensive capabilities.”

From 1789 until 1949, the department was named the Department of War. As the Department of War, the U.S. won every war, Trump said. “And then we decided to go woke, and we changed the name to Department of Defense,” Trump said.” Pete Hegseth, whose sign on his door was quickly changed to “Secretary of War,” says that the U.S. is “going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct. We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders.” That is not the language of a President or an administration that wants to be remembered as “a peacemaker” that is judged by “the wars that we end” and “the wars we never get into.”

Donald Trump has made no secret of his ambition to win a Nobel Peace Prize. He has brought it up and campaigned for it in interview after interview and speech after speech. In June, Trump took to Truth Social to boast of his role in brokering peace between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. “I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for this, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the War between India and Pakistan, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for stopping the War between Serbia and Kosovo, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for keeping Peace between Egypt and Ethiopia… and I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for doing the Abraham Accords in the Middle East… No, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do, including Russia/Ukraine, and Israel/Iran… but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me.”

But the change of names to the Department of War betrays that campaign. And it is more than just a change of name. The rebrand reflects the ever bloating role of the military in the Trump administration to push out diplomacy and law enforcement. Trump pushed aside diplomacy that was working with Iran with an unprecedented bombing of Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities. And he has pushed aside law enforcement with military action against drug cartels in Latin America.

On September 2, the U.S. claims to have identified a speed boat that was running drugs for a Venezuelan drug cartel. They did not turn to law enforcement, as has, until now, been standard operating procedure by having the National Guard interdict the boat and arrest the suspected drug smugglers. Instead, either an attack helicopter or an MQ-9 Reaper drone fired on it, killing all 11 of its crew. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking for an administration that wants to be a “peacemaker” that is judged by “the wars we never get into,” explained that “What will stop them is when we blow up and get rid of them.”

In order to prevent the flow of drugs into the United States, Trump and his Department of War have sent three Aegis guided-missile destroyers, several P-8 spy planes and at least one nuclear-powered fast attack submarine. Apparently insufficient to deal with the problem, the U.S. has now sent ten F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico to help carry out the operation against the drug cartels.

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