Donald Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, has announced that Trump’s tariffs against Mexico and Canada should not be considered a trade war but rather part of America’s “war on drugs.” As soon as Mexico and Canada stop the flow of fentanyl into the United States, he says, the tariffs will be lifted.
Politicians and bureaucrats are well-known for making nonsensical statements, but this one is a real doozy. How can an intelligent person make such a ridiculous statement?
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick
The war on drugs has been going for decades. That’s because American consumers want drugs and are willing to pay for them. To meet that enormous demand, other people sell them the drugs they want to buy.
Decades ago, U.S. officials decided that Americans should not be ingesting substances that are harmful to them — well, except for tobacco and alcohol, which Americans, for some reason, are permitted to ingest. To prevent Americans from ingesting unapproved substances, U.S. officials made it a criminal offense to possess or distribute such substances.
But a big problem arose: The criminalization of possession of certain substances did not end the big desire among Americans to continue ingesting such substances.
Another big problem arose: The criminalization of selling the drugs did not end the desire to make money from continuing to sell drugs to people who continued desiring to consume them.
Thus, drug prohibition failed to end either the possession or the sale of drugs. Instead, what it did was to create a massive black market in drugs, one in which the sellers consisted of an unsavory element in society, one that consisted of cartels, drug gangs, and people willing to employ violence in this illegal marketplace.
Needless to say, that phenomenon angered U.S. officials. They couldn’t believe that people were violating their drug laws. So, they responded in the predictable way — by cracking down on both users and sellers. Mandatory-minimum sentences. Asset-forfeiture laws. Inordinately high prison sentences. Exorbitant fines.
The drug-war crackdown goes back decades. It has involved DEA agents, federal prosecutors, and federal judges. They were all firmly committed to “winning” the war on drugs. Recently, with the passing of the actor Gene Hackman, I thought of an Academy Award winning movie in which he starred called The French Connection. It was about the drug war. It came out in 1971! Yes, the drug war goes back more than 50 years, without victory!
But it actually goes back further than that. When I was growing up in the 1960s, my father served as the U.S. magistrate in my hometown of Laredo, Texas, which is located on the U.S.-Mexico border. Most of the criminal defendants who would be brought before him for a preliminary hearing were people accused of illegally possessing, importing, or selling drugs. That was some 60 years ago!
Just a few days ago, Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum, in a desperate attempt to placate Trump to avoid his imposition of tariffs on Mexico, sent 29 Mexican drug-war defendants to Trump. One of them was Rafael Caro Quintero, who allegedly orchestrated the kidnapping, torture, and execution of DEA agent Kiki Camarena in 1985 — while Camarena was fighting the drug war as an American DEA agent in Mexico. Yes, 1985! In Mexico! That was 40 years ago! Camarena was as devoted to winning the war on drugs as his DEA compatriots.
When I was practicing law in Laredo in the 1970s and 1980s, there was a federal judge in San Antonio named John Woods. He was known as “Maximum John” because his policy was to mete out the highest possible prison sentence to drug-war defendants. Like other federal judges and like federal prosecutors then and now, he was doing his part to win the war on drugs. He was later assassinated as part of a drug conspiracy.
Why is all this important? Because the war on drugs will never — and can never — be won. There will always be people who wish to consume drugs. It’s just one of those facts of life that one must finally accept. Moreover, so long as there are people who wish to ingest drugs, there are going to be people who want to make money by selling drugs.
Therefore, the choice is between (1) leaving people alone who wish to ingest drugs and leave them free to purchase their drugs from reputable companies in a peaceful and legal market or (2) criminalize the possession and sale of drugs, which produces a black market of cartels, drug gangs, and massive violence.
What Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and his boss President Trump fail to realize is that by tying Trump’s tariffs to the decades-long, ongoing, never-ending war on drugs, they are essentially making their tariffs perpetual as well. Come to think of it, maybe do they do realize that.
