What a drug war leaves behind

At the height of his power and wealth, so-called Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar brought four hippopotamuses to Hacienda Nápoles, his rural estate. After he was killed in 1993, the animals roamed freely and eventually reproduced. They dwelled in the forests, eating native plants and destroying habitats – a vivid and voracious legacy of the drug war if there ever was one.

I’ve been thinking a lot about legacies as of late. What will come in the wake of Trump and the Republican Congress’ nuevo drug war policies? What will be left behind? 

In the first dizzying weeks of Trump’s second term in office, the metaphors don’t hold. Drinking from a firehouse. Controlled chaos. Flooding the zone. Calling for tariffs on countries to stem the flow of fentanyl. Labeling cartels terrorist organizations.  Slowing the flow of federal funding that supports many organizations working to address overdose and substance use disorder.

And then the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Halt all Lethal Trafficking of Fentanyl (HALT) Act, a bill that classifies all fentanyl-related substances as Schedule 1, stymies research, and creates community-destroying mandatory minimum sentences.

A tragedy is unfolding – a performance meant for a base of supporters who support “tough on crime” policies no matter what, or who have lost loved ones to the overdose crisis and believe tough on crime to be the only solution.

As he signed the executive order labeling cartels “foreign terrorist organizations” and launching a renewed Drug War, President Trump raised the stakes with dramatic hyperbole: “They’re killing 250,000, 300,000 American people a year, not 100, like has been reported for 15 years. It’s probably 300,000.”

The number of people dying from overdose is high but not that high – and overdose deaths have been dropping significantly. One of the biggest factors could be the shift in supply. There’s significantly less fentanyl in the Ohio drug market. Indeed, there’s evidence that the Sinaloa cartel prohibited the production of it in 2023. 

The anti-fentanyl warriors are not wrong that the supply is the problem, but the way they want to address it is a fool’s errand. We have seen this before and it didn’t go well. 

The supply will just begin to fill with other things, such as the industrial chemical BTMPS, which has been found mixed with fentanyl in California. Harm reduction activists have called for safe supply for years because in reality, despite what the DEA or your local law enforcement will tell you, there’s no restriction on what’s on the streets.  

On the CBC podcast “On Drugs,” activist and journalist Garth Mullins said that what we have now is the “Wild West.” “Anything gets sold as anything,” he said, going on to address the folly of passing blanket bans only to let organized crime flood the market with new, potentially more harmful substances. 

During Prohibition, Mullins noted, bootleggers produced alcohol that led to blindness and death for some who consumed it. “Instead of the government killing people with their policies and creating drug lord kingpins and stuff, we could actually decide how we want to do this,” he said.

The policies we’ve fostered in this country since the late 19th century and in earnest the past 50 years have harmed not only people who use drugs and their communities but also people in those places where the militaristic opposition to drug trafficking is greatest. And right now, that’s Mexico. 

Certainly, harm reduction interventions have been saving lives. In a brilliant report titled “Peak OD Phenotypes” by the Opioid Data Lab, the authors note that we can’t discount the myriad interventions and the life-saving invisible work done by people who use drugs and their allies. 

They write: “Our takeaway is that we cannot simply ignore local impacts; the cumulative effect of interventions cannot possibly be zero. It may be modest, but not zero.”

Headed by the Trump administration, this reinvigorated drug war will certainly lead to more people in prisons, more militarized law enforcement in the U.S., and more military interventions abroad. But it could also hobble the local work of harm reduction as federal funding to organizations with boots on the ground dries up.

The overdose crisis has already caused enough harm, we don’t need any more.

In Colombia, authorities are working furiously to solve the hippo problem. They have sterilized some of them, relocated others to sanctuaries. There’s fear that if they don’t, the hippos will displace otters and manatees and caimans. In 2023, estimates put the total number of hippos living in the wild around 200. 

These invasive giants – cocaine hippos as some have called them – carry their girth across the countryside, eating native plants, destroying ecosystems, lolling about in the rivers with their big mouths wide, all snout and teeth.