The War on Drugs Meets The War on Terror
America's go-to solution: Call 'em terrorists and blow 'em up. And I review CNN's Town Hall on fentanyl as a tangled knot of untenable contradictions.
During a CNN Town Hall about America’s fentanyl crisis, Senator Lindsey Graham’s various positions and utterances illustrate the irreconciable tensions and profound contradictions that lawmakers face in today’s war against drugs.
After being asked questions about what the government can and should do to address the fentanyl crisis, Senator Graham oscilated from expressing deep sympathy for families who’ve lost loved ones from drugs, to calling the DEA’s “law enforcement model” a failure, to saying that fentanyl is not a drug, it’s a “weapon of mass destruction,” to saying the drug war will “never be won at the border,” to telling a grieving parent that he adamantly opposes supervised consumption sites, to then saying his plan is designate Mexican drug cartels and Chinese chemical manufacturers as foreign terrorists and he aims to deploy military forces that’ll blow up the cartels (nevermind that Senators have virtually no power to send the military into Mexico).
Is your head spinning yet? First, Lindsey Graham is actually right. The law enforcement model hellbent on disrupting the supply of drugs does indeed not work. And he’s right again that the drug game will never be won at the border. But instead of reflecting on why those two points are true, he doubles down on the very things that he says don’t work.
“What did President Clinton do in Colombia?” Sen. Graham asked rhetorically. Sen. Graham answers: President Clinton sent U.S. military forces into Colombia to uproot cocaine traffickers. In Sen. Graham’s world, this was a success. In reality, he’s referencing PLAN Colombia, which today is recognized as a complete and utter failure and waste of billions of dollars.
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