Inside the new terrorism of drug prohibition

On February 25, 2025, the U.S. State Department under the direction of Marco Rubio accused several major drug cartels of being terrorist organizations. The accused include the Cártel de Sinaloa, Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), Cártel del Noreste, the Gulf Cartel, La Nueva Familia, Michoacana, and Cárteles Unidos. Each now bears the label of Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) or Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs).

Designating groups as FTOs and SDGTs makes a convenient political weapon out of the word “terrorist.” Individual terrorists are rare, so there is a belief that such individuals represent something unique or abnormal. In practice this is not the case. People have propensities. Wars against drug users and alleged terrorists fail because normal people are predisposed to do what they do. They take drugs or they commit violent and irrational acts against political foes. Individual predilections are inalterable since they predate the behavior in question and because pre-existing temperaments are a big part of being human.

American politicians speak of a war on terror when they really mean a war on certain non-conformists or anti-authoritarians who commit violent acts. In contrast to wars on terror, drug wars target not only drug cartels and their members but also drug consumers who may or may not make informed personal choices about their drug use, and who are typically non-violent toward politicians and common citizens. Despite what Marco Rubio or anyone else believes, drug smugglers and consumers are not in any way terrorists or terrorist collaborators.

Terrorism is defined as politically related violence. The first recorded instance of terrorism was in 6 CE when Rome imposed direct taxation on Judea. In retaliation a Jewish sect known as the Zealots infiltrated Roman cities and assassinated Roman soldiers along with the military’s Jewish collaborators. The Zealots believed that submitting to foreign taxation and rule implied accepting human rulers instead of a god, and that it threatened Jewish identity and culture. The Sicarii, or dagger men, a Zealot subgroup, specialized in assassinations and carried out attacks during crowded festivals for extra effect. Since the first century terrorism has been frequent. The world’s largest terrorism data set, the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) has catalogued over 190,000 terrorist incidents since 1970. Hundreds of distinct perpetrator groups are spread throughout 163 countries comprising 97.7-percent of the world’s population.

The distinction between groups and individuals is critical for understanding terrorism. Individuals tend to get along together when they first encounter one another in a peaceful setting, while differing groups of people typically do not. Group behavior can turn tribal. One result is the emergence of terrorism which poses an opportunistic disregard and reckless contempt for the lives of innocent people it imperils, while the primary aim of the terrorists themselves is merely to gain the attention of an already fearful public. Recent acts of terrorism conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense involved the planned and deliberate bombing of suspected drug smuggling boats off the coast of Venezuela. The government gained worldwide attention from aerial photography depicting precision strikes on fast-moving waterborne targets, exactly as needed for its drug war propaganda. The attacks pose a terrorizing prospect for non-commercial fishermen operating in the Caribbean.

In addition to murdering operators of fishing boats, kidnapping a foreign leader is considered a criminal and terrorist act under Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. Kidnapping foreign leaders violates the established legal order. Anti-drug zealots within the U.S. government are culpable for numerous war-like crimes which lately include aiding and abetting the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores by staging drug busts on alleged narco-boats in which exonerating evidence and potentially innocent victims are sent to the bottom of the ocean never to be seen again.

The labeling of drug cartels as FTOs and SDGTs by Rubio’s State Department is absurd. Drug cartels do not bomb fishing boats. Drug smugglers do not terrorize American citizens by attacking them during holiday festivals. Drug kingpins do not assassinate or kidnap political figures, they buy them off instead. Any act of violent terrorism by the cartels against American citizens or citizens anywhere would be bad for business and the cartels know it. The principal aim of smugglers is to deliver products to people who want them. If cartels didn’t smuggle drugs then someone else would.

What emerged from the boat strikes is that practically no one believes the political or military actions taken in Venezuela were initiated because of illegal drugs smuggling by Venezuelan officials. What remains in the end is the sad picture of a broken government that believes its dirty tricks using faked drug accusations still work in the information age. The original master dirty trickster of them all, Richard M. Nixon of Watergate fame, the president who originally declared war on drugs on June 17, 1971, by calling illegal drugs a national security crisis, would have tears in his eyes were he alive today to witness the ineptitude of the current government’s drug war propaganda. The United States is reduced in its greatness by these events to a nation whose terrorist influenced public officials commit human rights crimes while filming it all in glorious detail for the convenience of the federal prosecutors who will one day put them on trial.