If winning the drug war means removing all access to illegal drugs then the odds of victory are close to zero. Supply‑side enforcement in the U.S. is unreliable. It fails to reduce drug availability or overall rates of addiction. Drugs are too profitable, too easy to smuggle, and too easy and cheap to replace in the event of captured shipments or arrests of smugglers. Smugglers are also easy to replace.
Under prohibition drug scheduling and enforcement priorities are driven by law enforcement, not health agencies, and not by scientific evidence that might otherwise eliminate punitive, culturalized, racialized, and ineffective efforts criminalizing addiction or use of a drug. Addiction is a human health problem, not a military target.
Enormous social costs are associated with prohibition strategies. There is no reliable estimate of the number of drug war related deaths that have occurred since President Richard M. Nixon declared his war on drugs in 1971 because no country retains the statistics for fatalities related to drug wars.
Despite lacking certain vital statistics drug wars promote increases in state corruption as well as producing drug crimes that lead to bloody extra‑judicial killings. Community disruptions originate with crime syndicates fighting over drug territories while inflicting their self-made justice onto their syndicate members or other people who betray their trust. Drug enforcement funding in the U.S. that began in 1981 with $1 billion increased to roughly $10 billion in the mid‑1990s while cocaine and heroin remained widely available and cheaper than before.
Recent U.S. military involvement in Ecuador’s drug enforcement has escalated to become joint operations targeting alleged “narco‑terrorist” groups with lethal force. Ecuador’s newly elected 35-year-old president, Daniel Noboa, equates organized crime with terrorism to justify military solutions over policing or social policy. He approved a military approach by the U.S. as a way to counter drug cartels in his country.
After a 2025 election that was too close for his own comfort, President Noboa concluded his political future will be secured by being tough on crime. The U.S. attack on Ecuadorian drug smugglers represents a unique political opportunity. Using drugs as an excuse he has suspended civil liberties in key regions of Ecuador and hired U.S. mercenary Erik Prince as his security consultant. Among the suspended civil liberties are citizens’ rights involving warrantless home searches, militarization of domestic policing, freedom of movement and assembly, protections against arbitrary detention, judicial oversight of security operations, and the arbitrary labeling of local gangs as terrorist organizations. Ecuador has begun construction of a high‑security El Salvador-style prison that will one day enable mass detention of prisoners minus any due process of law.
Problems occur with attempts to wipe out cartels. The most likely result of a war on cartels is the ongoing creation of new cartels. New cartels will adapt to new circumstances. Syndicates will continue to survive by using more sophisticated and less detectable smuggling strategies. Any progress made in taking on Ecuador’s cartels or those of any other country will be fleeting. Where there is a drug demand there will be a supply.
If winning a drug war means creating a huge enforcement bureaucracy that fails to eliminate most illegal drug use while providing a steady job and lifetime benefits to its federal and state employees then their jobs and pensions become the victory rather than that of limiting crime. There are no other reliable incentives for prohibitionists to win a drug war. Despite a decades long enforcement strategy an estimated 1.5 million Americans still have continuing access to cocaine no matter what the government does to stop it. Drug enforcement devolves into an ineffective and endless stalemate.
Drug enforcement propaganda depicting drug war successes can overstate the success. The contraband displayed by Attorney General Pam Bondi in a 2025 news release is exceptional in its size and potency, however the odds the drug enforcement agents seen in AG Bondi’s video will ever again be involved in a bust as large or larger are basically zilch. Large scale busts are rare.
Public health approaches to drugs consistently outperform punitive ones because there is a health focus on reducing a person’s physical and mental demand for the drug. If a medical cure for addiction emerges within the next few years it will make current drug treatment facilities medically obsolete. Thirty-five cents of every dollar the U.S. spends on drug enforcement goes to drug treatment that can fail to fully suppress physical or mental cravings for a drug. The most effective drug treatments offer a legal and medically prescribed drug substitute for the addictive substance. There is evidence that psychedelics can help reduce drug cravings, but access to psychedelics is difficult for many people because the drugs are currently being listed and prohibited on Schedule 1 of the controlled substances list. The scheduling list continues to grow as more chemical variations of listed drugs are created or discovered.
Winning the U.S. government’s war on certain drugs means that many people are foregoing effective medical remedies simply because a few bad actors can’t handle their drugs and a host of politicians fails to understand drugs. If the same set of rules were applied to owning automobiles no one would be allowed to drive — think of the children. What remains is a largely ineffective drug war industrial complex coupled with an unwillingness to move forward by implementing better health measures and fewer Kafkaesque bureaucracies.
Sara Carter is the new Drug Czarina (Director of ONDCP). She is a former journalist and Fox News contributor who has covered drug smuggling stories from Latin America and the Middle East. Carter was assigned the directorship of the ONDCP on January 6, 2026, and she is pushing religion as the way to win the drug war. She says she wants to make faith central to the strategy, as if it hasn’t been tried before:
YouTube: Trump Administration Makes Faith Central in Strategy to Combat Illicit Drugs
New opioid discovery DFNZ has effective pain relief but does not cause respiratory depression or tolerance:
Psilocybin is found to be an effective treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD):
A study in Brazil ranked drugs according the frequency drugs were found in postmortems of homicide victims in different geographic areas: