The United States kidnapped Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, in January 2026 on now-crumbling allegations that he headed the fictional “Cartel of the Suns.” Washington framed Maduro as a narco-terrorist kingpin to justify what was effectively an act of war disguised as law enforcement, but prosecutors are now quietly backing away from the bolder claims used to rationalize his abduction. The irony, of course, is that the United States has spent decades enabling narcotrafficking in the name of democracy.
For 40+ years Washington waged its unsuccessful War on Drugs alongside its oft-illegal Cold War pursuits. In the American hierarchy of foreign-policy values, anticommunism trumped human rights, basic decency, and even narcotics enforcement itself. On an ongoing basis, the U.S. overlooked, tolerated, collaborated with, and sometimes directly supported drug traffickers when they served broader geopolitical objectives.
Historian Alfred W. McCoy’s exhaustive study, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, chronicles U.S. Cold War strategy’s repeated alignment with major heroin traffickers in pursuit of anti-communist objectives. In Europe, U.S. intelligence collaborated with Corsican underworld figures in Marseille to undermine communist labor unions and secure strategic docks during the early Cold War. During Washington’s Indochina rampage in the 1960s and 70s, the CIA consistently tolerated, protected, or worked alongside allied militias and warlords deeply entangled in the heroin trade in Laos, Burma, and Thailand. Throughout the Cold War, narcotics networks repeatedly flourished in the shadows of Washington’s covert warfare and anti-communist operations.
Nancy Reagan championed the “Just Say No” program to America’s youth in the 1980s, but Ronald Reagan had grander plans. The Iran-Contra affair tends to steal the spotlight when it comes to Reagan’s transgressions in Nicaragua—if not Central America—but Reagan’s eagerness to arm the daycare-bombing, civilian-torturing Contra insurgency didn’t end there. With the blessings of U.S. intelligence, Nicaraguan expats financed the Contra insurgency by trafficking cocaine into the U.S., while the CIA protected Contra-linked traffickers and obstructed investigations.
The controversy exploded when journalist Gary Webb broke the story with his 1996 “Dark Alliance” series in the San Jose Mercury News. Webb revealed that U.S. intelligence permitted Contra affiliates to move cocaine into the United States while softening, ignoring, or obstructing investigations and prosecutions. Contra cocaine didn’t just powder the noses of caucasian club-goers—it contributed to the rise of the 1980s crack epidemic. Webb revealed what Los Angeles kingpin Freeway Rick Ross later confirmed: Ross built his national crack empire with Contra cocaine. Webb’s larger question was whether the CIA knowingly enabled those networks or merely tolerated allies who happened to be traffickers—it turns out, it was both.
The reaction was explosive. Webb’s reporting was initially praised, but Washington denied culpability and legacy media quickly cannibalized him. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times aggressively attacked the series for alleged overstatements and evidentiary gaps, particularly regarding the crack epidemic connection. Webb’s editors distanced themselves, his career collapsed, and he spent years struggling professionally after leaving the Mercury News. Webb later reported being followed and harassed by intelligence-linked figures, and in 2004 he was found dead from two gunshot wounds to the head. The coroner compliantly ruled it suicide.
Other journalists pursuing related Iran-Contra stories faced similar editorial pressure, marginalization, and accusations of conspiracy thinking. The Webb affair became a case study in how national security reporting is disciplined when it threatens core assumptions about U.S. foreign policy.
The Organization of American States, the Global Commission on Drug Policy, and similar institutions acknowledged that the “War on Drugs” had failed. As the world’s largest narcotics consumer market, the United States could never meaningfully suppress supply without reducing domestic demand; so long as American demand remained high, new suppliers would always emerge. The logical solution was treatment, decriminalization, economic reform, and demand reduction; but that approach collided with Washington’s post-Cold War needs. With the collapse of the USSR, the anti-communist justification for deep military and intelligence integration across Latin America began to evaporate. The drug war offered a replacement framework: a new permanent emergency preserving arms sales, intelligence networks, military aid, and security-state relationships built during the Cold War. The same repressive apparatuses once justified by anti-communism—surveillance, disappearances, torture, militarized policing—could simply be rebranded as anti-narcotics operations. Latin American leaders targeted for regime change could likewise be branded traffickers to provide moral cover for intervention.
Capitalism demands its cut. Plan Colombia, launched in 2000 as a joint U.S.-Colombian anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency initiative, was publicly framed as a campaign against coca production and guerrilla groups. Critics argued it often functioned as a de facto land-clearing mechanism in resource-rich regions coveted by mining, oil, agribusiness, and infrastructure interests. Entire communities reported poisoned water, destroyed crops, illness, and forced displacement as aerial herbicide fumigation blanketed alleged coca-growing zones. Human-rights groups and critical scholars argued anti-drug operations frequently justified militarization and depopulation: label rural inhabitants coca growers or guerrilla collaborators, drive them off the land through fumigation and violence, then open emptied territory to multinational extraction and “development.” The formula survived the Cold War almost unchanged—where Washington once branded inconvenient rural populations “communist guerrillas,” they are now repackaged as narco-traffickers, narco-terrorists, or cartel collaborators.
On the domestic front, mass incarceration became economically and politically entrenched. Waves of legislation starting in the 1980s put more nonviolent offenders behind bars, and the U.S. surpassed apartheid South Africa and the Soviet Union to boast the world’s largest prison population. The American incarceration rate jumped 325-400 percent in the late 20th century, from 220 per 100k in 1980, to 683 in 2000, to 755 in 2008, and leveling off in the 600s. State prisons grew 700 percent from the 1970s onward, and prisoners were commodified in a uniquely American fashion as both the prison labor sector and the private prison industry exploded.
A serious reduction in drug demand and decriminalization would dramatically reduce prison populations, threatening a carceral system intertwined with private prison contracts, prison labor economies, police funding structures, and politicians financially dependent on “tough on crime” constituencies and donors. The drug war in the United States survived not because it succeeded, but because too many institutions benefited from its continuation. In this sense, the U.S. is winning the War on Drugs—according to its beneficiaries, not its publicly stated goals.
- This article originally appeared in the New Hampshire Gazette.