Poisoning America
“They are poisoning America,” the United States government says, referring to illegal drugs, especially opioids, both naturally derived and synthetic. Beyond the ignorant misunderstanding that, to them, “America” means only the United States, perhaps the first question such a claim calls for is: Why do they swallow the poison? Or, put another way, why are there so many people addicted to illegal drugs in the United States? The government of that country should answer this question if its intention to reduce those addictions is genuine, since it would be a fundamental part of a qualitative diagnosis of the problem. As we will see, there are many figures, and they are quite significant in showing the scale of the phenomenon.
The second question would be: Who is poisoning America? In response, the U.S. government does not hesitate to point directly to what it calls “drug cartels,” which it has designated as “foreign terrorist organizations” and therefore places outside its territory, in various countries ranging from Mexico and Canada to Colombia and as far away as India or China—but not in the United States. According to the 2026 National Drug Control Strategy, prepared by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and presented early last May, these countries “feed or have the potential to feed drug trafficking,” but the United States does not.
Incidentally, if anything fuels the illegal drug trade, besides consumption and the billions of dollars it generates as a business, it is the high-caliber weapons sold by U.S. gun shops. Consider, for example, official data on weapons seized in Mexico from late 2018 through March 2024: “Mexican authorities have seized 48,965 firearms that entered the country illegally. The most recent data (as of March 5) also show that 199,921 magazines, 3,245 grenades, and more than 19 million rounds of ammunition have been seized. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said that 75 percent of the nearly 50,000 high-powered weapons seized by his government were smuggled in from the United States” (La Jornada, article by Emir Olivares and Gustavo Castillo, March 30, 2024). According to the report presented on September 8, 2026, by Mexico’s Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection, “from October 1, 2024, to August 31, 2026… 34,353 firearms have been seized. Eighty percent came from the United States, and what is relevant is that 61 percent of these seized weapons are long guns” (El Heraldo de México, article by Raúl Mendoza, September 8, 2026, which publishes the full text of the report delivered by Omar García Harfuch).
The Pentagon says that “drug trafficking in Mexico” and throughout the Western Hemisphere is responsible for more American deaths than “any other adversary” the United States has faced “in recent times.” Meanwhile, the Department of War argues that “it is not only the spread of fentanyl, a highly lethal drug, that contributes to deaths in that country, but also the export of violence to American communities” (La Jornada, staff article, September 3, 2026, p. 12).
President Donald Trump himself, in a report sent to Congress on September 16, 2026, advances that same narrative in a highly contradictory way. Although he says he has secured the country’s borders, he claims that drugs continue to flow in from abroad: “While we have secured our borders against invasion, Mexico and Canada need to do much more.” He also said, “We recognize the government of Mexican President Sheinbaum for seizing larger volumes of drugs, dismantling drug labs,” and deploying security forces to the U.S. border. He also praised the fact that bilateral cooperation “has helped eliminate some of the world’s most notorious cartel bosses, including El Mencho… but [Mexico] must take additional action against the narcoterrorist organizations that dominate vast areas of its territory and continue to threaten the American people” (La Jornada, article by David Brooks and Jim Cason, September 17, 2026, p. 17).
As can be seen, their narrative repeats again and again that the problem comes from outside. They “only” sell high-powered weapons—strictly business—and distribute and consume the poison and violence the world sends them. Worse still, all of this supposedly happens “inexplicably,” because, according to their president, they have “secured their borders against invasion.” Or, as President Trump said in his speech to the United Nations: “We now have the most secure border in the history of America. Nobody gets in unless they are invited, unless they have permission. For the last sixteen months, no illegal migrant (‘illegal aliens,’ as the president calls them in his speech) has been admitted to the United States” (speech to the United Nations, September 22, 2026). So, are no illegal drugs entering that country anymore? Has the problem been solved? And if not, where and how did the illegal drugs get in?
A broad consensus among analysts, government agencies, and even U.S. court rulings—including the convictions and multibillion-dollar settlements involving Purdue Pharma for abuse, negligence, deception of the FDA, and bribery—is that what has come to be called the opioid crisis, caused by the consumption of opium-derived drugs, whether natural, semisynthetic, or synthetic, and beginning in the 1990s, was not caused by illegal drugs sold on the U.S. black market. On the contrary, those drugs were produced by major U.S. pharmaceutical companies and sold with prescriptions in thousands of pharmacies, creating a serious public health problem. Yes, opium-derived drugs were legally sold, and they proved highly addictive and even deadly, contrary to what the pharmaceutical companies and the government agencies responsible had claimed. As Raúl Gómez aptly points out: “The United States is facing the worst drug-related health crisis in its history, and it is not due to heroin, cocaine, or designer drugs distributed by drug traffickers, but to prescription opiate-based medications. The role of the unscrupulous pharmaceutical industry and the complicity of the government agencies that were supposed to regulate it are laid bare in this devastating crisis. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) explains that the current crisis is not due to black-market sales, but to the dispensing of prescription drugs… patients who could no longer obtain new prescriptions ended up hooked on illegal drugs such as heroin and then fentanyl” (Raúl Gómez, The Opioid Crisis in the United States: The Role of the Pharmaceutical Industry in a Devastating Epidemic, December 2023. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376861928_Crisis_de_los_opioides_en_Estados_Unidos_El_rol_de_la_industria_farmaceutica_en_una_epidemia_devastadora).
To get an idea of the scale of the resulting health crisis, official figures show that nearly 841,000 people died of drug overdoses in the United States during the first twenty years of the twenty-first century, half a million of them from opioids, whether legally or illegally obtained. (Data Overview: CDC’s Response to the Opioid Overdose Epidemic, CDC, October 15, 2021. Available at: https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/data/index.html.)
As our wise grandparents say, you cannot whistle and eat pinole at the same time. The inconsistency of a narrative that points outside the United States to find those responsible for its addictions is grotesque. As popular wisdom also tells us, they can see the speck in someone else’s eye but not the beam in their own; a few simple questions are enough to realize this. In which country are there more millions of people addicted to illegal drugs than anywhere else in the world? In which country are millions more doses of those drugs transported, distributed, and sold every day? In which country do billions of dollars from that drug trade circulate every day? In which country is more money from that illegal trade laundered? In which country are tens of thousands of weapons sold to the people who operate that trade? In which country are the largest and most powerful illegal drug-trafficking cartels found, in terms of membership, operational structure, and financial resources? The answer, without a doubt, in every case is: in the United States of America.
To grasp the scale of what we are discussing, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s World Drug Report 2024 states that “70.3 million Americans (25 percent of the population aged 12 and older) used illicit drugs in the past year.” At the launch of the latest report, in June 2026, UNODC Executive Director Mónica Juma said that we are facing “an unprecedented increase in new types of drugs on the market and, worryingly, some are more potent or dangerous than before.” The report also notes that the number of users increased by 34 percent in just one decade. In late 2023, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen herself acknowledged that $100 billion—about two trillion pesos—from illegal drug sales in the United States circulated through the country’s financial system each year (La Jornada, article by Clara Zepeda, December 7, 2023, p. 4). Yet according to RAND, a highly respected independent research center known for its work on illegal drug trafficking in the United States, the amount of money generated by drug consumption in the country is even greater than the Treasury secretary acknowledged. RAND estimates that “people who use drugs in the United States spent about $150 billion… in 2016” (Gregory Midgette, Steven Davenport, Jonathan P. Caulkins, and Beau Kilmer, What America’s Users Spend on Illegal Drugs, 2006–2016, RAND, published August 20, 2019). That is 50 percent more than the U.S. Treasury secretary acknowledged.
Despite these figures and the explicit acknowledgment of government and banking complicity, the U.S. government has not changed its failed prohibitionist domestic policy. In any case, it bears down on the poor in its own country, chiefly people with addictions who are left to fend for themselves, or Black and Latino people who are jailed for selling a few grams of cut cocaine. Meanwhile, Wall Street bankers and addicts who consume cocaine by the industrial quantity, along with their dealers, are not even stopped for a look. Those killed abroad are also generally poor people—growers and traffickers in Latin America and the Caribbean—because the drug trade concentrates wealth but distributes very little of it.
What the U.S. government has done is increasingly use what it calls “the drug problem” in Latin America and the Caribbean as a lever to pressure, weaken, and even attack its neighbors, allies, and those it calls enemies, including through military action. It does so for many different purposes, but above all to impose economic, political, and military control. The State Department has stated bluntly and without embarrassment that “under our new national security doctrine, American dominance of the Western Hemisphere will never again be questioned” (La Jornada, article by Jim Cason and David Brooks, August 12, 2026, p. 21). Through what it has called the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, whose official slogan is “we do bad things to bad people” and which is also known as the Shield of the Americas Coalition, U.S. Southern Command chief General Francis Donovan has claimed that the coalition has made “a decisive turn in our regional fight against the mafias and the narcoterrorists… We have to take action together, working shoulder to shoulder to apply total systemic friction to these networks and safeguard our hemisphere.” More recently, the U.S. secretary of war said they expect to achieve, together with their allies, “an operational capability like the one you saw in the strikes on drug boats in international waters. It will have the same effect on land, and that is why we are working with Ecuador, Colombia, and partners to take the fight against designated terrorist organizations onto land. Wherever they traffic drugs or threaten the American people or our partners, they are a target, just like ISIS or al-Qaeda.” He then made his murderous intentions explicit—intentions that are openly illegal and violate the most basic human and legal right to be heard before being sentenced and to receive a punishment proportionate to the offense: “We will not put them through a judicial process where we know they will be released. We will destroy these networks with every capability of the U.S. government” (La Jornada, AFP, August 14, 2026, p. 21).
General Joseph A. Ryan, who, according to The New York Times, leads the U.S. Army’s Western Hemisphere Command, described the complex challenges of returning to a region that had not been a primary focus for decades, then said: “We have ceded economic dominance in the region to an adversary, and that is a fact. Now we are fighting to regain ground—maritime and land ground, human terrain, cognitive terrain—that in many cases we had previously abandoned.” According to his remarks, U.S. Southern Command has stepped up training and military exercises with the region’s armies to confront what it calls “the cartels’ most pressing threats” (The New York Times, article by Eric Schmitt, Greg Jaffe, and Annie Correal, titled The U.S. Is Sending Hundreds of Soldiers to Latin America, October 14, 2026).
It is impossible not to relate this, given its similar profile, to the infamous Operation Condor of the 1970s and 1980s, through which the United States coordinated operationally with the military dictatorships of Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Paraguay. That operational capacity left a trail of state crimes, with thousands of people subjected to enforced disappearance, torture, and murder. One of its best-known offshoots was the Iran-Contra scandal, after the U.S. Congress itself established that U.S. government agencies were financing the Somoza Contra in Nicaragua with proceeds from the illegal sale of weapons to Iran and cocaine sales in the United States.
The crude imperial thuggery and explicit intentions to use force against any country in the hemisphere they choose, under the pretext that illegal drug trafficking operates there, insult the intelligence. It is an excuse not even the most submissive governments believe. Evading the fact that the main problem lies within the United States is an obvious denial of reality, which much of the world and many Americans see clearly and with anger.
Yet, as Seneca described the Roman Empire two thousand years ago, they are “robbers of the world… If the enemy is rich, they are greedy; if poor, they are despotic; neither East nor West has been able to satisfy them… They give the false name of empire to robbery, murder, and plunder, and call desolation peace” (Cornelius Tacitus, Agricola, Gredos, Spain, 1981, p. 81).
In other words, this is not merely a matter of hypocrisy, but a strategy of imperial domination. They speak of foreign cartels and narcoterrorists while the largest and most complex networks for transporting, distributing, and selling illegal narcotics in the world operate in their own country, as do the networks for laundering the resulting money. These networks involve millions of people every day, most of them Americans, including thousands of government officials at every level and in every sector. Millions of doses are trafficked and billions of dollars circulate in plain sight, and, to make matters worse, with their government’s knowledge, that money is laundered through U.S. companies and banks.
If it is true that someone is “poisoning” the United States, the government’s denial of the serious domestic problem it faces would make it complicit, at least through omission. The most visible part of the business—the part moving the most dollars, requiring the involvement of the most people on the streets, at customs, in government offices, and in banks, and generating the largest profits in the global illegal drug trade—is on U.S. territory. So are the production and sale of the weapons that give illegal drug traffickers their substantial firepower.
The complicity or failure of the many U.S. government agencies involved in the supposed fight against drugs in their country—considering the increasingly bellicose rhetoric of their own government—is something they will have to explain to the American people. The government of the United States of America does little or nothing to understand and confront the serious problem of addiction and illegal drug consumption, their distribution, the circulation of dirty money, money laundering, and the sale of weapons to drug traffickers, in the country that represents the greatest problem in all those respects. If we were to believe that government’s rhetoric, it would not seem unfair to ask: Are government officials complicit in this criminal network terrorists? Are the owners and executives of banks that launder drug-trafficking money in the United States terrorists? Are the owners and executives of U.S. gun shops that sell weapons to drug traffickers around the world terrorists? Are those who produce, transport, and/or sell illegal drugs in the United States terrorists? Are those who buy those substances for their own use terrorists?
I do not for a moment believe that mass addiction in the neighboring country—to both the substances and the billions of dollars they generate—is a problem that can be simplified or easily solved. Simply imagining that, if the flow of those substances—and the billions of dollars they represent in the U.S. banking system and economy—were cut off, millions of people across the country would simultaneously suffer withdrawal and economic dependence should keep us from oversimplifying the U.S. government’s and all its agencies’ overt complicity in allowing such a wide variety of illegal drugs to enter and circulate. However, one thing is certain: the problem will not be solved by blaming those abroad who produce part of the supply or transport it along one leg of the route taken by the tens of thousands of containers of illegal narcotics needed to satisfy growing U.S. demand. Put plainly: the world’s largest cartel operates in the United States. For reasons its own government will have to explain, that government is evidently complicit; to put it mildly, it looks the other way. Can anyone believe that intelligence, immigration, anti-drug, and national security agencies do not know who brings in and distributes the thousands of tons of illegal drugs consumed in the United States, where and when they enter, and where the billions of dollars they generate go?
The truth is that the U.S. government is using threats, coercion, and violence with increasing intensity and frequency to preserve its imperial supremacy. This unmistakably indicates that its legitimacy in the world has declined—and, as seems to be happening within the country as well, we will likely confirm this in the results of the November midterm elections.
In the words of German sociologist Max Weber, the U.S. state has weakened its domination. In other words, its acceptance, or its ability to achieve its goals without resorting to coercion or violence, is declining. Its “war on narcoterrorism” is increasingly exposed as a rhetorical ruse meant to disguise—badly—its growing frustration and its imperial political and diplomatic failure, rather than to save its people from a poison that, in its own words, is killing them. It seems as though, repeating the fate of the empires that came before it, it is killing itself.
Whether that suicide can be avoided is something American citizens have much to say and do about. If they do not change course, I believe the decline described here will continue, and in its fall it will surely drag much of the world down with it.