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THE VENEZUELA ESCALATION IGNORES A LONG HISTORY OF US HYPOCRISY ON
DRUGS  
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Eric Ross
December 30, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ For decades, the most powerful state actors facilitating and
protecting narcotics trafficking have not been Washington’s
adversaries but Washington itself. _

President Ronald Reagan discusses his remarks on the Iran-Contra
affair with Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz, Ed Meese, and Don Regan
in the Oval Office on November 25, 1986. , National Archives

 

Every accusation is a confession. This is clearly true of the Trump
administration’s insistence that Venezuela
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“narco-state,” exporting terrorism
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to the US via fentanyl, now labeled
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as a “weapon of mass destruction.” The charge is not only false,
given that virtually no fentanyl
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enters the country from Venezuela, but transparently political and
pretextual.

This hypocrisy was made unmistakable with President Donald Trump’s
recent pardon
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of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was
convicted [[link removed]] in 2024 in
a US federal court on drug trafficking charges. Hernández presided
over a regime long treated as a strategic ally
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within Washington’s regional security architecture, a reminder that
the label of “narco-state” is applied not according to fact but
according to the shifting imperatives of US imperial power.

This accusation collapses further when placed in broader historical
context. For decades, the most powerful state actors facilitating and
protecting narcotics trafficking have not been Washington’s
adversaries but Washington itself
[[link removed]]. Throughout the
Cold War [[link removed]] and the so-called
War on Drugs [[link removed]], the
United States [[link removed]], above
all through the CIA
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repeatedly subordinated drug enforcement to geopolitical priorities,
enabling narco-networks so long as they advanced perceived US
interests.

These dynamics became especially pronounced in the 1980s, with
disastrous consequences both at home and abroad. The decade marked an
intensification
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Cold War under Ronald Reagan
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insisted that communist “advances” could not only be contained but
rolled back
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taking office, Reagan launched his promised global offensive,
intervening
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wherever alleged Soviet influence appeared. Turning a blind eye to
drug trafficking became a central feature of this crusade, as
anti-communism consistently took precedence over anti-narcotics
efforts.

Carter and the Crisis of Confidence

Reagan’s rise followed a brief but meaningful thaw. In the wake of
Watergate
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and the Vietnam War [[link removed]],
Americans’ faith in political institutions had been profoundly
shaken
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Years of economic stagnation, inflation
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and the reverberations of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo
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many that the postwar promise of endless upward mobility, the
ideological core of the American dream, was collapsing.

It also became impossible to ignore that the US was not only failing
to deliver on its economic promise but had also long abandoned the
democratic values it claimed to champion. In 1975, the Church
Committee
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laid bare what much of the Global South
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The United States had been operating as a global anti-democratic force
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orchestrating coups and assassinations
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sabotaging leftist movements (at home
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imposing political outcomes that served the interests of American
capital rather than the aspirations of people around the world.

Imperial powers had long leveraged drugs to consolidate geopolitical
control, from alcohol’s role in Indigenous
[[link removed]] dispossession to
Britain’s forced export of opium into China.

Then, in 1977, came Jimmy Carter
[[link removed]]. Carter promised a new
foreign policy
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rooted not in reflexive anti-communism but a commitment to human
rights [[link removed]].
In doing so, he broke, at least in his rhetoric, with decades of
bipartisan Cold War orthodoxy. For the first time, a president openly
challenged the axiomatic belief that every leftist movement was a
Kremlin proxy that demanded immediate US intervention.

As Carter put it
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“We are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led
us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear,”
acknowledging that “for too many years, we’ve been willing to
adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our
adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs.”
Washington [[link removed]], he admitted,
had “fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better
quenched with water,” a strategy that had ultimately backfired.

Carter would also come to critique not only the misguided zealotry of
US foreign policy but, to an extent, capitalism
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toward the root causes of the nation’s intersecting crises, he
warned that
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“too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and
consumption,” and that “human identity is no longer defined by
what one does, but by what one owns.” Conservatives responded with
derision, quickly dubbing it the “malaise speech
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a framing that captured many Americans’ refusal to confront the
deeper structural problems Carter had identified.

The Reagan Rollback

Reagan ran on this response. He rejected
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everything Carter had come to represent. Carter, for his part,
presided over a series of perceived foreign policy blunders
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them self-inflicted, including the Sandinista Revolution
[[link removed]] in Nicaragua, the Iran
Hostage Crisis [[link removed]],
and the Soviet invasion
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Afghanistan, and his actual record was far less radical than his
rhetoric suggested. But Reagan seized the moment, casting Carter as
weak, naïve, and insufficiently committed to American power and the
American way of life, and he won in a landslide
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When Reagan assumed office in 1981, he claimed a mandate to pursue his
promised program of unfettered capitalism
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at home and militant anti-communism
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abroad, raising the military budget
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unprecedented levels
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Yet even with this political momentum, he faced constraints. Among
them was a public skepticism toward foreign intervention, labeled
“Vietnam syndrome
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which posed a direct challenge to his effort to reassert American
military primacy on the global stage.

Reagan, however, was not inclined to let public sentiment, democratic
constraints, or questions of legality impede his objectives. This saw
its most notorious expression in the Iran-Contra Affair
[[link removed]], in which
administration officials sold weapons to Iran, then in a war of
attrition [[link removed]] with
Saddam’s Iraq, whom the US was backing
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in exchange for assistance pressuring Hezbollah
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release American hostages in Lebanon
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generating funds to support the Contras in Nicaragua. Both were
illegal: Congress barred aid to the Contras with the 1982 Boland
Amendment [[link removed]], and
arms sales to Iran violated US law once it was designated a state
sponsor [[link removed]] of
terrorism in 1984.

Drug Traffickers and “Freedom Fighters”

Another method in which Reagan sought to bypass political constraints
on his policies was through the funding of “freedom fighters
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in covert proxy wars, an expensive endeavor financed not only by
taxpayer dollars but also by enabling allies to engage in drug
trafficking. The tactic was hardly new. Imperial powers had long
leveraged drugs to consolidate geopolitical control, from alcohol’s
role
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in Indigenous dispossession to Britain’s forced export of opium
[[link removed]] into China.

Nor was this unprecedented for the United States. During the American
war in Vietnam [[link removed]], US
intelligence enabled local traffickers
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to fold an existing regional drug trade
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counterinsurgency effort. As historian Alfred McCoy has demonstrated
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this helped transform the Golden Triangle into the world’s largest
opium-producing region. Estimates during the conflict suggested that
up to 25%
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of U.S. troops stationed in Southeast Asia used heroin in some units,
and thousands returned home with addictions seeded with the complicity
of Washington.

The “war on drugs” has never been a genuine campaign to curb the
sale or use of narcotics or to protect Americans. Rather, it has
functioned as a mechanism for advancing American power.

Under Reagan, such complicity only grew. As the administration
aggressively expanded punitive anti-drug policing
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at home under the banner of the “War on Drugs
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it tolerated and indirectly facilitated the cultivation and transport
of narcotics when doing so served Cold War priorities. This dynamic
was most visible in two of the bloodiest proxy wars of the Reagan era:
the Soviet-Afghan War and the Contra War in Nicaragua.

After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States
funneled billions of dollars
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to the mujahideen in an attempt to mire the Soviets in a Vietnam-like
quagmire, ultimately producing the most expensive
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operation in US history. It was clear at the time that this policy
risked significant “blowback
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although the result was much worse than imagined, but the chance to
bleed the Soviets was not one Reagan was willing to forgo
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The extent of US support, indispensable to sustaining the anti-Soviet
insurgency, led political scientist Mahmood Mamdani
[[link removed]] to refer to
the insurgency as an “American Jihad.” But the flow of money and
arms was not enough on its own, and drug trafficking helped to
supplement [[link removed]]
the effort. Before the war, heroin production in Afghanistan was
negligible. By 1989, Afghan-Pakistan supply routes dominated global
markets
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destabilizing the country and region and creating the conditions for a
catastrophic CIA [[link removed]] and drug-money
enabled, warlord-led civil war
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the Taliban’s consolidation of power in 1996.

This heroin not only fueled death and destruction in Afghanistan,
where the American-Afghan victory was paid for with the lives of
millions of Afghan civilians
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but it also boomeranged back. As Mamdani documents
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Soviet-Afghan jihad, this heroin came to account for some 60% of the
heroin circulating on US streets. The consequences were immediate and
severe. As a White House
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acknowledged at the time, New York City
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increase in drug-related deaths.

In Central America [[link removed]],
a parallel “logic” emerged. The Contras needed cash, and cocaine
networks supplied it. The Kerry Committee
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the wake of Iran-Contra
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investigating these links, concluded in 1989 that there was
substantial evidence the Contras engaged in drug smuggling and that US
officials allowed them to operate without interference.

This support for traffickers unfolded at the very moment the US was
intensifying its domestic crackdown
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on cocaine. During this period, lawmakers and prosecutors entrenched
and weaponized legal asymmetries
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between crack and powder cocaine, driving the militarization
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expanding infrastructure
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incarceration
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a campaign that disproportionately targeted
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and destabilized Black communities
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across the country.

When Gary Webb, an investigative journalist for the _San Jose Mercury
News_, revealed in 1996 an even more direct
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between CIA awareness of Contra-linked cocaine profits entering the
United States and the simultaneous domestic “War on Drugs,” the
backlash
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was swift. Government officials and major media outlets launched a
concerted campaign to discredit him, all but ending his career.
Nonetheless, many of his findings would soon be corroborated, at least
in part, by internal investigations conducted by the CIA
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Justice
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The Failures of the “War on Drugs”

Trump’s latest invocation of drugs as a pretext for war with
Venezuela is unconvincing on its face. But situated within the long
historical record of US complicity in, or calculated indifference to,
drug trafficking when it served strategic ends, even when those
decisions inflicted direct harm on Americans, it becomes little more
than farce. For decades, Washington has treated narcotics not as a
public health [[link removed]]
challenge but as a political instrument, inflating them into an
existential national security threat
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when expedient and minimizing them when inconvenient.

The “war on drugs” has never been a genuine campaign to curb the
sale or use of narcotics or to protect Americans. Rather, it has
functioned as a mechanism for advancing American power. This history
makes clear that the US cannot credibly condemn other nations for
their entanglements in the drug trade until it reckons with its own
record as a facilitator of state-sponsored terrorism and
narco-trafficking.

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Eric Ross is an organizer, educator, researcher, and PhD Candidate in
the History Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

* US Imperialism; War on Drugs; Venezuela; US Presidents;
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