Social Policy in Ontario

Donald Trump’s war on narcoterrorism is misguided: Cocaine is not the problem

Posted on December 22, 2025 in Child & Family Debates

Source: TheStar.com — Authors: John Semley

TheStar.com – Opinion
Dec. 22, 2025.   By John Semley, Contributor

America has a drug problem. A big one. Nearly 50,000 people died from synthetic opioid doses in America in 2024 alone. Stopping this (or at least, stopping the flow of such drugs) was a plank of Trump’s reelection campaign. And not a bad one, on its face. At the risk of handing it to Trump, I’d say that wanting fewer people to overdose is a good, and winning, policy. But the actual handling of this has proven a complete disaster.

Recently, Toronto-owned publisher Kids Can Press released an official statement responding to the abuses of their beloved character Franklin the Turtle, in memes shared by United States Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The image in question shows the cartoon turtle, whose smiling face has warmed the hearts of young readers for generations, blowing up a drug-smuggling speedboat with a bazooka, under the title ”Franklin Targets Narcoterrorists.”

Who’d have thought a Canadian cartoon turtle would get roped into not only the U.S. culture war, but its actual (though as-yet-undeclared) war on foreign drug smugglers? But like so many of the Trump administration’s absurdities, there’s something much more menacing undulating beneath the cartoon shell.

In the last few months, the U.S. military has been undertaking unauthorized strikes on drug runners moving narcotics from South America to the United States, and elsewhere. This is all being undertaken under some auspice of an ongoing Drug War, the actual declaration of which has not been approved by Congress. Among these attacks was a September strike where two defenceless civilians — drug runners, yes; but not actual enemy combatants — while clinging to the wreckage of a boat that had already been destroyed. The Washington Post had reported that Defence Secretary Hegseth delivered the order to, “Kill them all.”

In my understanding, executing targets who are shipwrecked constitutes basically any agreed-upon code of conduct for modern warfare. But what I find as disturbing is the whole language of the Drug War, and narcoterrorism — a distinctly 1980s concern that has revved back to life under Trump, and Hegseth specifically. Beyond being a throwback, the whole operation fundamentally (and deliberately) misunderstands the issue of drugs in America.

Drug boats from South America aren’t ferrying fentanyl, or other synthetic opioids. They’re moving cocaine, or heroin. The opioid problem is not an import. It’s as American as apple pie. It was born out of greedy pharmaceutical companies knowingly over-prescribing painkillers such as OxyContin. And it is sustained by cheaper, and even more dangerous, synthetics prepared (often domestically) in illicit labs, by pushers eager to seize on the crisis.

I live in Philadelphia, a city especially hard-hit by all this. It’s also a case study in how the “flow” of synthetic opioids tends to actually work. Oxy was replaced by fentanyl, which was itself replaced by the veterinary sedative xylazine (called “tranq” on the street), which has been recently supplanted by medetomidine (or “dex”), an even more lethal adulterant. Like the hydra of myth, if you cut off the supply to one of these drugs, a new — and typically worse, and more dangerous — one will replace it. And again, these horrible drugs aren’t being speed-boated into American ports by South American “narcoterrorists.” They’re being cooked in-house, cheaply and sketchily, by barely competent chemists. People aren’t even getting high anymore, in the sense of it being at all pleasant. They’re taking sedatives that smack them straight into unconsciousness, without the dreamy middle. I find it extremely sad.

But that sadness has a root. It is traceable, in microeconomic terms, not to the abundant supply of illegal opioids, but to the widespread demand for them. And this is the issue that Hegseth, Trump and the administrations that preceded them seem totally unwilling to confront. A great many Americans feel hopeless. Their lives have been immiserated, socially and economically.

The opioid crisis, I believe, is a response to those conditions — as well as a function of a pharmaceutical industry premised on the maximization of profits over patient care. You can sink 1,000 speedboats in the Caribbean, and infringe on the copyright of however-many turtles, and it won’t solve those problems. Maybe they could ask Franklin to bolster the welfare state, or create jobs that lift people out of poverty?

John Semley is a freelance writer.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/contributors/donald-trumps-war-on-narcoterrorism-is-misguided-cocaine-is-not-the-problem/article_cb85c020-39f4-4eda-9617-cf931f7c131b.html

Tags: crime prevention, globalization, Health, ideology, mental Health, poverty

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