“Colombian President Gustavo Petro says one of the “narcoterrorists” recently killed by U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean was a “fisherman” who had “no ties to the drug trade.” That man’s death, one of at least 32 ordered by President Donald Trump, therefore qualified as “murder,” Petro declared on Saturday.
That much would be true even if the dead man, whom Petro identified as a Colombian citizen named Alejandro Carranza, really was smuggling drugs. Trump’s new policy of summarily executing drug suspects simultaneously corrupts the mission of the armed forces, erasing the traditional distinction between civilians and combatants, and violates long-standing principles of criminal justice, imposing the death penalty without statutory authorization or any semblance of due process.
On September 15, U.S. forces blew up a boat that Trump said was “in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics,” killing three men he described as “confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela.” But according to Petro, the attack that killed Carranza happened in Colombian waters, and the target was a “Colombian boat” that “was adrift and had its distress signal up due to an engine failure.”
Trump reacted angrily to that charge on Sunday, calling Petro “an illegal drug leader” who is “strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs…all over Colombia.” He said the U.S. government would punish Petro by ending all “payments and subsidies” to his country.
Notably, Trump did not actually contradict Petro’s claim that Carranza had been erroneously identified as a Venezuelan “narcoterrorist.” And Trump has repeatedly acknowledged that his bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy could threaten innocent fishermen.
After the first strike on an alleged drug boat in early September, Trump joked about the potential for lethal mistakes: “I think anybody that saw that is going to say, ‘I’ll take a pass.’ I don’t even know about fishermen. They may say, ‘I’m not getting on the boat. I’m not going to take a chance.'”
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Trump claims drug traffickers are “murdering” Americans because some of their customers—about 82,000 last year—die after consuming their products. By the same logic, alcohol producers and distributors, who supply a product implicated in an estimated 178,000 deaths a year in the United States, likewise are guilty of murder.
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The Trump administration also argues that the U.S. government is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which makes the boat strikes consistent with the law of war. That claim, Cardozo Law School professor Gabor Rona says, is “utterly without precedent in international law.”
Geoffrey Corn, formerly the U.S. Army’s senior adviser on the law of war, agrees. “This is not stretching the envelope,” he told The New York Times. “This is shredding it.”
Trump, in short, is killing people without a legal justification. There is a word for that.”
“Somewhere off the coast of Venezuela, a speedboat with 11 people on board is blown to smithereens. Vice President J.D. Vance announces that “killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.”
When challenged that killing citizens without due process is a war crime, the vice president responded that he “didn’t give a shit.”
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But over 20,000 people are murdered in the U.S. each year, and yet somehow we find a way to a dispassionate dispensation of justice that includes legal representation for the accused and jury trial.
Why? Because sometimes the accused is actually not guilty.
As passions subside, a civilized people should ask: To be clear, the people bombed to smithereens were guilty, right?
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The administration has maintained that the people blown to smithereens were members of Tren de Aragua and therefore narcoterrorists.
Certainly, then, if we know they belong to a particular gang, then someone must surely have known their names before they were blown to smithereens?
At the very least, the government should explain how the gang came to be labelled as terrorists. U.S. law defines a terrorist as someone who uses “premeditated, politically motivated violence…against non-combatants.” Since the U.S. policy is now to blow people to smithereens if they are suspected of being in a terrorist gang, then maybe someone could take the time to explain the evidence of their terrorism?
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Few independent legal scholars argue the strikes are legal. Even John Yoo—a former deputy assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, who infamously authored the Bush administration’s legal justification for “enhanced interrogation techniques”—has criticized the Trump administration’s justification for the strikes, saying: “There has to be a line between crime and war. We can’t just consider anything that harms the country to be a matter for the military. Because that could potentially include every crime.””
The United States military is making extrajudicial illegal killings of potential drug traffickers, apparently killing a boat of Colombians this time. The U.S. is threatening a regime change war with Venezuela.
“Oregon’s three-and-a-half-year experiment with decriminalization is over. Last September, the state legislature overrode the ballot initiative, known as Measure 110, and recriminalized drugs.
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With few treatment facilities and lax enforcement, Portland became a safe haven for drug users to pitch tents on the street and get high out in the open. A meth user named Michael, who lives in a tent with his girlfriend on a Portland sidewalk, told Reason that he saw more drug users flow into the city after decriminalization.
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“When you look at the frustration that was built up by people who were just doing the things that everybody gets to do, get to take their kids to school, go to work. I mean, I felt it the same way,” says Schmidt. “I don’t like seeing people shooting up where I have to explain to my kids what’s happening right now, and then also maybe not feeling safe because you’re not sure if a person’s in their right mind. Like, that’s not okay.”
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decriminalization as a concept is “obviously not” doomed to fail. He points to several Western European countries and cities that have successfully implemented decriminalization policies for years.
Portugal became the first country to decriminalize all drugs in 2001. Overdoses and disease transmission fell, inspiring similar approaches in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Zurich, where the police enforced “zero tolerance” against open-air drug scenes with the goal of moving drug use off the streets and indoors.
“When you decriminalize drug possession, that doesn’t mean that you’re decriminalizing drug use on the streets. It doesn’t mean that you are decriminalizing disorderly behavior on the street. Those things need to go hand in hand. That’s what the European approach taught us,” says Nadelmann. “That sort of pragmatism is really what we need in the U.S.”
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A robust treatment infrastructure and protection of public spaces made Portugal’s decriminalization sustainable. When the country decriminalized drugs, police stepped up enforcement as the policy took effect. The authorities in Lisbon dismantled shanty towns, relocated their inhabitants, and broke up an open-air drug scene known as “the supermarket of drugs.” As Zurich decriminalized, authorities took a “zero tolerance” approach towards large public gatherings of drug users, which they described as “destructive to co-existence.”
In Portland, by contrast, decriminalization coincided with the defund the police movement and a 6 percent budget reduction for the Portland Police Bureau.
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as decriminalization took effect in Portland, the city effectively paused street camping removals because of COVID-19, exacerbating a decades-long unsheltered homelessness problem.
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The fentanyl epidemic caused a surge in overdose deaths in Portland starting in 2016. Overdoses soared in 2019, two years before decriminalization was implemented.
Only full commercial legalization could stop the fentanyl crisis because it would allow users to buy the drugs they’re seeking from reputable manufacturers, as has happened with cannabis, instead of a black market dominated by cartels selling extremely potent and deadly fentanyl.
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Portugal’s system can punish drug users for refusing treatment, but it’s rare in practice. Most who appear before the drug panel get off with a warning. Those deemed to have an addiction are referred for treatment. And a small subset of those refuse and face fines or other sanctions.”
“Most U.S. drug traffickers are Americans, but the president is ordering extrajudicial maritime killings while ignoring the domestic demand that drives the market.”
“Although Trump frames his unprecedented use of the U.S. military to summarily execute drug suspects as “self-defense,” it plainly does not fit that description. By his own account, he has unilaterally decided to impose the death penalty on alleged drug traffickers for the sake of deterrence. That policy represents a stark departure from both military norms and criminal justice principles.
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The Trump administration “has not even seriously tried to present a legal argument to justify the premeditated killing of the people aboard these two vessels,” former State Department lawyer Brian Finucane told The New York Times. “The U.S. president does not have a license to kill suspected drug smugglers on that basis alone.”
Rear Adm. Donald J. Guter, who served as the Navy’s top judge advocate general from 2000 to 2002, concurred. “Trump is normalizing what I consider to be an unlawful strike,” he said.
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Trump does not claim the men whose deaths he ordered were engaged in literal attacks on the United States. The justification in both cases was that the targets were “transporting illegal narcotics,” which Trump dubiously equates with violent aggression.”
“Whether he is waging the drug war, imposing tariffs, deporting alleged gang members, or fighting crime, the president thinks he can do “anything I want to do.””