“The well-documented problem with these kits is that the compounds they test for are not exclusive to illicit drugs and are, in fact, found in dozens of legal substances. That is to say, they’re better at telling if something isn’t a drug than if it is one. This is why they’re used in laboratory settings as preliminary screeners. But in the criminal justice system, they’re considered probable cause to make an arrest.
As a result, many people have been arrested for absurd items. Over the years, officers have jailed innocent people after drug field kits returned “presumptive positive” results on bird poop, donut glaze, cotton candy, and sand from inside a stress ball.
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Despite appearing easy to use, the tests can still be performed incorrectly or produce muddy results, which leaves suspects’ fates to the subjective opinions of police officers.”
A big Mexican Cartel Boss was killed by Mexico with intel help from the US. Afterwards, violence escalated around Mexico. The cartel’s forces are almost as well equipped and trained as the Mexican military. The cartel is attacking the Mexican military around the country and creating chaos.
TrumpRx, where Trump negotiated prices with drug companies, has lower drug prices for certain weight loss and fertility drugs, but outside of that, it won’t help much.
“Although President Donald Trump frequently decries the threat that fentanyl poses to Americans, his comments reveal several misconceptions about the drug. He thinks Canada is an important source of illicit fentanyl, which it isn’t. He thinks fentanyl smugglers pay tariffs, which they don’t. He thinks the boats targeted by his deadly military campaign against suspected cocaine couriers in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific are carrying fentanyl, which they aren’t. Even if they were, his oft-repeated claim that he saves “25,000 American lives” each time he blows up one of those boats—which implies that he has already prevented nine times more drug-related deaths than were recorded in the United States last year—would be patently preposterous.
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The fentanyl implicated in U.S. drug deaths is not a “weapon.” It is a psychoactive substance that Americans voluntarily consume, either knowingly or because they thought they were buying a different drug. Nor is that fentanyl “designed or intended” to “cause death or serious bodily injury.” It is designed or intended to get people high, and to make drug traffickers rich in the process.
Trump nevertheless claims “illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic.” How so? “Two milligrams, an almost undetectable trace amount equivalent to 10 to 15 grains of table salt, constitutes a lethal dose,” he says. But that observation also applies to licit fentanyl, which medical practitioners routinely and safely use as an analgesic or sedative.
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Contrary to what Trump implies, the danger posed by fentanyl in illicit drug markets is only partly a function of its potency. The core problem is that the introduction of fentanyl—initially as a heroin booster or replacement, later as an adulterant in stimulants or as pills passed off as legally produced pharmaceuticals—made potency, which was already highly variable, even harder to predict. It therefore compounded a perennial problem with black-market drugs: Consumers generally don’t know exactly what they are getting.
That is not true in legal drug markets, whether you are buying booze at a liquor store or taking narcotic pain relievers prescribed by your doctor. The difference was dramatically illustrated by what happened after the government responded to rising opioid-related deaths by discouraging and restricting opioid prescriptions. Although those prescriptions fell dramatically, the upward trend in opioid-related deaths not only continued but accelerated. That result was not surprising, since the crackdown predictably encouraged nonmedical users to replace reliably dosed pharmaceuticals with much iffier black-market products.
The concomitant rise of illicit fentanyl magnified that hazard, and that development likewise was driven by the prohibition policy that Trump is so keen to enforce. Prohibition favors especially potent drugs, which are easier to conceal and smuggle. Stepped-up enforcement of prohibition tends to reinforce that effect. From the perspective of traffickers, fentanyl had additional advantages: As a synthetic drug, it did not require growing and processing crops, making its production less conspicuous and much cheaper.
Traffickers were not responding to a sudden consumer demand for fentanyl. They were responding to the incentives created by the war on drugs.
“The war has ebbed and flowed over the past 54 years, but the results are clear. Drugs won. But instead of learning the requisite lessons, the Trump administration is ramping up anti-drug-war rhetoric to lunatic levels. The president recently issued an executive order designating fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction.” He’s empowered the military to destroy Venezuelan boats that likely aren’t carrying that synthetic opioid or even headed to the United States.
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“Enforcing prohibition incentivizes those who market prohibited substances to develop more potent forms that are easier to smuggle in smaller sizes.” Now “other highly potent synthetic opioids are becoming more attractive for drug trafficking organizations to produce and sell.”
Drug-warriors ignore how their own policies helped create the latest crisis. The feds began cracking down on prescription opioid analgesics (OAs) to combat their overprescribing to people with pain issues. “Unfortunately, opioid dependence and addiction do not simply dissipate with the contraction in the availability of OA pills…Instead, individuals who lost access have turned to cheaper, more accessible and more potent black market opioid alternatives,” per a 2017 article in the International Journal of Drug Policy. The prime alternative was heroin. The feds cracked down on that, too, and then black markets shifted to fentanyl.
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Most Americans are aware of the foolhardy nature of alcohol Prohibition, which empowered organized crime, led to alcohol poisonings as illicit operations rarely have great quality control, corrupted police agencies and politicians, and caused prison overcrowding. We see similar results after a half-century of drug prohibition.”
“Cártel de los Soles “is actually a slang term, invented by the Venezuelan media in the 1990s, for officials who are corrupted by drug money.” As Savage explained in November, citing “a range of specialists in Latin American criminal and narcotics issues,” Cártel de los Soles “is not a literal organization” but rather “a figure of speech in Venezuela.”
In 2020, in other words, the Justice Department made a pretty embarrassing mistake, which it has sought to rectify in the revised indictment. Yet the Treasury Department and the State Department are still listing Cártel de los Soles, which federal prosecutors now say refers to “a patronage system” created by a bunch of corrupt government officials, as an FTO, which under federal law means “a foreign organization” that “engages in terrorist activity” threatening “the security of United States nationals or the national security of the United States.””
Venezuela is a direct security threat to the United States because they cooperate militarily with countries like Iran who considered giving missiles to Venezuela that can hit the US.
Because the Maduro regime is still in charge in Venezuela, it seems likely that these military ties will continue, even if they take a temporary pause.
Venezuela isn’t simply ruled by a dictator or a military junta, but by criminals who are in criminal enterprises to get rich. That makes it harder to negotiate away the rulers because the government is actually run by criminals who want to maintain their criminal enterprises.
Venezuela is a more homogenous country than Iraq, and it has a history of democracy before the authoritarian socialists took over.
“Initially, Trump defended his military operations near Venezuela as keeping drugs out of the US, although experts say the cocaine that passes through Venezuela winds up mostly in Europe while fentanyl is sourced from China.
Trump also accused Maduro of emptying Venezuela’s prisons and “mental institutions” into the U.S., although there’s no evidence of that either. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have settled in the U.S. in recent years due to economic and political instability in their home country.
By mid-December, Trump accused Maduro of “stealing” U.S. oil and land. Trump appeared to be alluding to work done in the 1970s in Venezuela by Western oil companies before the government there opted to nationalize its reserves, eventually forcing out American companies.
In a Dec. 17 social media post – around the same time sources say Trump was making a decision to greenlight the Jan. 3 military operation — Trump said the U.S. military threat to Venezuela will “only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
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Two days later at a press conference, Secretary of State Marc Rubio offered a more general explanation than access to oil reserves, calling Maduro’s presidency “intolerable” because it was cooperating with “terrorist and criminal elements” instead of the Trump administration.”