Blowing Up Fishing Boats Won’t Win the Drug War

No evidence, no legal basis for murder on the high seas

How would the US react if another country did this to us?

By Sanho Tree

The Trump administration has been blowing up fishing boats in the Caribbean — and now one in the Pacific — claiming without evidence that they’re “drug boats.”

These are extrajudicial executions outside any system of law. And there’s a reason we shouldn’t allow drug warriors to act as judge, jury, and executioner: because over the years, they’ve made many, many tragic mistakes and killed lots of civilians.

I’ve seen countless tragedies like these in my decades studying drug policy. Two were particularly egregious.

In 2001, the United States was using local air forces to shoot down alleged trafficking planes over the Peruvian Amazon. In this case, a surveillance plane flown by CIA contractors misidentified a pontoon plane and had it shot down. Instead of traffickers, they killed a missionary from Michigan named Veronica Bowers and her infant daughter.

The second case was an incident in Honduras in 2012, where the DEA and local forces mistakenly opened fire on a water taxi, killing four people — including two pregnant women — and then tried to cover it up.

What makes these strikes so appealing to Trump is that it gives him the godlike power to look down from above and smite anyone who displeases him, without consequence. He’s even told sick jokes about local fishermen in the Caribbean now being afraid to get in their boats.

If he’s allowed to normalize this kind of international extrajudicial killing, I don’t think it’s a far leap for him to try it domestically.

Imagine a cop chasing a guy down the street, getting hot and tired, and shooting the suspect in the back. The cop probably wouldn’t tell a judge, “Well your honor, I didn’t want to chase him, so I just shot him.” But here’s the president declaring on the international stage: We’re not going to do police work. We’re just going to kill people.

Now imagine the shoe’s on the other foot. Most of the killings in Mexico are done by guns smuggled from the United States. They call it the “River of Iron,” and it’s responsible for literally hundreds of thousands of killings in the country in the past 20 years.

So would it be okay for the Mexican military to blow up a U.S. fishing boat because they believed it was smuggling deadly guns into Mexico, even if they offered no evidence? Would that be acceptable to this administration?

Here’s what drug warriors don’t understand: The U.S. isn’t under armed attack from drug traffickers. It’s actually the opposite.

Most drugs cost pennies per dose to manufacture. But the higher the risk to the individual smuggler — like the risk of getting arrested, shut down, or blown up — the more they can charge as drugs move down the smuggling chain.

By the time drugs reach users, they’ve snowballed in value. But consumers in the U.S have proven more than willing to pay hyper-inflated prices, and even risk arrest, for drugs — just as drinkers were once willing to pay bootleggers huge sums for booze during Prohibition.

In short, our policies create tremendous value for substances that are relatively cheap. We’re making trafficking more profitable, not less.

So if the U.S. bombs a trafficker — or an alleged trafficker — we escalate the risk premium for everyone else in that industry. It’s a bad deal for you if you’re the one who’s killed, but it creates a “job opening” for others in the operation, or a rival cartel, to take over that turf — which is now more lucrative.

The drug war acts as a price support for drug dealers. That’s why no one wants the drug war to continue more than the smugglers themselves. This was ultimately why the U.S. ended alcohol prohibition.

Addiction is a public health problem and requires public health solutions, not allowing someone like Trump to play judge, jury, and executioner — at home or abroad.

Sanho Tree directs the Drug Policy Program of the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was adapted from a congressional briefing and distributed for syndication by OtherWords.org.