The murders, which Trump insists are part of a larger war against drug cartels and traffickers, are horrific. They highlight Vance’s callous cruelty. The vice president has joked about murdering fishermen and claimed he “doesn’t give a shit” if the killings are legal. As to Trump, he’s brushed off the need for congressional authority to destroy speedboats or attack Venezuela, saying: “I think we’re just gonna kill people. Okay? We’re gonna kill them. They’re gonna be, like, dead.”
But as with so many Trumpian things, it’s important to remember that he wouldn’t be able to do what he does if it weren’t for policies and institutions put in place by all too many of his predecessors. His horrors have long backstories. In fact, Donald Trump isn’t so much escalating the war on drugs as escalating its escalation.
What follows then is a short history of how we got to a moment when a president could order the serial killing of civilians, publicly share videos of the crimes, and find that the response of all too many reporters, politicians (Rand Paul being an exception), and lawyers was little more than a shrug, if not, in some cases, encouragement.
A Short History of the Longest War
Richard Nixon (1969-1974) was our first drug-war president.
On June 17, 1971, with the Vietnam War still raging, he announced a “new, all-out offensive” on drugs. Nixon didn’t use the phrase “war on drugs.” Within 48 hours, however, scores of newspapers nationwide had done so, suggesting that White House staffers had fed the militarized phrase to their reporters.
Nixon’s call for a drug offensive was a direct response to an explosive story published a month earlier in the New York Times, headlined “G.I. Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam.” Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers were addicts, with some units reporting that more than 50% of their men were using heroin.
At press conferences, Nixon was now being questioned not just about when and how he planned to end the war in Vietnam, but whether drug users in the military would be sent to rehab or punished. What, one journalist asked, was he “going to do about” the “soldiers who are coming back from Vietnam with an addiction to heroin?”
What he did was launch what we might today think of as Vietnam’s second act, a global expansion of military operations, focused not on communists this time, but on marijuana and heroin.