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Trump’s War on Drugs
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Trump’s War on Drugs
Posted: October 26th, 2025
https://theintercept.com/2025/10/08/collateral-damage-podcas...
The United States has long used drone strikes to take out people it alleges are terrorists or insurgents. President Donald Trump has taken this tactic to new extremes, boasting about lethal strikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and declaring the U.S. is in a “non-international armed conflict” with narcotics traffickers. Trump appears to be merging the war on terror with the war on drugs. This comes as he’s simultaneously ramping up the use of troops to police inside American cities. The modern drug war began during President Richard Nixon’s administration. In 1994, the journalist Dan Baum tracked down Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and interviewed him. He said, “Look. The Nixon campaign in ’68 and the Nixon White House had two enemies: Black people and the antiwar left. [V]ilify them night after night on the evening news, and we thought if we can associate heroin with Black people in the public mind and marijuana with the hippies this would be perfect.” And [Ehrlichman] said, “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” This line of thinking drove policies designed to “unleash” law enforcement. The Nixon administration tried to relax wiretapping laws, roll back Miranda rights, and erode Fourth Amendment protections against unconstitutional searches and seizures. And now we’re seeing the Trump administration push even harder to roll back constitutional protections.
Note: Though President Richard Nixon launched the War on Drugs by declaring drugs “public enemy No. 1,” secretly he admitted in a 1973 Oval Office meeting that marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.” The War on Drugs is a trillion dollar failure that has been made worse by every presidential administration since Nixon. Don't miss our in-depth investigation into the dark truths behind the War on Drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on military corruption and the War on Drugs.
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