Imagine America’s New War on Drugs: Now With Even Fewer Rights

  

Americans have grown accustomed to learning that, far from our shores, suspected drug

traffickers are sometimes dispatched with an efficiency that would make any autocrat envious. A

skiff approaches a naval vessel a little too quickly, an officer peers through binoculars and

decides the intent looks criminal, and a burst of bullets resolves the ambiguity. Sometimes,

tragically, the “traffickers” turn out to be fishermen. The ocean swallows the mistake, and the

republic moves on.

But lately, a question seems to be drifting in with the political tide: If we’re comfortable with

such tactics abroad, why not bring them home? Why maintain the pretense of due process

when we’ve already demonstrated how optional it is?

Imagine an America that applies its maritime doctrine of “shoot first, sort later” to its own streets.

The efficiencies, we are told, would be tremendous. Instead of judges, juries and evidence, we

could rely on the quick instincts of whoever happens to be armed and wearing a badge. A new,

streamlined process: identify a “suspect,” eliminate the suspect, and file a report under the

increasingly elastic category of “public safety.”

Picture the press conference: a podium, a flag, a lineup of officials pointing to rising overdose

deaths as justification for an unprecedented expansion of state violence. “We cannot afford to

be soft,” they might say. “And nothing says tough-on-crime like eliminating the crime scene

altogether.”

In this imagined America, it becomes almost quaint to ask whether the person killed actually

was a dealer. Why get tangled in the nettles of truth when certainty can be manufactured so

easily? If the high-seas approach teaches anything, it’s that mistakes are tolerable as long as

they happen out of view. And if they happen in view? Well, that’s what narrative framing is for.

But let’s be honest. This fantasy—this impossible, grotesque fantasy—appeals because it offers

something uniquely seductive: the illusion of control. Faced with the complexity of addiction,

poverty, mental illness, and the drug economy, some gravitate toward solutions that don’t solve

anything but look decisive on television.

Such a system would, of course, disproportionately target the same neighborhoods that have

borne the brunt of every previous iteration of the drug war. It would not touch the affluent user,

the discreet professional with a recreational habit, or the teenager in the suburbs whose

missteps are softened by parental advocacy. Extrajudicial punishment, like every other blunt

instrument, falls hardest on the people least able to withstand the blow.

And yet, the arguments for this dystopia follow a familiar cadence. “We tried incarceration. We

tried interdiction. We tried treatment. Why not try the final frontier of deterrence?” It is the

rhetorical equivalent of burning down the house because the plumbing is faulty.

But the true danger lies not in the outlandishness of the proposal. It lies in how plausible it

suddenly sounds.

A society does not collapse into authoritarianism with a single dramatic lurch; it slides there

quietly, greased by fear and justified by exceptional circumstances. A killing on the sea becomes

an arrest without probable cause. A militarized raid becomes a routine police tactic. A nation

once anchored by the rule of law starts experimenting with its removal in the name of efficiency.

And so the suggestion that we apply the high-seas “solution” to domestic drug crime is not

merely offensive. It is clarifying. It forces us to confront the contradictions we tolerate: our casual

acceptance of violence done in our name, our preference for spectacle over substance, our

belief that safety can be purchased by discarding other people’s rights.

If we are repulsed by the idea of executing suspected drug dealers on American streets—and

we should be—then we must also question the quiet comfort we’ve developed with doing it

anywhere else. Principles that travel poorly are rarely principles at all.

The drug crisis is real. The suffering is real. But so is the danger of becoming a nation that treats

human life as a logistical inconvenience.

America can choose accountability, justice, and evidence-based policy. Or it can choose the

simplicity of the trigger.

The world is watching to see whether we still know the difference.