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.
