As a police officer of some four decades’ experience, I confess to experiencing a certain visceral satisfaction in seeing Venezuelan drug boat crews being instantly turned into chum for sharks.
A good portion of my police career was spent as a narcotics detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, and at various times I investigated every level of the drug trade, from street-corner crack slingers to international wholesale suppliers. While assigned to a crew working the lower rungs of the drug market in South Los Angeles, my squad-mates and I were particularly vexed by a group of gangsters plying their wares in a public housing project.
Such was the geography of the area, and so thoroughly burrowed into the local populace was the gang, that the conventional means of law enforcement we normally employed were useless. We dressed in plain clothes and drove undercover cars, but we and our cars were instantly recognized, and our presence was made known whenever we got anywhere near the place where the drugs were sold.
During downtime around the office, we sometimes fantasized about the unconventional means to abate the problem we might resort to if not bound by the constraints of the law. One solution I proposed, one that my coworkers heartily endorsed, was to enter the area undetected via the storm drains and, through the use of a silenced sniper rifle, pick off the drug dealers one by one.
On one level, satisfying, to be sure, but on every other level, illegal and immoral.
Which brings us to the matter of the Venezuelan drug boats. There can be no denying the harm done by illegal drugs. The CDC reports there were 76,516 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. during the 12 months ending in April 2025. And the tens of thousands of deaths are only the most obvious ramification of a public scourge that has incapacitated or immiserated millions of others from sea to shining sea. There is moral and legal culpability at every link in the supply chain that produces these drugs and transports them to consumers.
But what is to be done about it?
In his 1989 bestseller Clear and Present Danger, the late Tom Clancy wrote of an American military campaign being waged clandestinely against a Colombian drug cartel. I was a drug warrior at the time, and just as I have at recent images of drug boats and their crews being sent to the bottom of the ocean, I cheered at Clancy’s fictional depictions of cocaine-laden airplanes being shot out of the sky and of a gathering of cartel chieftains being vaporized in an airstrike.
But while Clancy’s drug war was conducted in secret, the Trump administration is proudly broadcasting its videos of the attacks and labeling anyone who questions this escalation in the drug war as sympathetic to criminals.
I’ve been writing for various conservative outlets for 25 years, and no one who is the least bit familiar with my oeuvre would call me soft on crime or sympathetic to criminals, but one must recognize the moral peril in these airstrikes.
Some questions arise: What is the limiting principle in this escalation? Assume that not every drug boat is interdicted and destroyed, and that those that reach American shores will be met by people who will then distribute the cargo to others, and they to still others until, in ever smaller amounts, the drugs reach the ultimate consumer. At what level of this supply chain should those involved be considered safe from summary execution? If the crew of a boat carrying a thousand pounds of drugs is a legitimate target, can the same be said of the man who sells the kilos? What about the ones who peddle the ounces or the grams? Or should all of them be shot if caught in the act? And for that matter, what about the drug user whose five- and ten- and twenty-dollar purchases accumulate to a multi-billion dollar enterprise? Should he not face the same risks as those who supply his habit?
Loath as I am to agree with Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), we must have no illusions that the people crewing the drug boats are kingpins or even mid-level figures within the drug cartels. They are, as we say in the trade, “mopes,” i.e., people who are paid a fee to haul a load from one place to another. The fees vary according to the risks incurred, and until recently, the most severe of these risks was a lengthy prison sentence.
But such are economic conditions in Venezuela, where the inflation rate is approaching 200%, that there will always be a supply of people willing to risk even death for sufficient compensation. The fees paid to the mopes, even if doubled or tripled, are but a rounding error to the cartels. And if the risks of an open-ocean voyage become such that not even the most desperate mope is willing to come aboard, the cartels will find other means to get their products into the hands (and veins) of their customers, as they always have.
And consider this: If one approves of President Trump’s use of military might against drug traffickers, who might be at risk when a Democrat president comes to office? On whose forehead might a President Ocasio-Cortez consider dropping a warhead? Surely she experiences a Pavlovian response at the mere thought of it.
Perhaps Nicolás Maduro will relinquish power in Venezuela and slink off to Cuba, as seems to be the desired goal of these airstrikes. Regardless of who succeeds him, the flow of drugs from Venezuela will not stop. What will we do then?
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