The United States and spending on wars and drugs

By Guillermo Alvarado

The United States injects fuel to the war in Eastern Europe, gives weapons and political and diplomatic support to Israel to continue the genocide against the Palestinian population, but curiously shows itself incapable of solving a serious internal problem, such as drug trafficking.

According to recently published statistics, in 2022 the northern power once again broke the record of deaths due to overdose of illicit drugs, with 107,941 deaths, which indicates that the epidemic of consumption has been growing unstoppably during the last few years.

To give an idea of the seriousness of the issue, the United States lost a total of 60,000 military personnel in the wars it waged against Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, all three together, a figure much lower than that caused by the failed fight against trafficking in prohibited substances.

Worse still, only one of the drugs circulating in that country, fentanyl, killed more people than those three war conflicts, since according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Health Statistics, by the end of 2022, the latest figures released, some 74,000 people succumbed to this product.

It is striking that the richest country in the world is not capable, for example, of cleaning up the now infamous Kensington neighborhood in Philadelphia, where drug users wander like zombies and require urgent medical assistance.

Fentanyl is undoubtedly the most dangerous substance on the streets of the United States -and other countries- for several reasons, the first being that it can be produced entirely in a laboratory, unlike opioids, which require natural raw materials.

Second, and even more dangerous, it is 50 times more powerful than heroin and 100 times more powerful than morphine, so that an excess of a few milligrams in the dose is enough to kill a person.

Recently, the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, participated in a UN conference on narcotics held in Vienna, Austria, where he called for unity in the fight against this scourge.

It is true that international coordination is needed to confront drug trafficking, but it is also true that so far Washington has seen the issue only as a police and military problem and is trying to solve it outside its territory, where the world's largest consumer market is located.

Disappear the demand through education and public health and the supply will disappear, it is not easy, but it is the way to go.