Matthew J. Parker: Cruise Missile Policing | The Latest Drug War Hysteria of our Nannies in Chief

Prohibition laws do not work. Have never worked. Right up until 1910 most everything was legal, including opium, heroin, cocaine, and psychedelics, and the world got along just fine. Then between 1910 and 1920, spurred on mostly by the religious zealotry inherent in the Temperance Movement, prostitution, narcotics, and alcohol were prohibited, the acts of each, almost overnight, birthing not just nannies galore but so too the global gangster cesspool – for not only did we inflict a narrow view of morality upon ourselves but also forced it upon much of the world, so much so and so effectively that to this day the use and sales of narcotics is a death penalty offense in 34 countries, a practice we in the US once considered barbaric. 

No longer. 

The initial impulse to legislate morality is based on the belief that these vices are detrimental not only to users but also public health, a conviction historically propped up by a plethora of self-righteous cliches that have spilled and indeed are spilling from the mouths of the proponents of drug prohibition; warfare against drugs; public enemy number one; war on drugs; zero tolerance; say no to drugs; a scourge; drugs are wrong, drugs are illegal, and drugs can kill you; and, most recently, a drug has been designated a weapon of mass destruction. Moreover, since narcotics users are allegedly steeped in the vice temperance types are always going on about, then preventing the former from getting high was/is worth the wanton slaughter, unmitigated profits, and rampant corruption left in the wake of street gangs, mafias, and cartels. The nannies in fact preach that these devastating side effects are not only necessary collateral damage but in point of fact worth every drop of blood spilled, including the huge increase in fentanyl deaths. 

The nannies most responsible for all this misery are skin-in-the-game organizations like the DEA, who’ve conditioned far too many into believing that any mind-altering recreation other than alcohol is reprehensible, although the rule rarely applies to those non-addicts popping the occasional pill or snorting the occasional line, especially if they are famous. The overall result, however, is that the population of the world in general and the United States in particular consists of tens of millions of moral hypocrites, with Trump just the latest torch bearer leading the witch hunt. 

One of the resurrected myths he and his lackeys are perpetuating is that illicit drugs have permeated every facet of society. This, of course, is rubbish. Diana R. Gordon, in her essay “Drugspeak and the Clinton Administration: A Lost Opportunity For Drug Policy Reform,” exposed this lie thirty years ago: “The ubiquity theme portrays all U.S. institutions as crippled by the presence of drugs and recognizes no distinctions among drug types, dosages consumed, or frequency of use.” Drugspeak today includes the concept that it’s ok to assassinate drug smugglers because fentanyl is both an existential threat and, as noted above, a WMD, even though most everybody knows, and none more than vice nannies like the DEA, that South America is not a fentanyl hub.  

What the DEA does know but will never admit is that crime is a job-security machine, a subterfuge which became a self-serving axiom when prohibition collapsed; so much so that many who knew better stood mute when said prohibition on alcohol was deemed unconstitutional but preposterously (and equally unconstitutionally), left in place on everything else. Stood even more reticent as the belly of the prison industrial complex bloated in the latter half of the 20^th Century. It was during this period that their hyperbolized tropes were administered enema-like nationwide, the onus of which dictating that the bloodbath of organized crime was – indeed, is – much less evil than a citizen’s right to do whatever the hell they please with their own bodies. While in an equal and opposite manner we are not only permitted but actually encouraged to use and often abuse nicotine, alcohol, and fatty/ultra processed foods, even knowing that these vices claim scads more victims and are much more detrimental to public health than naughty narcotics ever would or could be, including fentanyl. 

On this latter, I used heroin and cocaine intravenously for decades, and my life was rarely in danger. I did fentanyl once and it nearly killed me. Luckily there was plenty of heroin around back then, but no longer, and the relatively recent ubiquity of fentanyl is explained in a principle known as the Iron Law of Prohibition. Tarnell Brown, in his series posted on The Library of Economics and Liberty (Econlib), says of the demand side of fentanyl that “the creation of barriers to both entry and supply is comprised of consumers moving away from a product of lesser potency to one of greater…. [which] creates pressure to minimize volume while simultaneously maximizing profit,” all of this makes crime functionalindeed. 

Segue to my imprisonment, roughly ten years served behind bars in county jails and Arizona state and federal prisons, all ostensibly for my own good as well as that of the public’s. It’s the former, however, that’s pertinent; upon which the foundations of the entire moral house of cards is constructed, with preventing self-harm the paper-thin walls of justice or, more aptly,  justification – I needed to be incarcerated to protect me from myself, and so ingrained in our psyche has this become many Americans are convinced that the summary execution of alleged drug dealers hundreds of miles from any US border only crossed the line when we knocked off a couple of survivors clinging to the Hegsethian flotsam; that in truth it’s all worth it to keep me and millions of other allegedly free Americans from using intoxicants not approved by the majority because, as history is so at pains to remind us, the majority (along with the laws and courts which so ruthlessly prop it up. Are you listening, Justice Roberts?) is never, ever wrong. Just ask Dred Scott. Homer Plessy. Richard and Mildred Loving. John Geddes Lawrence, or indeed any DACA recipient/Dreamer, deported or otherwise.   

History has also shown that this is especially true of self-righteous, know-it-all majorities, those proverbial purveyors of the nanny state who are forever preaching. For the record, I neither acknowledge nor appreciate their concern, but rather prefer (or in this case, preferred), to pick my own poison, thanks just the same, and so should you.   

Which leads us to the ace of spades crowning their thin-papered edifice. Republicans are not only branded as the party of law and order but have been using it quite effectively to win elections not despite but because of all of the above, to the point where their prohibition house of cards morphed into the hard concrete and cold-rolled razor wire of the most industrious carceral country on the planet; and did so while pontificating about constitutional liberty, which goes something like this: “It’s guns, bourbon, tobacco, red meat, deep-fried butter, type-2 diabetes, and triple bypasses, damn it, as well as, most recently, John Boehner bud, but that is most definitely it. All other substances we do not approve of, to the point where we will lock your ass up or blow your carcass out of the water if you don’t tow our thin moral line.” 

And again, the effects of such duplicity ripple far and wide. Police officers are currently being murdered in Colombia by the rebel group ELN “to show its opposition to the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean” even though Trump is literally defunding the war on drugs in Colombia. Both police officers and purported smugglers on the high seas are dying, the narrative insists, to keep American citizens from using narcotics even as anybody with half a brain openly acknowledges both the bias and futility of our perpetual War on Drugs. On the former, the onus of the war here in the states falls hardest on the heads of the poor – nobody is kicking down doors in affluent neighborhoods, where the vast majority of cocaine is consumed. Let’s not pretend for even a second that broken windows policing isn’t exactly what it says it is. 

And on the latter? Most are still convinced that 80 to 100 thousand Americans being killed annually by fentanyl is less harmful than legalizing heroin would be, so much so that the left actually refers to their policies as harm reduction even as they absurdly attempt to arm us all with Narcan. Moreover, consider their attempts to both change the terminology and decarcerate, but a jailed junkie is not only alive but so too blessed, as jailhouse vernacular posits, with “three hots and a cot,” and not defecating mere feet from my back door. 

Meanwhile, all those affluently upturned noses, powdered and dripping with kilos of tax-cut-financed cocaine – recall those Roy Cohn parties in Provincetown which included a bowl of blow for each guest – can give a rats ass about neither dead junkies nor Colombian cops in a similar manner that most average Americans care two shits for dead Latinos strewn across the Caribbean Sea. 

And if that’s not enough, Democrats have coined the most idiotic misnomer since Separate but Equal. Rather than rally around legalizing drugs they instead, with their Harm Reduction policies, have all but legalized a plethora of crimes associated with drug addiction – from theft to paraphernalia to defecating on city streets to pitching tents on prime business real estate. If you require proof of this, take a walk through the Tenderloin in San Francisco and then try finding a bar of soap that’s not been sealed in a safe deposit box, the turnkey as elusive as a leprechaun. 

Harm reduction, then, like prohibition, actually compounds law-breaking. As Brown succinctly puts it, “instead of reducing crime, prohibition simply creates more criminals. Everyone involved in the drug market, from supplier to distributor to consumer, is automatically a criminal.”

This includes the conspicuously un-incarcerated Sackler family, by the way. You know, the Big Pharma billionaires who are most responsible for the dramatic rise in opioid addiction. I wonder why Trump isn’t blowing them up on their yachts? At least they’d be killing actual suppliers. Whereas those he’s murdering on the alleged drug boats are mules at best, and this if we believe they are smugglers at all. But even if they are, the logic is inane. You are not harming the actual narcotraffickers. Far from it. It’s like going into a bank suspected of laundering drug money and shooting the tellers. 

So it’s bad enough that conservatives have been riding the prohibition bandwagon into more-or-less election success since the repeal of prohibition, but worse still is that the Democrats have not just appeased it but compounded the problem with their near universal cowardice, proving that they are undeniably soft on crime. As I’ve written elsewhere, give a junkie an inch and we’ll take a light year. 

Lastly, both sides need to get over this idea that rehabs are a silver bullet. They are not, are rather the upper echelon wing of the prison-for-profit juggernaut. I did a court-ordered rehab in 1992; eloquently articulated my way through every hoop they put in front of me and then had a needle in my arm not an hour after my release. And I was a poor, state raised junkie. Nick Reiner did rehab 18 times, which not only demonstrates their ineffectiveness but so too underscores how mental illness is often an integral part of the equation. 

So, what’s to be done? Why, educate, of course, and stop running scared. We even have a legalization model. The powerful opioid methadone is legal, so much so that you can be strung out on it in a week if you so choose. The trick today is to lobby, protest, and demand in the same manner that led to legalizing same sex marriage. It indeed could and probably should be the Democrats new angle. We need to make it so that everyone except gangsters, Republicans, prison industrialists, and vice cops are for drug legalization. But excavating the fascist foundations of feds like the DEA won’t be easy, especially when confidence dweebs like Hegseth, Noem, and Stephen Miller have their holier-than-thou hands all over the levers of power. ICE, after all, is just the latest incarnation of our omnipresent Nannies in Chiefs.

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Copyright 2026 Matthew J. Parker

Matthew J. Parker teaches writing at UC Berkeley.