The temptation to bomb Mexican drug labs

It might ease our anger over fentanyl deaths, but it's a bad idea that won't curb demand for the potent opiate

Last week’s news that fentanyl fueled a five-year doubling of drug overdose deaths in Cowlitz County made me recall a conversation with an old friend late last year.

“We should bomb the hell out of the Mexican drug labs,” said he, a Trump supporter from Ohio.

Such a visceral reaction is understandable. Opiates killed 110,000 Americans last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Many of the victims were in the prime of life, like the 19-year-old grandson of actor Robert De Niro, whose suspected overdose death was reported earlier this month.

Fentanyl is far more potent than heroin and accounted for about 70,000 of the U.S. opioid overdose deaths last year. It is manufactured largely in Mexico with Chinese ingredients and is smuggled into the U.S.

A growing  number of Republicans, including Southwest Washington congressional candidate Joe Kent, advocate using military force against Mexican drug cartels.

While he was president, Donald Trump reportedly considered placing cartels on the State Department’s terrorist blacklist and asked about using missiles to destroy Mexican drug labs. He backed off then, but as a candidate now he is reviving proposals to use cyber warfare and special op forces to take out drug lords and their labs.

I sympathize, and I know that there are a lot people out there who might wonder what we’re waiting for. This indeed is a war. 

Ultimately, though, this is a bad idea that draws attention away from the need to cut demand through better education, counseling and treatment.  Calls for military intervention reflect the same “kick some ass,” cowboy mentality that got us mired in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Taking military action would cost billions of dollars, money that could be far better spent expanding treatment and prevention programs.

Invading Mexico, in effect turning it into a war zone, would dramatically increase border crossings and bolster the legal grounds for migrants to seek asylum. Border control agencies already are swamped. Legal and illegal border crossings would further overwhelm the system.

The cartels are the only real authority in much of rural Mexico. The drug trade is  pervasive,  woven into legal and social structures. So U.S. military intervention would undoubtedly lead to many collateral deaths, a collapse of civil governance and  a humanitarian crisis. Our armed forces would get mired in communities hostile to them. 

War often has unpredictable and unpleasant consequences, as we learned in the Middle East. One of them in Mexico likely would be a big surge in violence as new players seek to take over the drug trade — like the mayhem that followed the capture of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the boss of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.  No doubt the violence would jump across the border as the cartels seek revenge.   

Mexico’s leaders have stated unequivocally that they oppose American military  intervention. Yes,  I hear the chorus: They're in the pockets of the drug lords. Perhaps. However, the U.S. would face international criticism for sending troops into a nation without the consent of its leaders. We’re helping Ukraine fight Russia for doing that very thing. Admittedly, the circumstances are very different. We have a compelling beef with Mexico for failing to hold drug lords to account.  But there are parts of the world that would see American intervention as a bullying action. We could end up undermining our efforts in Ukraine and damaging our international image as well.

Finally, taking out the drug labs in Mexico would simply shift them elsewhere. That happened after the U.S. military intervened in Colombia to curb drug trafficking. It just moved northward to Mexico and Central America. 

America needs to come to grips with the real problem: A insatiable demand for psychoactive substances.

We need to dramatically expand treatment programs and force more drug users into them through institutions such as drug court. Oregon’s experience shows decriminalization doesn’t work.

Washington is getting about $400 million from the settlement with three opioid manufacturers to finance its opioid response plan. Cowlitz County ($6.9 million) and the cites of Longview ($2.47 million) and Kelso ($534,000) will get a combined $9.9 million from the settlement. (These amounts do not include further settlement payments yet to be negotiated with Purdue Pharma.) 

As of yet there is no plan for how to spend the money, which must be used for drug treatment, counseling and related services. Although the amount of funds seems large, it will trickle in annually over nearly two decades. The money surely will help, but it is not by itself a panacea for the opioid problem.

We need more substance abuse education in our schools and in families.  Adolescence is a critical time for preventing addiction. Mentoring teens on this subject is far more useful and essential than politically motivated railing about critical race theory or transgender education. 

Talking about drugs is not easy for some parents, but there is lot of online advice on how to do it . (Check out the Mayo Clinc’s site.) If nothing else, parents themselves should model sobriety.

“Early use of drugs increases a person's chances of becoming addicted. Remember, drugs change the brain—and this can lead to addiction and other serious problems. So, preventing early use of drugs or alcohol may go a long way in reducing these risks,” according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, a federal agency,

We need more research into the nature and treatment of addiction. Why, for example, is the overdose death rate among men two to three times higher than it is for women?  

And why is it that buprenorphine — an FDA- approved drug that stops fentanyl withdrawal symptoms and has been shown to reduce rates of criminal recidivism and relapse — is not more widely available in jails, hospitals and treatment centers? Only one in four adolescent treatment facilities offer buprenorphine for opioid use disorder, according to the NIDA.

“We know that less than 23% of people with opioid use disorder are getting treated for it, and we only have a few medications for opioid use disorder that have been found to be very effective for opioid withdrawal to date,”  Gail D’Onofrio, professor of emergency medicine at Yale University, said through a NIDA press release.

On the law enforcement and political side, the U.S. must continue pressuring China to stop the flow of fentanyl ingredients and urging the Mexican government to fight the cartels.

I still think we need even harsher penalties for drug dealers, and border patrols need to be beefed up by hiring more agents and equip them with expanded surveillance technology. If the military has any role here, it should be to bolster security at the border and at ports of entry.

America has waged an unsuccessful war on drugs for nearly six decades. We’re getting smarter about it. But as tempting it is to shoot missiles into Mexico or deploy Green Berets against the drug lords,  those actions would create far more trouble than they would solve.