Chemical Warfare and Drug Trafficking

The drug trade is a lucrative business in the United States and around the world. It has been for a while. Mind-altering drugs have been sought after ever since many have been able to be synthesized and mass-produced over the last century or so.

  The drug trade and drug related activities have been notoriously brutal, violent, and deadly. It is not a trade or activity for the faint-of-heart by any means. The nature and sheer volume of profits coming in from the trade makes the partakers in the business willing to go to any level to protect their interests, often in brutal and cruel ways. Even terrorism isn't out of the question for drug traffickers as long as terror suits their objective and interests.

     When I hear the term "chemical warfare," I used to think of substances like Sarin gas or VX poison gas or chemical weapons of war that cause mass disruption, death, and destruction. However, I started thinking about looking at drugs from the angle of considering them as chemical weapons.

      For starters, drugs are chemicals. That's pretty obvious. Drugs are shipped into countries like the United States from organized crime syndicates like cartels or the mob, and then sold to the civilian population for recreational use.

       Many of these drugs do significant damage to the mind and body and destroy users' social and economic stability because of the addictive nature of them. They can cripple entire communities and trap people into poverty, and often contribute to the disenfranchisement and oppression of certain minority groups.

     We used to call chemicals that do this to people a relatively simpler term; poison. That's what drugs do to our kids and our communities. They poison them. Often all for just a few more dollars in the pockets of those who manufacture and sell them. 

When this activity of shipping dangerous and addictive drugs into a nation state to essentially poison the kids and people of that nation is state-sanctioned by a foreign government (which probably happens more often than even I am aware of), from my vantage point that is chemical warfare. 

Just because another country isn't dropping aerosol canisters of nerve agents over cities and communities doesn't mean other less conventional forms of chemical warfare aren't being implemented. 

         Shipping drugs and poisons into a country and marketing them to potential consumers knowing full well the health problems social and economic problems they cause and how destructive they are to society does constitute chemical warfare, especially when its done by a foreign power (state or non-state actor like foreign organized crime) hostile to the United States with the intent to destabilize the country. 

The inability of players to go head to head in armed conflict because of nuclear war and the threat of mutually Assured Destruction after World War II forced nations and players of earth's neverending giant war game scenario to circumvent conventional warfare in a multitude of ways to go after each other.

Drugs, chemicals, and other poisons were one of the methods of getting around conventional war and the threat of annihilation that came with it. Drugs have often been a means to finance war and terrorism, and still very much is today. 

If there is one threat to society that might be the most dangerous to the stability of our communities and nation, it is still probably drugs. However, drug addiction should be treated more as a public health concern and treated less like criminality.

 Addiction is a disease caused by the poor choices of a compromised individual, and treating it too much like criminality only perpetuates the cycle of violence, death, and incarceration, and the drug trade has already reaped a have toll on society because of these things.