The DEA Is A Domestic Terrorist Organization That’s Trying To Kill Children

from the every-victory-pyrrhic dept

Plenty of people are going to disagree with this headline. But why should I bother defending it when I can let the government dig its own hole?

From Executive Order 14367, issued by President Trump last December:

Illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic.  Two milligrams, an almost undetectable trace amount equivalent to 10 to 15 grains of table salt, constitutes a lethal dose.  Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from fentanyl overdoses.

The manufacture and distribution of fentanyl, primarily performed by organized criminal networks, threatens our national security and fuels lawlessness in our hemisphere and at our borders.  The production and sale of fentanyl by Foreign Terrorist Organizations and cartels fund these entities’ operations — which include assassinations, terrorist acts, and insurgencies around the world — and allow these entities to erode our domestic security and the well-being of our Nation.  The two cartels that are predominantly responsible for the distribution of fentanyl in the United States engage in armed conflict over territory and to protect their operations, resulting in large-scale violence and death that go beyond the immediate threat of fentanyl itself.  Further, the potential for fentanyl to be weaponized for concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries is a serious threat to the United States.  

As President of the United States, my highest duty is the defense of the country and its citizens.  Accordingly, I hereby designate illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals as Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

The Trump administration defending its extrajudicial murder program, currently being carried out in international waters off the shores of South America:

Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, emphasized in a statement late on Wednesday that the strike took place in international waters and did not put American troops at risk. She said that Mr. Trump had directed the attack in “defense of vital U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations who have long suffered due to the narcotics trafficking and violent cartel activities of such organizations.”

“The strike was fully consistent with the law of armed conflict,” Ms. Kelly said.

Here’s the Secretary of Defense, claiming the boat strikes referenced above were justified acts of war:

Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Hegseth was asked what legal authority the Pentagon had invoked to carry out its deadly strike on a vessel officials claim was carrying drugs.

“We have the absolute and complete authority to conduct that,” Hegseth said. “First of all, just the defense of the American people alone. 100,000 Americans were killed each year under the previous administration because of an open border and open drug traffic flow. That is an assault on the American people.”

Terrorism and enemy combatants, says the government, in reference to foreign gang members who also engage in drug trafficking:

The administration has designated more than a dozen of the region’s criminal groups as foreign terrorist organizations. Where U.S. border forces once limited themselves to intercepting boats suspected of carrying drugs to the United States, the military has instead been firing without warning on such vessels, including those not obviously headed for the U.S., killing more than 200 people.

Now the targeted killing of Guerrero, without due process and in a foreign country, has further blurred the line between how the U.S. government views Islamic terrorist networks that plot violence against Americans and criminal groups that more often want to sell them drugs. His death was less like the capture of a Latin American drug lord than the remote-controlled assassination of a jihadist leader.

This all seems pretty clear.

1. Drug trafficking is terrorism and an act of war.
2. Drug traffickers are terrorists and enemy combatants.
3. Fentanyl is a weapon of mass destruction.
4. Therefore, anyone involved in distributing this drug is a terrorist.

Here’s the other half of the headline: won’t somebody think about the children? Anne Milgram — who served as the head of the DEA from 2021 to 2025 certainly did. Milgram was the candy-colored clown who insisted the only reason drug traffickers might add color to their fentanyl was to target kids, completely ignoring the fact that even illicit products rely on branding and differentiation to ensure repeat business.

This went on for months. Here’s Milgram insisting multicolored product that sometimes resembled “sidewalk chalk” and other times resembled chewable vitamins existed only to turn kids into addicts or corpses:

“Rainbow fentanyl — fentanyl pills and powder that come in a variety of bright colors, shapes, and sizes — is a deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said in a statement.

Here’s a stupidly credulous Senator Josh Hawley demanding the DEA do more to prevent “rainbow fentanyl” from killing children:

On August 30, 2022, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) issued a warning about so-called rainbow fentanyl, which your agency says is a “deliberate effort by drug traffickers to drive addiction amongst kids and young adults.” The warning noted that the DEA has seized brightly-colored fentanyl in 18 states and that the drug is being found in all forms, including pills, powder, and blocks resembling chalk. Two of the recent seizures occurred in St. Louis, Missouri.

Issuing a warning is a step in the right direction. But it is not enough. We should stop the flow of deadly drugs across from the southern border, seize all rainbow fentanyl contraband, and imprison all who manufacture and distribute these horrible drugs.

And here’s another senator demanding the DEA — and the rest of the federal government — do something (there’s a suggestion it might involve regulating social media services) to keep kids from being killed by “rainbow fentanyl.”

“The flood of counterfeit, fentanyl-laced pills falsely marketed as legitimate prescriptions is driving a dramatic spike in overdose deaths among young people in this country,” wrote Senator Collins.  “This heartbreaking data remarkably predates the infiltration of ‘rainbow’ fentanyl in U.S. markets.  Rainbow-colored fentanyl recovered in Maine has resembled candy and easily could be mistaken for children’s Flintstone vitamins, according to one Maine police chief.”

“While I applaud DEA’s ongoing enforcement efforts and public awareness campaign to educate the public about the dangers of fentanyl and counterfeit pills, the reality is that drug traffickers continue to use social media to advertise and sell drugs to teens and young adults,” Senator Collins continued.  “There is no time for delay.  National trends already show that as the supply of illicit fentanyl increases, so do overdose deaths in Americans of all ages. This crisis requires an all-of-government response, and we must be using every tool in the tool box—including partnerships with the private sector—to stop this scourge of drug poisonings.”

Again, this seems to be pretty basic:

1. Fentanyl is becoming increasingly colorful.
2. Colors attract kids.
3. Kids die.
4. People involved in trafficking fentanyl are killing kids.

Back to the headline, bearing in mind everything detailed above. Absorb the context because here comes the connective tissue:

Even as it battled the deadliest drug epidemic in American history, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration permitted hundreds of thousands of fentanyl pills to hit the streets of New Mexico between 2023 and 2025, according to three current and former DEA agents and government records reviewed by The Associated Press.

DEA agents repeatedly monitored shipments of fentanyl pills — but did not seize them — as federal prosecutors sought to bring bigger criminal cases against traffickers of a synthetic opioid that the White House last year designated a ” weapon of mass destruction.”

So… this looks like material support of terrorism? To use the government’s own heated rhetoric, deliberately allowing fentanyl to end up in the hands of American citizens is the equivalent of supporting enemy forces, perhaps with the added bonus of helping them kill more children.

It certainly had a noticeable effect in New Mexico, where most the drugs were ignored by the DEA who theorized it could get better busts if it endangered more Americans:

Albuquerque, which has a neighborhood so besieged by drugs it’s known as “War Zone,” and other regions in New Mexico remain at the epicenter of the fentanyl epidemic. While overdose deaths nationwide fell 14% last year, government data show New Mexico tallied a 21% spike.

And I’m going to stick with my headline, despite what the DEA thinks of me:

“Public descriptions suggesting that DEA knowingly permitted fentanyl to reach communities are false and fundamentally mischaracterize the facts,” DEA spokesperson Amanda Wozniak wrote in an email. She said the investigations involved court-authorized wiretaps “in which agents and prosecutors conducted real-time surveillance, intelligence gathering, and operational analysis targeting larger drug trafficking organizations.”

The first sentence has nothing to do with the second. The first sentence asserts that facts already in evidence are false. Records and personal statements by DEA officials make it exceedingly clear the DEA allowed large amounts of fentanyl to flow into New Mexico because the amounts were somehow too small to be worth seizing.

Agents, for example, deciphered coded chatter over cellphones and closely surveilled a transaction at a mobile home park in Albuquerque in June 2023, according to a 66-page report reviewed by AP. Agents wrote in the report that traffickers delivered 74,000 pills as part of that deal, a figure federal prosecutors later confirmed in a court filing.

Days earlier, another DEA report showed, investigators watched the same distribution ring deliver a spare tire hiding another suspected fentanyl shipment that similarly went unseized.

The second sentence of the DEA’s defense of its actions is meaningless. It’s like a cop shop defending police brutality by explaining that the department performs hundreds of traffic stops a year as part of its investigative efforts. We all know the DEA engages in long-term investigations using surveillance, wiretaps, and intelligence gathering. None of that is being disputed here. What people want to know is why the DEA felt a quantity like 74,000 pills should be ignored just to extend an investigation.

Let’s work backwards from the DEA’s own celebratory math, as delivered by Trump’s ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi:

During a televised Cabinet meeting the following day, she effusively praised Trump for the accomplishments of his first 100 days. “Since you have been in office,” she gushed, “your DOJ agencies have seized more than 22 million fentanyl pills, 3,400 kilos of fentanyl, which saved—are you ready for this, media?—258 million lives.” That figure amounts to roughly three out of every four Americans, or nearly the entire adult population according to the most recent U.S. Census.

258 million lives divided by 22 million pills equals roughly 11.7 lives per pill. Here’s how 74,000 pills (and that wasn’t even the only shipment the DEA ignored!) adds up in DEA Maths:

In case you can’t see or read the calculator screenshot, the death toll is 867,818. That’s more than double the number of lives lost by US soldiers in World War II (418,500). And at least the soldiers who died in WWII weren’t children, who are apparently the new hot thing for international drug cartels.

The DEA will keep trying to talk its way out of this. Every time it does, it needs to be shut down. It’s aiding and abetting the flow of illicit drugs into the US. Even if the ultimate goal is bigger busts and taking down cartel leaders, it can’t pretend it’s not part of the problem. Especially not in New Mexico, where its hands-off tactics appear directly related to an anomalous spike in fentanyl overdoses.

Filed Under: anne milgram, biden administration, dea, drug war, failure, fentanyl, trump administration