Since President Richard Nixon declared a "War on Drugs" in 1971, federal, state and local governments have spent an estimated $1 trillion fighting it — and losing. Donald Trump now seems fully engaged in that futile conflict, adding his own twisted brand of violence.

It's not enough to bomb boats "suspected" of ferrying drugs to the United States. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the military, after the initial strike, to "kill" survivors clinging to life rafts on the waters below.

Shocked lawmakers, both Republican and Democratic, are calling such actions "war crimes." The law of war authorizes the use of deadly force against enemy combatants. But once they're no longer a threat, the obligation is to care for the wounded.

That's beside the matter of whether the targets were, in fact, drug boats. Some may be, but the U.S. military is fully capable of stopping, boarding and interviewing the crew of a little vessel sailing through the Caribbean or Pacific.

And even if the boats are carrying drugs, there's no easy way of knowing how many of their passengers were traffickers and how many were the traffickers' hostages. Drug gangs are known to threaten innocents and their children to force participation in the ferrying business.

How well has this "war" been working out? Not well.

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, has killed more Americans than the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined. And lined up behind it are still more vicious street drugs.

In 2023, about 110,000 Americans died from drug overdoses, nearly 10 times the number in 1999. The death toll fell in 2024, due mostly to the availability of naloxone, which can reverse overdoses. But it was still seven times the drug-related fatalities of a quarter century prior.

This is counting deaths from both opioids and stimulants, the category for cocaine. Deadly synthetic opioids such as fentanyl are now often added to the cocaine. A recent CDC report found that nearly 80% of cocaine-related deaths involved drugs with opioids mixed in, especially fentanyl.

You can't stop fentanyl from entering this or any other country. Fentanyl the size of a pencil eraser can kill dozens of people. How hard is it to hide that tiny amount sewn in a teddy bear's nose? Not hard at all.

A kilogram of fentanyl contains up to half a million potentially lethal doses. A kilogram is only 2.2 pounds. A quart of milk weighs about that.

In fiscal 2025, the Coast Guard seized almost 510,000 pounds of cocaine. That was the most in its history but a fraction of the cocaine that got past our borders — drugs arriving by land, sea and air.

Go ahead and keep trying to prevent these drugs from coming in, but let's not pretend that this bombing of unidentified boats is anything more than another Trump performance. Perhaps it's another way to divert attention from the Epstein files.

If this were really about punishing drug lords, Trump wouldn't have just issued a full pardon to Honduran ex-President Juan Orlando Hernandez. Convicted last year of partnering with traffickers, Hernandez is credited with helping flood the U.S. with hundreds of thousands of kilograms of cocaine.

A Drug Enforcement Administration agent, who worked on the Hernandez case but was not allowed to comment publicly, called the pardon "lunacy."

That show of inconsistency was so crashing, you can't help but suspect Trump's motive was to even further distract the public from the investigation into the sex trafficking of underaged girls. It was piled right onto the macabre videos of the U.S. military dropping bombs on small boats.

That would seem the best explanation for these bizarre Trump orders — short of lunacy, that is.

Follow Froma Harrop on X @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at [email protected]. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Danny Gallegos at Unsplash