For almost as long as I have been alive the “War on Drugs” has evoked images of the US military and DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) working in tandem with the militaries from Columbia, Mexico, Honduras, or whatever Latin American country you pick, to eliminate illegal crops and do battle against dangerous and powerful cartels. Another image that comes to mind are top drug lords in the US who get our children hooked on drugs and are caught and imprisoned for the rest of their lives while kilos of illegally trafficked drugs are seized so that the supply side of drug addiction is slowly siphoned away.

These images have been cultivated by politicians and media alike. But increasingly, we know these images are a lie. The reality is that on the US side, the War on Drugs has exploded the size of the prison population so much that some states are having to cut and privatize their education budgets in order to afford current incarceration levels. The costs of incarceration are enormous not only to state budgets, but to the families and communities which are devastated by locking away people who use or deal low levels of drugs. The War on Drugs and mass incarceration do make politicians look good through 30 second ads promoting their “tough on crime” approach to law enforcement.

Further, the War on Drugs exacerbates the innate racism of the criminal justice system. People of color are locked away at a dramatically greater clip than White people are. The War on Drugs also skews the understanding of drug use and addiction. While the level of drug use often varies in peoples’ lives, depending on the physical, mental, and emotional condition of the drug user, the War on Drugs has wrongly led us to view addiction as a binary condition – you “use” or you are “clean.” These too are mistruths.

But the hardest image to change of the War on Drugs has been the supposed battle against international drug cartels. Yes, there are dangerous gangs and cartels at work in the world, but they did not arise out of the blue and they are not so vertically structured and organized as we have been led to believe.

I recently read Drug War Capitalism by journalist Dawn Paley. It was published in 2014 and in it Paley travels extensively throughout Latin America to better understand the international drug trade. What she found is that the War on Drugs is in actuality based on how “terror is used against the populations in cities and rural areas [in Latin America], and how, parallel to this terror and resulting panic, policies that facilitate foreign direct investment and economic growth are implemented.” (p. 16)

This is the part of the War on Drugs that never seems to be highlighted in our media accounts.

Paley gives numerous examples she witnessed firsthand during her travels throughout her book. One of the many policies initiated by the US government that she highlights was called Plan Colombia. One of the many lobby groups in DC that support a policy called Plan Colombia is the US Global Leadership Coalition. The USGLC advocates for what they deem “smart power” which emphasizes global economic “partnership” between the US and countries like Colombia as well as the use of military power to protect US foreign interests. The problem with “smart power” is that “partnership” between a massive economic and military power and a relatively small country like Colombia is not centered on egalitarianism or mutuality, as Paley documents.

Paley was not nearly as fond of Plan Colombia as USGLC. Poor rural farmers were forced to stop growing coca and opium through the military fumigation, but the spray poisoned the ground and some of the farmers, and caused a tremendous food shortage. As a result, farmers fled rural areas to urban centers.

Plan Colombia also overhauled Colombia’s judiciary and legislature which privatized state-owned companies. This paved the way for easier foreign direct investment. Easing restrictions on foreign direct investment allowed in extractive industries like oil and mining companies and that is who took over the empty lands once farmers were forced off from fumigations or military seizures. Underlying this were racist attitudes that often (though certainly not solely) targeted Afro-Colombians.

For instance, oil giant British Petroleum (BP) took a 15% interest in a Colombian company called Ocensa, which built an almost 500 mile pipeline, ruining water sources and causing landslides that displaced farmers in the process. To protect the pipeline the company hired paramilitaries. Paley interviewed many people in Colombia who witnessed or were victimized by the violence of the paramilitaries formed by the oil companies so that they could more easily take over the land with its valuable resources.

Unbelievably, the finance to support paramilitaries often came from drug trafficking. The paramilitaries, often working in connection with Colombia’s actual military, targeted indigenous populations in order to clear the land. This tragically included the Mapiripan Massacre in 1997 when 100 Colombians were killed so that Chiquita Brands could have the land to grow African palm oil. Among Colombia’s indigenous peoples, 64 of the 102 tribes are at risk of extinction and the largest group of displaced Colombians are Afro-Colombians. (See Chapter 3)

The results of all of this has been increased violence causing displacement and forced migration. The cartels and gangs operate often under the protection of militaries and paramilitaries alike and their violence mainly creates a problem when Northern investment is threatened.

Paley’s book only emphasizes what we already know: the War on Drugs is one of the worst policies the United States has ever adopted. Coupling this horrible policy with US foreign and economic policies has caused massive damage and destruction to both people in the United States and numerous Latin American countries. This is not the fault of Republicans or Democrats. This is the fault of all of us.

But we can stop it.