Let’s talk about capitalism, drugs, and the drug war.

Capitalism warps our relationship with substances. It creates conditions for misuse — like despair, alienation, and a future devoid of hope — and then criminalizes that very same use. It locks people away, eliminates so-called surplus labor, and profits from their caged bodies.

This alienation — a concept developed by Karl Marx — refers to the feeling of being disconnected from your work, your community, and your own humanity. Capitalism reduces people to mere cogs in a machine. When you feel like a cog, you often seek ways to escape that feeling.

Meanwhile, the system celebrates other addictions. Addictions to power and wealth — far more destructive than those to substances — aren’t criminalized; they’re glorified. Under capitalism, these are labeled “ambition” or “success.”

Let’s be clear: criminalization was never about our protection or well-being. It never has been and never will be. The U.S. government has collaborated with drug traffickers for decades without hesitation. The CIA has partnered with everyone from the Kuomintang in Taiwan to Corsican Mafia syndicates to Cuban exiles and the Contras in Nicaragua.

As Seth Harp discusses in his book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, Afghanistan produced 90 percent of the world’s heroin during the global opioid epidemic. Did the U.S. have a problem working with narco-state governments? Of course not. We created those circumstances and then helped keep them in power.

Meanwhile, vast amounts of drugs were being smuggled into the U.S. by military personnel through bases like Fort Bragg.

Often, the U.S. is complicit in the very problems it claims to care about. As Harp notes, “You can look at every single region of the world that’s a massive drug production center, and in every case, U.S. military intervention preceded the country becoming a narco-state — not the other way around.”

Does Trump care about overdoses? If he did, he’d clean up his own military bases.

Or he’d pursue the real criminals — families like the Sacklers, who made billions by hooking Americans on opioids, had their names plastered on museums and universities, and walked away without a scratch.

And where does all the drug money flow? Through New York, Paris, and Dubai, to name just a few hot spots; through big banks; through the same financial institutions politicians claim they’re “fighting.” Funny how no one ever actually cracks down there, isn’t it?

The capitalists are always the real criminals.

But the drug war was never truly about drugs. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy chief, admitted it: “The Nixon campaign had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

They knew they were lying.

Consider what this system does to the human psyche. Borders and immigration policies tear families apart. Imperialist wars kill poor Black and brown people around the world just trying to survive.

This is what capitalism in its imperialist phase does to us. It’s not a flaw we can reform our way out of; it’s the design.

Friedrich Engels called the mass death from poverty, neglect, and overdose “social murder.” A man just died in an Amazon factory, and apparently workers were told to just keep working. Today, thousands are dying — from lack of health care, from hopelessness, from addiction — and the system just shrugs and keeps moving; capitalists have money to make.

Trump has never met a war he didn’t like, and the “war on drugs” is no exception. It’s a war he could never lose because he’s its biggest booster.

He has bombs for Black and brown people abroad and mass incarceration and disenfranchisement for Black and brown people at home.

And because of increasing capitalist crises, Trump now really needs a “win” on the books (especially with the ongoing crisis he’s facing in the Middle East). So he’s fast-tracking research into certain psychedelics for specific mental health conditions like depression and anxiety, as if he remotely cares about the suffering of the general population. Trump, along with many other capitalists, is looking for a profitable magic bullet to patch up the wounds of capitalism’s violence (and also a tool to offer soldiers used as instruments of U.S. imperialism — essentially to get them “fixed up” and back to killing). He is at least partially hoping psychedelics can help in that process.

Psychedelics could be beneficial, but it will be far more difficult under this economic system. Regardless, you can search for the holy grail, but it won’t solve the despair that capitalism causes and will continue to cause.

The future isn’t set in stone. We can fight for a world where drugs aren’t criminalized; where we treat addiction as a health crisis, not a crime; where people aren’t driven into despair or forced to harm each other for the profit of a few while we watch the world burn.

A world worth living in — one where we can alter our states of consciousness however we damn well please.

This article is based on this Instagram post by Puppet Marx, Left Voice’s puppet influencer and correspondent.

The post Let’s Talk Capitalism, Drugs, and the Drug War appeared first on Left Voice.

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