Opioids, health, entertainment and paradigms: Drug trafficking is a problem with many aspects (+US)

Published at: 24/10/2025 05:00 PM

Opioid use in the United States is prescribed to help people endure the American lifestyle: medicines for insomnia, stress and concentration, which are weakened by people's daily lives. A business has been built out of people's need for well-being in a society that is constantly on the edge: excessive working hours, unpayable bills to maintain lifestyles, which in the end, you don't live it, because you're always working.

If we ask ourselves what does the fight against drugs mean? Well, it is based on the criminalization of addicts and poverty. The professor at La Gran Colombia University (Colombia), Mauricio Luna Galván, explained in his research called “Drug trafficking as organized crime: understanding the phenomenon from a transnational and multidimensional perspective”, that one of the narratives that develops, is the criminalization of the addict, “addicted people are sick, they have a problem of consumption, therefore, are not criminals, they are patients who need treatment and care; and, for which, they have not planned any policy to address this public health problem. These people require a social care plan, not a prison.”

Luna Galván added that “you can't win the race against organized crime around drug trafficking, if you don't address the root causes of the problem, which are caused by the financial system as a generator of poverty; and you need to have the problem to have cheap labor for your legal or illegal companies. If you don't give people living in poverty any other type of development opportunity, other than this type of activity, even in a forced way, the problem will not be solved. In the same way, addicted people, who have a consumption problem, are not criminals, they are patients who need medical attention, it is a public health problem that is not addressed, they should not be classified as criminals.”

With regard to drug cartels , the question arises: Who named the Cartels? Who decides if there is a cartel or not? Cartels are a narrative instrument created by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that together with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) designed these structures to build a common enemy and focus the fighting against it, but it has no serious support.

Mexican researcher and journalist Jesús Escobar Tovar explained that “according to the American narrative, cartels are a structure that has and manages technology, economy, bankers, politicians, recruitment camps, death camps, in addition to having the capacity to launder money in the financial system of any country, who can handle all that? When a drug lord “falls”, does it affect the business? All of this is weird. These characters (drug lords) are magnified to avoid talking about the real problem, which is consumption.”

A former DEA agent, who did not want to give his name, stated that it is the CIA that “equips the cartels with weapons to articulate the American companies that sell weapons, both to the world's armies and to criminal gangs. It's just a business.” This statement was also made by former CIA officer Ralph McGehee, who was assigned to East Asia and Southeast Asia between 1968 and 1970, revealing some facts in his book published in 1983 and entitled Deadly Deceits.

Regarding the proliferation of violence, Escobar Tovar commented that “what is sought is to generate violence and then save and control; an example is mining in Mexico: the United States supplies weapons to the areas where the extraction is located to control and then intervene. Then, armed groups are financed and created and they manage the commercial activities associated with mining; they did so with the extermination group called Los Zetas; this group formed by former police officers, former soldiers of the army with the approval of security agencies in the region, who were threatened their families, if they did not collaborate with the development of mining marketing activities. Although it is true that it was a social problem, the magnitude declared in the media by the United States was not a justification that merited an intervention from another country.”

Using the same strategy of violence, former CIA agent McGehee explained the case of The Congo ; which has been suffering genocide for more than 30 years: “ internal violence, state violence and violence from neighboring countries such as Rwanda, which reached an agreement with France and England to steal gold from the Congo. They pay mercenary groups to extract gold at the point of violence, attacking populations; then they describe them as drug traffickers and present them as a problem, but, in turn, they finance them, buy their merchandise and make a profit from it. Once again, we see how economic power uses such practices to control markets, territories and societies. Communication companies (telephony, media and technology) and arms manufacturing companies are the ones that supply rare minerals extracted through violence.”

Added to this reality is the media creation, through the world's largest film and television industry, narco-heroes: untouchable, sheltered characters with a lot of power, coming from places where poverty abounds and become the great owners of a whole machine for planting, creating and distributing drugs worldwide. An article published by the National University of Mexico, written by Jorge Alan Sánchez Godoy called Processes of Institutionalization of Narcoculture (2009), explained that “this idealized construction of narcos is also accompanied by culture through art (movies, series, novels and songs) that romanticizes crime and attacks a generation that grows with that as an ideal of life (narco culture). Is it logical that a country that wants to end the drug business should allow novels, series and movies to be developed to enhance the life of a drug dealer? Why do they do it? Well, it's to consolidate a discourse that legitimizes and normalizes criminal life so that it's ever easier to consolidate the drug market.”

This is not just a question of money, nor of an apology for crime, it is a legitimization of a criminal life, but for what reason? For example, the life of a hit man: a human being who feels disposable, in an interview for his postgraduate thesis in sociology at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), Sánchez Godoy interviewed several people dedicated to this violent practice and in the study they consider that they were born to be what they are, that they were unlucky, that they do a job that someone else would have to do, and that if they were murdered, it doesn't happen Nothing, who would rather live for a year with a latest-model cell phone, a van and money in their pocket, than to be poor all their lives.

If we associate this with economic power as a generator of poverty, we see how the other part of economic power romanticizes criminal life and then legitimizes and normalizes behavior, so young people who have no way out or who have a very precarious life; they say: “I better try as a hit man”, and this is what narco-series reflect, for example.

Raising the figure of the drug trafficker with women, money and power, selling that idea, so that being a drug dealer is something aspirational, is no longer just saying “I'm here out of necessity”, now, they sell it as a way of life that is intended to be had.

Sánchez Godoy added that “this goes hand in hand with the discourse that studies are useless, it is not necessary to go to university, it is better to be an influencer, narco, webcam model, among others; this in order to promote a life without a sense of social value, thus strengthening a narco-culture: disposable cheap labor to feed an economic and financial system supported by drug trafficking.”

And as we continue to review, we realize that those who train violent groups are, well, none other than the American soldiers at the School of the Americas, who also served as training sites for Latin American armies.

For this reason, we must question all the news that comes from the United States, we have the habit of easily assuming the empowerment of the American narrative when it talks about cartels in Latin America, violence and their fight against drug trafficking and from there, we assume their speeches as true and repeat them, giving them power without even questioning, if they really exist.

AMELYREN BASABE/Mazo News Team